14 Jun The Importance of Creative Testing
Testing is a core part of any marketing strategy. In order to determine what works with your audience, you should continually be testing.
Common elements that could be included in a testing strategy include:
- Creatives
- Messaging
- Landing page experience
- Call to Action
- And more!
We’ve put creatives at the top of this list, as creatives are increasingly important to test. Visual assets are one of the most striking ways to catch your audience’s eye. And after all – that’s what it’s all about! You want a marketing campaign that works, delivering qualified leads to your business.
The Importance of Creative Testing
Marketers are increasingly limited in how specific they are able to be with their audience targeting. Platform automation is also limiting control over things like bids or placements. With these challenges, creative assets are becoming one of the most important means of delivering performance.
It’s likely that you already have a good idea of what creatives are going to work with your audience. You should already have an idea of your audience’s target demographics and general interests. This can help in the initial development of your creative strategy.
It’s easy to assume what’s going to work and what isn’t. However, testing creatives can take the guesswork out of it. Instead of assuming that Creative Type A will work best with your audience, you can back this up with data.
Creative testing involves various combinations of copy and images or videos. The objective is to understand which combinations best support your business goals. These learnings can, in turn, help you develop impactful marketing campaigns that work for your audiences.
Put simply: Testing your creative is important. Here are 3 tips to help you set up your creative testing strategy.
Define Your Goals
The first step is to define your goals. You want to have a clear objective in mind. How will you measure the success of your campaign?
Your testing strategy will be dependant on the goals of your campaign. Are you looking to improve conversion rates on site? Are you looking to increase traffic to a particular page?
Keep It Simple
It can be tempting to go a bit wild with testing. Different ad copy variations, different creatives, different Call To Actions, different audiences.
Remember, the goal of creative testing is to determine a winning combination of assets. If you are testing too many levers at one time, it’s impossible to determine what worked and why. Test one element at a time, determine the winning element, and then move on.
It may take longer this way, but it’s worth it in the long run. Keeping it simple gives you impactful, meaningful data that should inform future marketing campaigns.
Keep An Open Mind
You know your business. You know your audience. It’s therefore not unusual to assume that you know which creative assets are going to succeed.
Successfully testing creatives requires you to keep an open mind. Even the smallest factors can impact the results of your testing. The results of your testing may be the complete opposite of what you were expecting.
The point of testing is to remove our own subjectivity. Testing allows the data to do the talking for us. Keep an open mind, and let the data inform your decisions.
Creative testing should be the cornerstone of your marketing strategy. We recommend that you look at updating your creatives at least once a month to avoid ad fatigue. This gives you plenty of opportunities to test, test, and test some more!
Are you looking for expert help for your creative testing? The digital team at 1 Stop Marketing Solutions would be happy to help. Get in touch with us today by clicking here.