Creative Testing Best Practices: How to Maximize Advertising ROI

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Finding the perfect creative concept combination with agile insights

Struggling to make your ads stand out in a crowded market?

You’re not alone. In today’s bustling advertising landscape, cutting through the noise and truly connecting with your audience is tough. But imagine if you could gather real-time feedback from your target market and tweak your creatives on the fly—sounds like a dream, right?

With OnePulse, it’s a reality. Our platform lets you gather real-time consumer insights to fine-tune your creative concepts and ensure your ads hit the mark every time. With marketing budgets tightening, being smart with your dollars is crucial, so investing in a creative testing budget is more important than ever.

Ready to revolutionise your creative testing process? Let’s dive in!

What is creative testing?

Creative testing evaluates different versions of your creatives to determine which performs best with your target audience. It involves testing various creative concepts, creative elements, and messaging to gain valuable insights for optimizing your marketing strategy and improving key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Why creative testing is important

Did you know that the average person sees 6,000 to 10,000 ads daily?In such a saturated market, ensuring your advertising creative stands out is more critical than ever, and here’s why creative testing is essential:

– Validate effectiveness before launch

By pre-testing your ad creative with the target audience, you can identify which creative elements resonate best and make necessary adjustments to maximise impact and return on investment (ROI).

– Provides valuable audience insights

Understand your target audience’s preferences, perceptions, and potential pain points and inform your creative team with insights that ensure your strategy aligns closely with audience expectations.

– Optimising advertising spend

By identifying the most compelling creative concepts through creative iteration testing, you can allocate your marketing budgets more effectively and focus on the ads proven to engage and convert, improving return on ad spend (ROAS).

Benefits of using agile market research for your creative testing 

Think creative testing is just for big brands and agencies with hefty budgets? Think again! With agile research tools like OnePulse, creative testing is accessible no matter your budget.But why use OnePulse for your creative testing?

– Speed to market

Agile creative testing allows you to quickly validate concepts and get winning advertising campaigns to market faster, capitalising on timely opportunities and staying ahead of competitors.

– Risk mitigation

Traditional campaign development often left creative testing until the end, risking ineffective advertising creative that could damage brand perception or waste ad spend. With agile methods, OnePulse helps you validate concepts early and often, significantly mitigating these risks.

– Adaptability

In a constantly changing market, OnePulse lets you quickly adapt your creative strategies to match current conditions, consumer trends, or competitive landscapes.

– Continuous optimization

With OnePulse, you can continuously refine and optimize your creative elements based on real-time data and audience feedback, keeping your campaigns fresh and avoiding creative fatigue.

Ready to transform your creative testing process? Let’s explore how OnePulse can help you do just that.

Step-by-step guide to creative testing:

Step 1: Define your goal

Clearly defining your goal upfront is crucial to ensure the creative testing is focused and the results provide actionable insights. Some key considerations:

• Identify the creative elements you want to test, such as ad copy, visuals, calls-to-action, etc.
• Determine what attributes you want to measure, like appeal, uniqueness, quality, purchase intent, etc.

Step 2. Prepare your creative concepts

With your goals clearly defined, the next step is to develop and gather all the creative concepts you want to test. We’ve made it easy for you to test a variety of creative elements via OnePulse, including:

• Links: Include URLs to external resources or landing pages to see how your audience reacts to different content. 
• Images: Integrate design mockups directly into the survey to gather visual feedback. 
• Videos: Embed videos into your survey to gauge audience engagement and preferences.

Step 3: Choose your target audience

Next, specify the characteristics of your target audience. Consider demographics, behaviours, and interests that align with your creative strategy. Using OnePulse, you can tap into the minds of 125 million people in 50+ countries and select from 70+ demographics, consumer habits, lifestyles, and traits so you speak to the right people from the get-go. 

Pro tip: Going global? No worries, we’ll automatically translate your Pulse into the native language of your target audience and ensure you receive results in yours.

Step 3: Design your survey/Pulse

This crucial step in the creative testing process is where you gather the actionable data to inform your creative strategy and guide your creative team in refining and optimising your advertising creative. A well-designed survey not only collects the necessary data but also provides insights into how different creative elements perform with various audience segments.

With OnePulse, you can choose from 8 question types, including open text with up to 12 answer values, and seamlessly embed images, videos, and web links into your Pulse to easily test every element of your campaign.

There are different ways you can approach creative testing, and they include:

A/B testing 

A/B testing allows you to compare two distinct creative concepts or variations, isolating a single variable simultaneously. 

Advantages of A/B testing:

• Quickly validate what is working and what is not, allowing for fast, accurate decisions
• Focuses on testing two specific designs against each other so results are clear and unbiased, letting the data speak for itself rather than relying on assumptionsEasier to track data and obtain results quickly

Multivariate testing
On the other hand, multivariate testing compares multiple creative variables simultaneously across different combinations of creative elements. This provides deeper insights into how individual elements and their interactions impact performance.

Advantages of multivariate testing:

• Multivariate testing provides a holistic view of how different creative elements interact with each other rather than assessing them in isolation
• It moves creative testing from an art to a science by providing the data to back up creative choices. This allows you to focus budget, time, and creative efforts on the strategies with the highest likelihood of success.
• By identifying the best-performing combinations of creative elements, multivariate testing allows for precise, targeted optimizations

💡 Pro tip: Draft a Pulse in seconds using our AI-enhanced editor that harnesses the power of 12 billion data points to help you write smarter questions. Alternatively, if you prefer, you can write your own questions.

Recommended read 👉 What makes a good Pulse?

Step 5: Launch your survey / Pulse

Now hit send, grab a coffee (or tea!), and watch your results come in real-time from our always-on engaged communites eager to respond.

Step 6: Analyse the results 

Elevate your understanding with our AI-powered result analysis and uncover key insights, findings, and recommended actions from your creative tests. This enables you to make informed decisions about your creative strategies, leading to more effective advertising campaigns.

Pro-tip: Easily share your Pulse results with colleagues and clients through dynamic, downloadable raw data exports and charts for cross-team collaboration. 

Example:

Step 7: Optimise, intereate and repeat

A study by McKinsey & Company found that companies using data-driven strategies are 23 times more likely to acquire customers. By continuously testing and refining your creative elements based on audience feedback and performance data, you can maximise the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and drive better results over time.

Pro tip: Continue the conversation with follow-up Pulses based on your initial findings. With a retargeting rate of 90%-95%, compared to an industry average of less than 5%, you can ensure your creative campaign remains relevant and impactful.

So to conclude, in today’s fast-paced advertising world, creative testing is essential. It ensures your ads resonate with your target audience, drive engagement, and deliver outstanding results. By validating your creative concepts, minimizing campaign fatigue, and optimizing ad spend, you can perfect your advertising campaigns and achieve better outcomes.

Ready to the first step towards more effective advertising?

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