In Oliver Twist, the orphans toil in the workhouse with very little food, until the desperately hungry boys decide to draw lots; the loser must ask for another portion of gruel. The task falls to Oliver, who at the next meal tremblingly comes forward, bowl in hand, and makes his famous request: “Please sir, I want some more.”  A great uproar ensues.  Check out this famous scene with the master saying Mooooore!

We’ll I too have received several requests to provide more, but in my case, more information about Interactive Dry Testing.  As a reminder, you might want to first read my earlier Interactive Dry Testing blog…Field of Dreams or Field of Morons?  Using Interactive Dry Testing to avoid loser products.

So, what is Interactive Dry Testing?  It’s a market test to discover whether a product or service is worth pursuing.  It’s inexpensive – actually cheap.  It can be done fast – like today if you want to.  And it’s interactive  – it’s only done digitially on the internet.  If Interactive Dry Testing is done properly, a marketer can get a very good “read” on whether a product will or will not be profitable and how profitable (or non-profitable!) it might be.  It’s related to Dry Testing, however Interactive Dry Testing is more contemporary than the old school Dry Testing due to it’s focus on cheap, fast and interactive.

First some ethical guidelines are in order.  While this type of testing is perfectly legal, marketers should engage in Interactive Dry Testing only when the special nature of the offer is made clear at some point in the promotion.  It is OK to “test the waters” for interest in a new product, i.e., one that does not yet exist.  However, consumers should not be misled and should be informed, for example, by stating something like this somewhere during the test process: “This new product is being planned; we will let you know if it will be created, and of course, if it is not, we will promptly credit your account by (date).”

The Federal Trade Commission is normally OK with tests like this, so long as four conditions are met:

• No representation is made that the product definitely will be produced.
• There must be adequate notice of the conditional nature of the offer.
• Those who order are promptly informed if it is not produced.
• There can be no substitution of another product.

So what exactly do you do.  Here’s the typical high level three-step approach using Google:

• Set up a Google AdWords test for the potential new product.  This will allow you to test cost, impressions, page ranking, clicks, click through rates… for various ad groupings and keywords.  You’ll need to come up with a bid strategy.  My suggestion is you set an initial bid to get 1st placement, and then manage the campaign daily just like any other SEM campaign.
• Create special internet landing pages simulating and describing the product or service, price, terms, etc…  You are in essence actually setting up web pages, copy, photo’s etc… offering/selling the proposed product or service.  You’ll need to decide to either set it up as a facade company or promote your actual company in the test.  If you set up a facade company your AdWords quality score will likely be low for a few days, maybe even a few weeks.  So keep this in mind when setting the test time frame.
• Create and link a research survey to the landing pages, where you ask questions to the consumers who were actively in the purchase process at that moment.  This allows you to ask questions where recollection has the potential to be more accurate since it is more recent; such as what other products did you look at and why are you currently doing this search.  You can also invite a person into a live chat interview.

What is great about Interactive Dry Testing versus say surveying people about a proposed product or service, is that a questionnaire is still not a real sales situation, no matter how much care is taken in its construction.  Any questionnaire makes the prospect into an expert rather than a potential buyer.  Interactive Dry Testing is real simulation of the selling situation.  And here’s a twist which violates the laws of social media.  DON’T include any links to social sites whereby the person can “like”, “Digg”, “retweet”, etc… the survey.  To have a solid test you ONLY want people participating in any survey process tied to the test, who were actively in the buying process of looking, researching, evaluating, and so on.

In future blogs I’ll go deeper into each phase of Interactive Dry Testing, and other options beyond Google.  Yes, you can have Mooooore!