Anyone who tells you that they know exactly what type of marketing is going to work for your company is not telling you the truth.
Strategies and tactics are highly situational and every situation is a bit unique. The only way to learn what will truly work for your business is to try various tactics and measure carefully. That means you must leave room for failure; it’s going to happen.
Your marketing team must have an experimental mindset. They should be excited to try new things and be religious about tracking, measurement, and learning. My teams usually keep a Google Slides presentation with the various tests we’ve run and their results. This type of journal gives us an invaluable resource for learning and getting new team members up to speed. When you get to scale with digital programs, your journal should include statistical analysis to ensure the validity of your tests.
As the founder, it’s your job to encourage this. Don’t get upset if a well executed program doesn’t achieve the desired results (if it’s poorly executed, this is another story). Push for continuous learning -- which leads to continuous improvement. Push for excellence in execution, but be forgiving if a test fails.
When something fails, ask the three whats?
What? What exactly happened in the program and the execution?
So what? What does this mean for future efforts?
Now what? --What are you going to do next?
You and your marketing leader should demand crisp answers. This reinforces the importance of both transparency and learning.
As your company matures, your marketing mix will have a balance of “tried and true” programs and experimental ones. In the beginning, of course, most everything is experimental. The important thing along this path is be rigorous about execution and learning, but encourage risk taking and experimentation.