Introduction
In the past, performance marketers have relied on “spray and pray” marketing tactics: throwing a lot of advertising at various channels to see what works best.
They rely on the ad platform to decide which channels are best and leave it up to them. This is expensive and wasteful: nowadays, with App Tracking Transparency in place, there’s no way that approach would work well.
There’s a better way to choose which marketing creative will make the biggest impact on your company.
We know that you need a strategic component, a creative team whose purpose is to combine market research and competitive analysis in order to build actionable monthly testing plans. At Quaff, we call this process “creative testing.”
What is Creative Testing?
Creative testing is a four-part process to find the best-performing ad creative for your company. In this way, you’re thinking about brand values and user segments more than ever before in order to develop new concepts that will represent those visions well
Creative testing aims to validate the most effective and efficient creative ideas by making comparisons between different versions of a single advertisement. Each version should be designed in service of an overarching value proposition, which is aimed at very specific user segments.
Creating Testing Process
The four part process in creative testing is:
- Research different types of users and possible ways to approach them.
- Identify the best idea and refine it until it’s a winning concept.
- Test the most promising concepts by validating their underlying themes.
- Use content amplifiers to increase the efficiency of your marketing efforts as the volume of your content increases.
Why is Creative Testing Important?
Testing allows you to experiment with different versions of your ads, ensuring that they will be effective.
So you get data on whether something is working well or poorly, but you also know why—you understand the reasons for running that specific test.
It wasn’t until recently that anyone considered creating mock research and doing competitive analysis as a way to create concepts.Large companies were the only ones who could afford such a luxury. Quaff’s dedicated creative testing team takes the guesswork out of marketing tests, so you have more time to focus on other aspects of your business.
But, we’re not spending months on end doing mock research. Instead, in addition to creating and building new portfolios of concepts every month (which we turn into measurable testing units), we create separate channels for executing our ideas across them—allowing us to then scale up once a concept is proven effective.
How we use data to scale our marketing efforts
Prioritizing volume while maintaining efficiency. This can be done in 2 ways:
- Technical Optimisation: To be done in daily health checks to drive up volume
- Budget
- Bid
- Keyword Changes
- Iterations
- Format|Placement|Channel
- Creative Variations
- Audience Scaling
Creative testing allows us to validate different creative marketing tactics across multiple channels.
Once we’ve run our tests on a piece of marketing creative, we can see which parts are resonating with consumers and determine how well the brand is communicating their products or services.
When our specialized channel teams have proved the effectiveness of a concept and made sure it is suitable for broad use, they create weekly launches of creative iterations that incorporate this data into their messaging.
Why You Should Use Creative Testing to Scale
By combining creative testing with the scaling of creative iterations, you get a system that allows monthly strategic tests while constantly reviewing why things are working and not.
The creativity testing will be carried out by the creative strategy team to determine which concepts and themes are most effective.
Then, the performance team will take over and do any technical optimizations or creative variations that may be needed. They’ll also determine the best way to reach a given audience—which channels/formats should be used for this?
Conclusion
Creative testing is a method used to find the best-performing ad creative for a company. It involves a four-part process that involves researching and identifying user segments and value propositions to test, validating the highest performing concept and themes, and maximizing efficiency through scaling.
This process helps to ensure that every ad is related to a company’s original concept and provides data on the performance and reasons behind it. Creative testing and scaling can be done through technical optimizations, such as budget changes to drive volume, or through iterations, such as scaling across relevant audiences or launching new creative variations.
This combination of creative testing and scaling allows for a system of monthly strategic testing with constant feedback on what works and what doesn’t