Creative testing is a critical component for optimizing brand performance- a good way of thinking about it is like the board game Battleship (see video). Whether you’re running Facebook ads, TikTok ads, or even email and CRM campaigns, effective testing can help ensure that your messaging is resonating with your target audience and that your ad spend or creative efforts are being applied effectively.
As media costs continue to rise, ineffective creative can quickly burn through your budget and cause you to miss out on potential customers. That’s why it’s more important than ever to optimize your creative, particularly as you scale up your spending.
There are a few general approaches to creative testing and strategy, including top-down creative campaigns, A/B testing, and multivariate testing. While each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, multivariate testing tends to be the most effective for quickly identifying winning ideas and optimizing your ad spend accordingly.
Top-Down
Top-down creative is when you come up with one approach, go through a few rounds of reviews, maybe do some focus grouping, then release the project to your audience. It can work, but it generally takes a long time to create, takes a lot of resources and the odds of success aren’t necessarily in your favor.
Pros:
Easier to manage a complex review process (multiple stakeholders, legal review, etc.) because the volume of creative is more contained.
Cons:
Even with a lot of background strategy and focus grouping, it’s a lot like gambling. It’s a big investment in ideas and approaches that aren’t guaranteed success.
a/b Testing
a/b testing can be a better approach, but it’s slow and can be expensive. By testing just two options at a time, you’re putting a lot of time and money behind ideas that have lower odds of success.
Pros:
Easier to isolate variables and compare their effectiveness.
Cons:
Slow and expensive- you can spend a lot of effort and media dollars on trafficking ineffective creative for the sake of the test.
Multivariate Testing
With multivariate testing, you can try out a variety of different ideas at once and then quickly determine which ones are resonating with your audience. This allows you to scale up your media spend on the most effective ideas and iterate on them for even better results.
Pros:
Much faster to get learnings. Know what works and what to invest in in the future.
More effective creative and more efficient spend. You’ll connect with your ideal audience in a shorter amount of time.
Cons:
A higher volume of tests means a higher volume of creative production and reviews. Depending on how many assets and how extensive your review process is, this may require more effort from your team.
Optimizing creative is crucial to your business, and despite the strengths of other approaches, in most cases, multivariate testing is the most effective approach to growing a brand quickly and inexpensively.
By implementing effective testing, on different social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. you can connect with larger audiences and make more informed decisions about how to allocate your marketing budget and achieve better results. And by applying these insights to other areas of your marketing strategy, you can drive growth and optimize your overall brand performance.
If you’d like to learn more about how we run our tests, or get a free audit of your digital marketing, hit us up at the link below!