5 Ad Strategies: How can Advertising Affect Consumers?

After automating millions of dollars in creative testing, we’ve honed in on how to get meaningful creative data out of your ad tests. And we know it all starts with a solid testing strategy.

The first step is to answer this question:

What area (or areas) of the brand or business do we most need to affect with better ad creative?

The answer depends greatly on your business’s maturity, overall growth goals, and GTM strategy.

Here’s a quick summary:

Prospecting: What works best with current customers isn’t always what works best with new ones. Multivariate testing can help you find the best possible combination of creative elements to bring new people to your brand.

Launching new products and product lines: Set your new products and product lines up for success. Find winning ads and creative elements that drive people to purchase your latest offerings.

Testing seasonal designs and messages: Find out which creative elements work best to draw people into your biggest deals and holiday sales of the year.

Refining your brand’s overall look and feel: You’re not married to your brand’s design system or you’re a relatively new brand still building your look and feel. Why not let your customers decide what they like best?

Building a database of historical creative intelligence for your brand: Every test adds another layer of depth to your brand’s pool of creative intelligence. Over time, you can build insights that hold true not just for ads but for your brand as an entity.

Once your team has landed on an area of focus, you can build goals and a testing plan around it.

TRANSCRIPT

Susan: Hey everybody. Welcome to Resting Ad Face. I am Susan Wenograd. I am the VP of Performance Marketing at Marpipe. So I am the nerd that runs ads all day long. I've done it for about 20 years now. So obviously I love this topic. And with me is Jess Cook.

Jess: Hey, I'm Jess Cook. I'm the Head of Content at Marpipe. And I am the nerd that writes all of the things that you see in our social channels and on our website about testing and ad creative and building modularly, designing modularly, things like that.

Susan: So, we are here today to talk a bit about strategies around testing and the best ways to put a plan in place for who you're gonna talk to in terms of your testing, your ads and, and what exactly you wanna test.

Susan: I feel like that's one of the most neglected steps. I hate to say that, but so often it's kind of like, hey, here's a whole bunch of new creative let's test it.

Jess: Absolutely. So I think we have five different strategies we wanna talk about today. There are more, this is not a comprehensive list. These are just some we have seen that have had great success. And again, like you said, Susan, it's like these, this is what is going to help you one, build a hypothesis around what you wanna test and then two choose the right assets.

Susan: Yeah. And I think not run out of tests. But if you learn how to iterate on some of the angles that we're gonna talk about today, I think that'll, that'll create at least a good probably six month window for a lot of places.

Jess: All right. So the first one that we wanna talk about is prospecting.
So bringing in new customers, using testing assets specifically to find the right combination of messaging and images to bring in new customers, to the fold.

Susan: I feel like this is the thing that has actually gotten the hardest for advertisers, because targeting is just not at all what it used to be.

Susan: It’s kind of like, if you look at something, the best selling thing is always gonna be a men's white undershirt, but that's not gonna be interesting in an ad. So it's kind of the same thing where it’s like, people will always buy the reliable stuff once they get there, but it's not gonna be the thing that makes them feel like you're a different brand than what they see everywhere else.

Jess: Totally. Yeah. The hot pink thing is like the aspirational, right.

Susan: So I guess that, that also kind of lends seamlessly to the next way which is launching new products and product lines.

Jess: Yeah, absolutely. I think so sometimes if those new product launches just didn't perform up to your goal, there's this question if you don't test around, well, was it the product? Was it the campaign?

Jess: Another great kind of strategy around testing is seasonally or like holiday type messaging. So a lot of our customers are focused around, you know, Black Friday, Memorial Day sales, Prime Day coming up.

Susan: This is another area where I think testing ahead of time, you can't obviously test the sale messaging, but to your point, if you find out something like they care about sustainability, then at least you have some direction going into what you feature or the photos you use or...

Jess: Yeah, you might find out that like percentages always do better than dollars off, right? In terms of discount codes.

Susan: Yep. Absolutely. And I think this is how you start to build a brand that is driven by the customer and not by internal opinions, right?

Jess: Yeah, for sure. And I think it's how you build like a longstanding experience with a, with customers, right?

Susan: Well, and then you also get in the room with the big titles that are. I wanna do it this way. And you're like, no, no, we, we already know, we already have these things work.

Jess: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is how you start to build a brand that is driven by the customer and not by internal opinions, right?

So there you have it. That's five different testing strategies for you that you can start using right now. Which I think is, is really cool or maybe one that you're already using and it just kind of validates for you like, oh yeah, this is the right path. And I can build hypotheses around this.