Advertising could be the cornerstone of success for your business: it’s adverts that tell your customers about your products, creative ad campaigns that communicate the values of your brand and make customers excited to spend their money with you (rather than merely drily appreciate the value of your proposition). This requires a significant spend: first you have design and create your adverts, and then you have to buy space for them to appear, be that between television programmes, on the sides of buses, on billboards, or in print media, or online. If your ads don’t appeal to your customers, and don’t appear where they’ll see them and pay attention, then you’ve wasted a lot of resources – not just money but time.
This is why it’s important to test your adverts before going to a full launch: before you commit all those resources, you need to be confident that your adverts will be persuasive to customers, and will communicate the key information and brand values you intend. Today we’re looking at how you can do that.
Market Research
Market research firms can help you from day one. The first step in any campaign needs to be finding out who your customers are and what they like. If you don’t know this basic demographic information, you can’t design adverts to appeal to your market specifically and target them efficiently.
A/B Testing
As your ads get closer to launch, don’t take a chance on decisions over small details. A small scale launch of your adverts to two carefully chosen audiences, with each audience seeing a different version of the advert could help find the best solution. Track the audience’s reaction to each ad through their clicks and sales and you can see which advert, and therefore which decision, is best.
Brand Uplift
It’s important for you to know how much value your brand has: how much it’s a persuasive force for your customers. Over time your ads contribute to this force, which is known as ‘brand uplift’, so it’s well worth measuring.
You can do this with a particular kind of A/B testing. One audience sees your advert as designed. The other sees a genericised version: all your branding removed. The difference in response is a measure of the value your brand imparts to your adverts. It should be positive: your brand should be convincing more people to buy, inspiring more clicks and more sales. If the generic version performs better you either have some serious work to do on your brand or you’re targeting wholly the wrong audience.
