How do you really know when a marketing piece is going to strike a cord with your target audience? As you build that piece, you’re imagining how well it will connect and motivate the target to take an action, hopefully resulting in a sale. But how can you be sure that your hard work and planning will actually translate into someone taking action? It’s a best guess scenario every time.

But then why is it that some marketers guess better than others, and get better results? Is it experience, skills and knowledge, or could it be their intuition, their ability to just know when something will or won’t work? Maybe it’s insight from market research. But does the quality of that research matter most, or will intuition play a bigger part in the marketers’ choices in assembling a marketing communications piece?

Intuition put to the test

I recently attended a research study Webinar, where the intuition of over 200 marketers was tested. The results were staggering. The instructors began by showing a few different landing pages to participants. They had a control page and three other versions with various changes. These pages had already been tested to determine which pages converted best. The goal of the research was to see how well each marketer could predict the success of the communication piece based solely on their intuition. All the marketers put in their votes one by one. Then it was time to see how they all did.

To everyone’s amazement, less then 30 percent of 200 marketers got the right answer. Now why is that? We were studying the strength of the marketers’ intuition — if more than 70 percent failed to predict the highest converting page correctly, how could they be successful at creating effective marketing communication pieces and value propositions? The role of the marketer is to make his best prediction, put it into practice and spend thousands of dollars to see if it works. But is there a better way to enhance one’s ability to understand what will or won’t work, and be more accurate than 30 percent of 200 marketers? I think so.

Developing your intuition

Intuition is something we all have but need to develop. It defies science — we cannot know how someone 'just knows' something and why they are usually right. Many go through years of training, yet never hone their intuition, often because their confidence in their judgment is lacking.

People develop self-efficacy by demonstrating their ability, and then being validated in some way. If you have more failure than success, you might be building more character than intuition (which is never a bad thing!), but you might not be building self–efficacy to develop solid intuition. So how does someone who does not have a string of successes evaluate their ability to make accurate judgments?

Testing, testing, testing

Most often people do not learn how to develop their intuition because they do not understand that all marketing is testing, testing and more testing. Some just put their marketing out there and, when it doesn’t work, they have no idea why. Knowing why it’s not working is worth millions of dollars to your company, as well as promotional consideration for your career.

If the criteria you’re using to judge marketing communications is off, then the marketing piece itself will not hit the mark due to flawed foundation. Testing is really the only way out of these bad habits or old marketing philosophies that don’t generate results. But you have to know what to test. Again, it returns to the intuition required to set up a valid test.

Your criteria for testing may be based on both sound principles and intuition. Be careful not to confuse intuition as just a best guess. There is a difference. To truly intuit, you have to be correct in your interpretation. If you keep intuiting and keep getting it wrong, then you are just guessing and your confidence in your own intuitive abilities will falter.

You have to have a string of successes to improve your intuitive confidence. Without that, you’re just 'spaghetti marketing' — throwing things at the wall at random to see what sticks. Testing is the way out of this random approach and is the key to success. Keep your testing grounded on solid principles with scientific reasoning behind it, and look for quantifiable outcomes that allow you to measure your hypothesis. Add a healthy dose of intuition, and you’re on your way to both a highly developed ability to just know what works and a string of successes.