Creative Campaign Testing on the Cheap

In the old days, if you wanted to test the messages you were using for your marketing campaign, you could either hire a research company to conduct focus groups, or do small-scale micro-market rollouts to see what kind of response your campaign generated before you launched your campaign to your entire audience. We’ve recently started using a very inexpensive method that gives you some good directional feedback, for very little up-front cost.

It doesn’t matter what you are selling. In today’s information-overload world, the value of a well-crafted campaign message is more important than ever. There are more distractions than ever before, and more offerings in any category than ever before, and the best way to get the attention of your prospects is to have a compelling and engaging “idea” driving your communication efforts. The “idea” can make or break the effectiveness of your campaign.

Facebook advertising (those little postage-stamp size ads that run down the side of a Facebook page) can be a great creative testing tool.

Facebook ads can be set up to appear only on the pages of the people you are most interested in talking to. You can program the system to match a basic description of your customer profile.

You only pay for the people who actually click on your ad, and move through to your website. And you can indicate the maximum amount of money you are willing to spend each day. Once the system has generated the number of click-throughs that correspond to your daily maximum, your ads just stop appearing anywhere.

If you run two different ads at the same time, you can use the analytics provided by Facebook to see which one worked best. If you do this often enough, testing various campaign ideas against each other, you will end up with a pretty good idea of what kind of messages are most motivating to your prospects.

Try testing messages that are based on product facts against messages that are rooted in lifestyle benefits. Try testing messages that are time-sensitive against ones that are more open-ended. Try traditional messages that worked in the past against ones that your team thinks are more motivating for today’s consumer.

Each day, or every few days, use the analytic data to delete the loser, and replace it with another ad that you think will out-perform the winner.

Eventually you will find your most powerful messages. You can then reverse-engineer those messages into your other campaign components – prints ads, or direct mail, or etc.

A small warning: this system is not fool-proof. All you really know for sure at the end of a testing period is that certain messages outperform others on Facebook. You don’t ever know for certain that these same messages will work better in print or other mediums, as all media have a different set of variables in play as a consumer engages. Put more simply, just because it works on Facebook doesn’t mean it will work in a magazine. However, for a very small investment of time and money you will have more information than you did when you started. And you will have a general idea of what kind of information is more powerful.

A practical application? In today’s everything-is-new marketing environment, there are increasingly heated conversations about the right direction to go. There are factions within any company that want to do things one way, and equally staunch supporters of other directions. This is a good way to settle the controversy. We have client organizations where the “old boys” want to do things the old way, and younger team members who are in favour of a more modern message. Throw a few examples of both up on Facebook in a split-run test as described above, and you will have an impartial set of stats that should convince one side or the other to acquiesce.