How to improve your Ad/Marketing Strategy?
If you are one of those who goes with a “One-size fits all” approach for your business/ ad campaigns it’s time to re-evaluate your strategy to reach your customer.
Experimenting the way your marketing strategies work can reap benefits to your business. Be it a risk-averse or a traditional business/advertiser, experimenting is key to improve. Simply put, it’s like any science experiment! You want to prove your hypothesis considering a few variables. If the test goes as per your expectations, that’s your Eureka moment, if not, that’s also a Eureka moment! At the end of each experiment you invariably learn something and the why’s behind it.
- Don’t know where and how to start an ad experiment? Ask yourself these questions frequently as the business landscape is constantly evolving around the globe.
What is my business goal?
Who is my customer/target audience?
Where is my customer/target audience?
How can I reach them?
When can I reach them?
2. Always back your questions with data driven insights, and that data can be obtained by deploying testing/experimenting methodologies. Here are a few experiments you can conduct on your video ads, dynamic ads, ad recall, landing pages, responsive displays etc.
- A/B testing
- Incremental experiments
- Pre-Post impact analysis
I personally prefer A/B testing as it allows you to test one variable at a time. It’s used to pick the better out of two variables. For instance, if you are testing the background color of your landing pages to determine which one helps you generate the most conversions, you would use an A/B test. You can also test on the page level, which means that you are looking at the entire page as the variable. Bear in mind, in the above experiments you have a “test group” [who view a version you think would perform better] and a “control group” [who view the original/ unaffected version]
Hubspot has an amazing A/B testing kit to track results! Do check it out.
3. Before starting a test, be sure of what business goal you want to test and which metric you want to assess. SMART approach can be employed here.
4. Once you comprehend your results which are statistically significant, meaning, (a reliable result) you can use your findings to alter/scale your marketing strategy aligning to your business goals and customer needs. A Kantar study states, since the C19 pandemic broke, there has been a 70% increase in web browsing, 61% increase in social media engagement and 63% increase in Tv viewing.
5. Get into the rhythm of an experimenting mindset, learn, iterate and, run with what’s good for your business and advertising. Folks, that is exactly how you keep up with your competitors!
P.S: You can take a shot everytime I use the word experimenting!
