Why Your Marketing Assumptions Are Costing You Money

I don’t know anyone who enjoys throwing away their hard-earned money, and I'm sure you feel the same way. This is exactly why social media marketing should be a core part of any modern marketing toolkit. It gives us the power to test our ideas and adjust on the fly.

Unlike direct mail or print ads, you don’t have to sink a ton of cash into a campaign and wait months to see if version A worked better than version B. With a proper setup, you can know within a day or two which ads are performing and which ones are duds, allowing you to scale your spending intelligently. This approach is fundamental to a smart .

Pretty Trophies Don't Pay the Bills

A few years back, I was at a major advertising conference and found myself completely baffled during an awards ceremony. Winners were being celebrated, but no one mentioned a single word about the actual results of their campaigns. It didn't seem to matter how much money was spent versus how much was earned. People were getting shiny crystal statues without any regard for ROI.

It’s certainly easier to operate that way. Awareness-based campaigns can be built on gut feelings, assumptions, or the artistic vision of a creative director. They’re “fun” and stress-free because there’s no real accountability tied to them. But if you’re okay with that, you might as well just light your money on fire.

It's time to put the matches away. Smart companies, especially a new , build marketing campaigns on facts, not guesses. The best results come from looking at the data and making changes based on what it tells you. This is where truly shines. You can optimize a campaign in real time based on how your audience behaves, what they like, and what they’re interested in. You can instantly dial your ad spend up or down based on the results you’re seeing.

Stop Guessing and Start Testing

The hard truth is that most businesses barely use 20% of what social media advertising can do. They’re wasting money over and over because they guess instead of test. And if there’s one rule I’ve seen proven time and again, it’s that assumptions are almost always wrong.

Whenever I’m speaking to an audience, I like to show them some of our top-performing split tests and ask them to guess the winner. About 90% of the time, they get it wrong. That means if you’re creating ads based only on what you will work, you’re missing out on optimizing your results. Think of all the money that gets wasted—money that could have funded a nice beach vacation.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have all the answers. People often ask me for the single best way to execute a strategy, like how often to post on Facebook or the perfect time to send an email. While I can offer general best practices, I can't provide specific, effective strategies without one critical step: testing.

Testing your communications on a small slice of your audience before a full launch is how you gather real data. It’s the number-one way to prevent wasting money and see continuous improvement, especially when you're on a tight budget.

Think about an ice cream company releasing a new flavor. They don't just whip something up and ship it to stores. They create several versions and test them to see which one performs best. Your marketing deserves the same careful approach, free from guesswork. Recently, we discovered for a client that emails sent in the evening got double the response rate of the same emails sent in the morning. That’s a powerful piece of data we can now use to optimize all their future messaging.

Our motto is simple: Test small and launch big.

A Simple Framework for Better Ad Testing

When you start testing, take the emotion out of it and focus on measurable results. Here are some best practices to keep in mind for your efforts:

An ad that gets 100 clicks is worthless if it doesn’t convert. An ad with just 25 clicks that leads to more sales is the real winner. A successful focuses on the bottom line.
When setting up your target audience, make sure you’re only changing one variable. If you test too many things at once, you’ll never know what actually made the difference.
Start by split-testing your audience demographics. Once you find the best-performing group, use that audience to test other elements like your ad image or your copy.
After finding a winning image, test different background colors. Does black work better than blue? Red better than white?
With the best-performing visual, test different wording. Does “click here” outperform “download now”?
See if adding a CTA button helps or hurts. Sometimes, making a post look too much like an ad can decrease engagement.

Once your ad is optimized, it's time to test the landing page. Here's a quick checklist of things to experiment with:

Ad images and headlines
Target market (demographics, interests, behaviors)
Landing page copy and opt-in forms
Timing (time of day, day of week)
Daily budget and bid type
Ad placement (Newsfeed, mobile, desktop)

If you want a consistently high ROI, whether for a or an established brand, you have to keep testing. Steven Spielberg was rejected from film school multiple times before creating blockbusters like . He didn’t rest after one success, and you shouldn’t either. The status quo has never won anyone an Academy Award. Keep testing to create your next big win.