Are You Wasting Your Digital Dollars on the Wrong Creative?
What makes consumers pull the trigger on purchasing a product? If I had a nickel for every article written that tries to answer this question, my garage would eclipse Jay Leno’s.
Yet, despite the avalanche of intelligence on influence and behavior, there is no clear-cut solution. That’s because we’ve never been exposed to more messages. Whether you’re getting streams of ads or branded content served up on your social feeds, consume digital billboard messages while stuck in traffic or feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of online offers on your industry trade media websites, your information filter is logging some serious overtime.
Add the unique preferences of your target customers. Is your ad’s creative irreverent enough for Gen Z? Appealing enough for a Mom? Which product attribute gets your B2B prospect to fill out that lead-gen form? In short, which of the many thousands of potential text and visual content combinations will resonate the best with your most important customers?
Here at Brandware, our market research group spends a lot of time finding and analyzing consumer behavior data for clients in diverse industries, from automotive and technology to home goods and healthcare. Data-driven marketing and communications is the foundation of every effective campaign, starting with creative. Why spend a dollar on a digital ad buy, a social marketing campaign or even a trade show leave-behind without confirming that the words and pictures are the best possible combination for your desired results?
One of the products our team at Brandware Research has developed to help clients stop wasting dollars on the wrong messages is called Motherlode™. Think of it as A/B testing on steroids. We’ve designed Motherlode to optimize a brand’s short-form communications. It can pretest thousands of simulated display ads, landing pages, search ads, billboards, or promotional graphics all at once to determine which iterations are best at motivating your target customers’ desired behavior. Most importantly, Motherlode’s unique survey-based approach tests actual graphic/copy design combinations – not just attributes or message lists.
Motherlode is not only an essential intelligence tool whenever we’re building social and digital content programs, but it saves clients time and lots of potential dollars. We even provide a proprietary “optimizer” tool that allows a marketing client to easily test likely target customer reactions to any of the visual and message combinations before or after the campaign launches.
If you’re currently using digital testing tools, you would typically be testing the live response to only a handful of ads. Live response is great, but you’ve probably already figured out that this greatly limits the number of iterations you can evaluate, plus live testing requires several weeks in the field to gauge response. You’re not only burning time, but creative opportunities.
We developed Motherlode to function as a pre-testing tool that allows any marketer to automatically test millions of potential creative options before settling on a handful of the best ones for live testing or publishing. Motherlode also lets you see which iterations work best with various demographics groups or behavioral segments – something live tests can’t achieve.
According to eMarketer, 2017 is now officially the year when digital ads will surpass TV. Other predictions point to the rise of immersive devices (read: VR headsets) as the new “it” channel and influencer marketing as well as account-based marketing as must-dos. Be it mobile, social, digital, experiential or old-school – whatever your channel, make sure that the visual your deliver hits its mark full-force.
