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Marketing Tips | May
Tip 5 - Test, test and test again!
Whether it’s an email campaign or a new product/service, test the proposition and messaging before launch. Testing will avoid any costly mistakes further down the line and ensure you get the best results.
Why testing should form part of your marketing
Successful marketing isn’t about churning out as much as you can and throwing budget at it until something sticks. It’s about understanding your target audience and developing messaging and creative that your audience will respond to. The best marketers test their marketing before they invest in promotion.
Simple ways to test your marketing
It’s easier than ever to test your marketing. Whether you are running a digital, print or integrated campaign, you can test your creative and apply your findings across digital and print elements of the campaign. Here are some ways to do it:
- Define your audience
It sounds obvious I know, but it’s surprising how many people don’t do this. You need to know who your target audience are. This goes beyond simple demographics (parents with children). You need to know what the emotional drivers are that would make them use your product or service. We’ve written a useful guide to help you better define your audience (link to ‘Fish where the fish are’ article). By being clear about your audience, you can use the right data when testing and running campaigns and save yourself a lot of wasted effort and budget. - Develop and test your message/offer
Using the insight from your audience research, you can start crafting your message and offer. For example, you might want to launch a new service for your customers to increase revenue. You understand your customers, and you're confident that they will respond well to an introductory offer for this new service. You might be offering 20% off all bookings. You could test this in an email with a segment of your existing customers, but it would be wise to test different elements, for example, is 20% off more appealing, or does £10 off have more appeal?
Running small tests like this can make a big difference to your ongoing campaign. If you find that the email data is showing that £10 off works better than 20%, you can incorporate this into your adverts, website and emails. But the value is that you have this insight before you’ve spent all your marketing budget.
Remember if you’re dealing with small customer numbers, the research will only act as a guide as you need a decent sample size to draw any conclusive research insights. Even if it’s a small sample size, it always makes sense to test your campaigns. - Define what you are testing
Are you testing an offer or a tweak to your existing adverts? It’s important that you understand what you are testing and why. For example, if it’s a campaign landing page, you might want to test whether one image or headline is more effective than another. In this case, you can use two different versions of your landing page. Your control page will be the page as it is now and the test page will have the element you are testing (the different image or headline). There are plenty of tools to enable help you do this.
Once you start to see results you can apply this across the rest of your marketing. The value of this is that your campaign should perform better with your target audience.
If you don’t want to invest in software for landing pages, you can run some simple tests trialling different copy/images on social media posts. For example, you can try different versions of copy in tweets to test an email subject line or an advert strapline. - Testing creative with panels and peers
Another useful tool is to run your advertising creative by your colleagues and panels of customers. Remember, reviewing creative is very subjective. If you ask people for an opinion, they will give it. But you must allow for the fact that they will not be as close to the creative brief as you are and the feedback might be based on a personal preference. Treat the opinions you get as useful, but not necessarily gospel.
If you have the ability to ask some of your customers to review creative then this can be incredibly useful. But rather than asking customers ‘do you like it?’, ask them questions about how effective it is, ‘for example, would you respond to this offer?‘, ‘what would make you respond?’ - Be bold
The famous Guinness advert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9znA_dwjHw with the surfers and horses didn’t do well when the concept was tested with a research panel. However, the agency and the brand manager believed in the creative concept and pushed on. It was a commercial success for Guinness and it’s viewed as one of the best adverts of all time! So while ignoring research isn’t the message here, sometimes you have to follow your gut, especially when you know you’re onto something good!
It doesn’t matter how good the creative is, if the message is wrong for your intended audience, your campaign can fall flat on its face. Don't forget, we have an in-depth understanding of our readership and can give you advice on what parents respond well to. We can help you test your messaging and offers by testing them on social media before placing them in the magazine. Just ask us!