Redefining failure in digital: how to use failure to spark growth

Failing is the quickest way to grow your business. And in the digital age, failure costs nothing.

There are so many corny quotes about the value of failure that I won’t bore you with them now. Yet their sentiment is true: if you never fail, you never learn.

Fortunately for businesses, data analytics has made it easier and cheaper than ever before to use calculated failures to drive fast growth.

Meaning, it’s time to redefine failure within your business by actively integrating it in your growth strategy.

For why and how, keep reading.

Why small failures lead to massive growth

Through testing methods such as A/B testing – that provide you with quick user/audience feedback – businesses can learn from very minor failures to tweak and enhance all aspects of customer experience, conversion rate success, content performance, audience focused products and services, to all internal and external processes.

If you’re not open to failure you’re limiting your growth potential.

For example, by A/B testing different types of communication across key interactions throughout a given buyers journey, marketers can quickly learn which approaches fail to earn leads or conversions, gradually optimising their approach to be as high-performing as possible.

A/B testing works because of its intrinsic specificity. By testing one thing against another, you learn what is best, and immediately rule out the failure. Allowing you to move on, testing the winner against new iterations to gradually work towards the winning formula.

Failing successfully is all about listening to the results and taking action to make genuine improvements.

It’s important to remember that this approach can (and should) be applied to all aspects of your business, not just digital.

While data makes testing and tweaking simple across digital, the same brave open mindset can lead to great improvements across all areas of your business, from work culture to branding.

How to incorporate failure into your success strategy

Digital marketing is defined by quick changes. Your strategy and execution procedures need to reflect this, with processes built in that allow you to quickly adapt to what’s coming your way.

Allowing yourself to experiment and fail is a vital part of doing this successfully.

To effectively utilise failure within your growth strategy, you need to build a culture of doing over perfecting.

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Rather than spending the time to perfect things internally before deploying them, you’ll be allowing the testing process to perfect for you.

This way of improving is better in terms of growth, as it involves directly listening to your audience/users, allowing you to provide an experience or service that is primed to be most impactful among your target audiences and thus lead to maximum growth.

The best thing about that approach is that it is entirely evidence based. Giving you the confidence to act on each improvement as you grow.

Why it works

Over time, this process makes all parts of your business customer centric. Tapping directly into the audiences you’re trying to attract.

Download our persona template to build buyer personas that work for your business. 

You need to view every part of your business as having an impact on the customer. Bringing in a new business-wide mentality built around testing, failing and iterative improvement.

If everyone is working towards the same overarching goals and the same mantra that defines your philosophy, you can together troubleshoot the best path towards that endpoint; utilising tiny failures to guide you towards huge success.

Charlie