The Final Test of a Good Marketing Idea

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You have a marketing idea but aren’t sure if it’s any good. This is the third of three critical questions to ask before implementing the idea in your small business, including a template to easily prioritize your ideas.

Maybe you’ve got an idea in mind. But is it a good idea? Hopefully you’ve already been following along.

Back in May, I wrote about the first two questions you should ask yourself in order to tell if your marketing ideas are any good. They were the first two posts in a three-part series of articles where I’m diving into three critical questions. If you answer these three simple questions, chances are you’ll know exactly which ideas are worth your time, and which ones aren’t.

The first step is to apply your objectives as a lens through which you filter your ideas. Read more about this critical first step here.

The second step is to rank/rate your ideas based on their potential impact on your business. Read more about this important second step here.

Once you’ve taken those first two steps, you are ready to read on below for the third and final critical question to ask.

HOW EASILY CAN YOU PULL OFF YOUR MARKETING IDEA?

Your ability to execute your marketing idea is an important consideration. As with the previous step, you could rank the ideas in order from lowest feasibility to highest feasibility, or assign each idea a relative score.

Ask for each idea on the list: Is my ability to execute low or high?

Consider not only the difficulty or skills required, but also the time and monetary investments you have to make to pull off your ideas.

For example, you might think that writing an ebook is relatively easy to pull off, while publishing a traditional book might be much more difficult, time-consuming and/or costly.

Another example: you believe that running Facebook ads will be much easier to execute than becoming a contributing writer on Forbes.com.

PUTTING TOGETHER ALL THREE TESTS OF A GOOD MARKETING IDEA

To put all three steps together, you start with your list of ideas and then ask the following three questions:

  1. Does the idea meaningfully contribute to or directly support your primary marketing objective?
  2. Will this idea have a large impact on my business or a small one?
  3. Is my ability to execute low or high?

In order to make this process even easier, here are two quick example templates you can use to work through everything at once.

First, organize ideas by objective.

marketing idea generation template

Second, place your ideas on the two way chart based on impact and feasibility.

marketing idea prioritization chart

You should consider proceeding with any ideas that fall into the upper right quadrant. This is the sweet spot where the best ideas will appear.

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