How to nail your marketing creative!

What is creative testing?

You know all of those beautiful assets your creative team has been busy producing? Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could compare different versions to find out which will give you the best results?

Creative testing does exactly that!

Why should you do creative testing?

In a nutshell, testing your creative reduces the risk of your marketing materials being a flop. It could be a TV ad, a billboard layout or a new logo.

By testing your assets with your target audience you’ll find out their reaction and sentiment towards them, and use that insight to inform your next steps.

What happens if you don’t test your creative?

Sometimes a piece of creative work is launched that falls flat, or worse. 

Take a lesson from the Olympics. While the London 2012 games were a triumph overall, the official logo was ridiculed from the off, and a petition to replace it gathered tens of thousands of signatures.

What lesson was learned from London 2012? Make sure you test your logo before launching it to the world.

What types of creative testing are there?

If you want to test multiple creative assets, there are two main types – monadic and sequential. Don’t worry, they sound far more complex than they actually are!

Monadic testing

For monadic testing, your audience is split into as many groups as the number of assets you’re testing. 

So if you have three logos to test, you’ll have three groups of people, each analysing a different design. This is for when you want more detailed and in-depth responses from your audience.

Sequential testing

Sequential testing is when your audience remains as one group and each individual analyses your assets, one after the other. 

You get more data and responses per asset, but it’s likely to be less in-depth in its nature. 

Once you’ve chosen your style and conducted your research, what’s next?

The results from your creative testing should give you a good idea of how your audience feels about what you’ve presented to them. 

You can then use this knowledge to progress – whether that means you need to go back to the drawing board because of some negative or constructive feedback, or whether you’ve blown them away with your creative from the off.

Either way, you’ll come out of your creative testing more knowledgeable than you went in, and feel confident in your marketing decisions.