I have been testing my way through digital marketing for a few years now, one shiny new thing after another. QR codes, Google Plus, Klout, Pinterest, infographics, retargeting, live video, Snapchat, and about a dozen algorithm updates in between. I went back and reread my own posts recently, and I want to pull the thread together, because a clear pattern jumped out.
The stuff that faded
Some of what I got excited about did not last, and that is fine. Chasing my Klout score turned out to be chasing a vanity number. QR codes never became the magic everyone promised. Google Plus never quite became the thing Google kept insisting it would be. Google Authorship, the feature I loved, got quietly killed. If I had bet everything on any one of these, I would have been burned.
The stuff that stuck
And some of it was completely real and only got bigger. Mobile went from an afterthought to the whole game. Content that genuinely helps people beat every trick, every single time, through update after update. Owning your own audience, your list, your own site, kept saving me every time a platform changed the rules on me. Email quietly outperformed almost everything flashier.
The thing I got right without realizing
Here is what struck me rereading it all. I was wrong about which specific things would matter, a lot. But I was never really hurt by being wrong, because I never bet the house on a guess. I tested. Small, cheap experiments. When something worked I leaned in, and when it faded I shrugged and moved on, out only the little I had put in to find out.
The testing was the strategy. Not any one channel, not any one prediction. The habit of not trusting my own certainty, of going and finding out cheaply before committing, is the only thing that carried through all four years intact.
Where I am now
I cannot tell you what the next big thing is. I have been wrong enough times to know better than to pretend. But I can tell you exactly how I will handle it: test it small, watch the real numbers, lean in if it works, walk away cheaply if it does not, and never fall so in love with a tactic that I forget to check whether it is still working.
Test, test, and test. I said that was my mantra a couple of years ago. Four years of evidence later, it is the only thing on this whole list I am completely sure about.
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