I blogged earlier in the month about a contest that we ran at StartupNation.com and the overwhelmingly “I LOVE THIS CONTEST” reactions we received. I was surprised and surmised that the combination of competition and learning is what appealed to the StartupNation community of entrepreneurs. Give an entrepreneur a challenge while telling her that she’s gonna get smarter during the process, and you’ve got raving fans!
So here’s the question of the day for small business owners. How do you know when it’s the right thing to do to repeat previous successful strategies? In other words, just because it worked last time how do you know that it’ll work again? Should you just blatantly assume that a past success will again be successful?
Why not? I mean, what would it hurt? In this case, we’re looking at a promotion/contest. Do the rules for assessing promotions remain the same for assessing other marketing strategies?
Well, we’re gonna find out in this particularly specific instance because we just launched the StartupNation “Capture the Flag” Contest Reprise and Re-Prize at StartupNation.com. Will it have the same impact as the first contest? It’s not exactly the same as the last one. It can’t be. That moment in time is passed.
You know that we will be highly analytical about how we assess this contest reprise. But it’s still critical that a small business owner know when and how to use such data.
So I repeat, “How do you know?”
