3 Tips for Testing Marketing Campaigns

Testing marketing campaigns will help you get your messaging and creatives right for every target audience and purpose. Good campaigns can cut deep to the consumer and engage them in content that is harmonious with their thoughts and beliefs. However, bad campaigns will not only be a waste of time and resources, they may even deter consumers from engaging with your brand.

The problem is, public opinion is a dynamic and progressive phenomenon. Imagine running a campaign from 10 years ago today. Many of the adverts that aired then would feel disjointed from our present reality. People, trends and culture change at an incredibly fast rate and because of this capturing and distilling the essence of today is not easy. Making things even more difficult, our own research and experience testing marketing campaigns has found that people differ vastly in their opinions based on demographic, cultural and socioeconomic factors also have a huge impact on how how successful a marketing campaign will be. However, by sub-analysing the results of potential marketing campaigns we can determine what sort of messaging works for who.

Testing Marketing Campaigns Tip 1: Ask your audience

Testing marketing campaigns before they are live is the only way to ensure your concept and messaging won’t miss the mark or even end up accidentally upsetting people. So, when we have a few ideas or creatives together, we always recommend running surveys to the demographics you are targeting. Well built online research surveys can be completed quickly, easily and can provide huge amount of insights.

Testing Marketing Campaigns Tip 2: Start with concept testing

Too often marketers will approach us asking for us to test a fully worked out campaign right down to the channels they will be using to distribute it, the messaging and the creatives. However, in order to put your time to good use, we recommend you start with a few concept tests to see which would be most effective for which audiences. Starting to build your campaigns from a base of fact and opinion is an easy way to improve your targeting and is more likely to lead to a good response rate and ROI. The diagram below gives an overview of our proposed process for testing marketing campaigns for more information take a look at this article on concept testing.

Testing Marketing Campaigns Tip 3: Compare campaigns with your competition

When you are pretesting or measuring the performance of your marketing campaigns it can often be hard to truly judge their success. Marketers often use internal data from previous campaigns to benchmark the performance of their new campaigns. But, what if you are using a new channel, promoting a new product or breaking into a new sector or audience? Even if you are re-running a campaign that worked for, without comparing the results to competitors’ campaigns or industry benchmarks you will never know for sure if your campaigns is as successful in all areas as it could be. To find out how you can shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of different aspects of a campaign take a look at our Creative Testing guide.

This post was written by Tom Burke, Insight Executive, fastmap. For more information about how fastmap can help you with your marketing campaigns, you can read our Creative Testing Guide or visit www.fastmap.com. You can also get in touch with David Cole, Managing Director, fastmap on +44 (0) 20 7242 0702 or david.cole@fastmap.com.