Judging how successful a marketing push is going to be is next to impossible sometimes; especially if you're doing something you never have before. But even if you're using a form of marketing that has been around for a long time you still can't know how successful it's going to be until you actually show it to some people and get their opinion.
The more focused you're trying to make your marketing the more important this becomes as well, because you have to be certain that you make just what you were hoping to. You have less room to maneuver because you have a much smaller crowd of people to appease.
The best marketing campaigns can take quite a bit of time to create and quite a bit of money to make. This is the main reason why I consider it playing with fire to avoid any kind of testing. I have to wonder if the reason why companies avoid it is because they don't want to make any changes to their marketing after having spent so much time working on it, and if that's why they avoid testing.
The best way to test your marketing is to create a few prototypes before you start up your larger scale printing. If you were going to do a poster marketing push than you need to print posters in a smaller batch specifically for people to look at in order to gauge how effective they really are.
Remember too that for different forms of marketing you have to test for different things as well. If you do print posters than you have to be certain that people are able to get all of the information from them as quickly as possible. It should only take a person a few seconds to take notice and then get all of the information from a poster.
For a brochure you might instead be more concerned with how much information the person gets rather than how fast they get it, or perhaps how confusing or not the brochure is.
Failed marketing campaigns can lead to some costly results for a company. Not only do they fail to have a strong marketing presence because of the less than stellar marketing results, but they also risk tarnishing their company's image.
No matter what kind of marketing you plan on using take the time to do at least a few tests to gauge how much people are going to like it. Yes, you might have to go back to make some minor changes to your marketing because of it, but that's a lot better than having your marketing campaign fail.
