Do you have a framework for failing? Failing a business, failing a campaign, failing a launch? Have you thought about how you are going to define failure? If you have not, then your failure may define you.

Failure is not the word people love in relation to their job or business. Even when the numbers tell otherwise, we are quite skilled in crafting narratives to defend our choices and decisions to avoid taking the blame. But what if…? What if we looked at failure as a force for good? 

People have done it before us. Simon Sinek, a renowned expert in leadership, has a whole range of ‘motivational quotes’ to console the one who failed. 

Yeah, right. It all sounds great until the investors come after you.

And yet…

Everyone is failing all the time - it is just that not everyone is aware of it.

If you are not operating in the experimentation framework you are most likely spending your marketing resources on optimisation within existing campaigns even if they are not bringing you business. You simply don't know that something isn't working. 

The growth marketing approach provides a wonderful framework to see where you're failing without being hurt long-term.

Failed experiments save you time and money long-term.

Anastasia Dobronravova, Head of Strategic Marketing at Solid Water:

The growth marketing paradigm provides a framework and tools to quickly identify and stop ineffective strategies, sharpening your focus on actions that lead to success. The key to a ‘successful failure’ lies in thoroughly analysing what went wrong. This analysis builds confidence in future decision-making by providing hard evidence to dismiss ideas that have proven unsuccessful.

1️⃣ Collect data:

To draw conclusions, you need robust data to back them up. For example, if you launched an influencer marketing campaign and it didn't work, how do you know why? 

You’d need UTM tags ('UTM' stands for 'Urchin Tracking Module'. UTM codes can be added to the end of regular URLs, in order to give Google Analytics specific information about that link.), website analytics, and data points on reach and clicks from the influencer. 

Only then can you determine what went wrong—whether it was a unattractive promotion (because there were no clicks), wrong choice of influencers (due to low reach), your website (because of a high bounce rate with most users leaving immediately), or the product fit (if all metrics are healthy but you have got no leads).

2️⃣ Build your log of hypotheses:

When launching any experiment, you need to understand the foundational points it relies on: target audience, channel, mechanics, etc. The hypothesis behind the experiment is the key to understanding what failed. 

💡 Once, a private investor asked us to assess the marketing strategy of a startup, a consumer mobile app, he was willing to invest in. The company had been building a user database mostly with Paid Social channels. However, now they were asking for a few hundred thousands to launch above-the-line ads.

We asked the founder what her hypothesis was and she said in full confidence that “ATL will unlock exponential growth”. She saw London tube as a playground for heavyweights, the league she thought the ATL campaign will take her to. She had not thought through any contingencies. What exactly are we testing here? There was no sense of experimentation which is exactly what makes you more aware of the need for a Plan B or C. When you don’t know what you are testing, you will fail hard. The money will have been wasted and the learnings will have been missed 💡

3️⃣ Coach your team:

Your team should be comfortable with finding and acknowledging mistakes. In fact, they should always be in the ‘testing mode’. When dealing with extensive analytics, there's always the temptation to manipulate the data to make it look positive and pleasing—but this won't help the business. Keep working on the team mindset and encourage continuous experimentation (which implies failing 95% of the time).

Understand failure-friendly channels

It is no coincidence that many examples of experimentation and failure are based on digital channels. Some experiments are truly rich in data, such as Paid Digital campaigns, where you can test a multitude of things in a week, budget permitting, fail on some tests, and quickly implement the learnings. However, traditional media, OOH (out-of-home advertising), and even influencer marketing are not very flexible acquisition channels.

You would not be able to quickly change a creative or re-allocate the budget to another channel. It is also generally harder to attribute impact when dealing with these media. Therefore, Solid Water usually suggests to clients that they test hypotheses on agile channels before moving to above-the-line advertising. The rule of thumb is: do not start experimenting with channels that require huge marketing investments.

If you need help in building a log of hypotheses and testing them on agile channels, book a 30-minute call with our agency .

Maria Tsarkova , CMO and co-founder at Solid Water:

“For me, the biggest hurdle is fostering the culture of ‘Fast Failure’ on the client side. As an agency we act as a catalyst for this change, providing frameworks that help our clients run multiple statistically significant experiments each week. They can fail fast with some of them and then scale up the ones that are successful.

However, it remains challenging to report on 'failed experiments' even though we know most of them are expected to fail. Therefore, I advise our clients to introduce metrics that help maintain high team motivation, even if many efforts seem to be failing — for example, such as the number of experiments conducted and the number of failed experiments.

Ultimately, the quicker you test and fail, the quicker you will succeed. The team should understand that they are doing the right thing by failing. Shoutout to Steven Bartlett , who introduced a role called "Head of Failure” (aka ‘Head of Experimentation”) to maintain the pace of experimentation across his company.”

Daria Partas , co-founder of Solid Water marketing agency:

“We once worked with a client who had been 100% data blind before he hired us. Once we introduced the analytics to build the attribution model for his business, he got really hooked. The client was obsessing about attribution at every single half-step we made. He wanted to have 200% guarantee that every buck spent was bringing him a new customer. And when some of our hypotheses were proven wrong he could not take it and got really upset.

This is an example of a business mentality that does not tolerate experimentation. It was 100% our responsibility to prepare our client for what was coming which we had totally failed to do. Well, certainly a failed experiment for us. We brought him some good business but the amount of stress we all went through did not justify it.”

Gregor Young , CEO of Guild with experience leading performance marketing efforts at Financial Times, Channel 4 and BT:

"You have to accept that without proof of what works you are feeling around in the dark. It’s important to embrace this as a starting point. When you are feeling around in the dark you don’t know the way and you need to try things: push this, turn that, pull that handle, until something works. Identify the metrics that will tell you if each step is working or not (volume of impressions, CTR, website traffic, onsite-conversions, orders placed etc).

Start trying things and develop a habit of reviewing performance against these metrics - I prefer weekly.

Now start doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t work. With this approach you will start to move towards higher performance whilst establishing facts about what doesn’t work and what does."

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