In a recent meeting I was running through results of a marketing initiative for a client. As I got to Facebook, we discussed the plan to set up A/B tests to test different text in each ad. The client asked me “Okay, so why wouldn’t you just start with one ad? What is the point of doing the A/B test.?” This caught me off guard because I thought the reason alone was clear. If we only ran one ad instead of two, we wouldn’t know if we had the best messaging to capture the audience’s attention. Whether its social media or email marketing, strategic testing is critical to evaluate what is working vs. what isn’t in your marketing efforts. To help, we’ve listed methods of how you can strategically test on different platforms.
Social Media
Many think social media is a simple and easy marketing platform. But that’s where they are wrong. Yes - it’s easy to post a random photo and pray for some likes and follows, but what’s actually harder is to track and improve ongoing results of your social media efforts. In order to do this, you must be knowledgeable in the different social platforms and also be able to identify with your consumer. What text and pictures speak to them? Do different incentives do the trick? This is where testing comes in.
Business Insights
Facebook- You’ll want to start by looking at what works vs doesn’t work on your current Facebook page. Once you’re on your business page, go to Insights on the top toolbar. You’ll probably be surprised by how much information is on the page. From page views to page followers, there’s a lot of valuable information available for you to see that you may not have known even exists. You can even see ‘pages to watch’ aka- your competition. You can watch these pages and Facebook will even tell you what posts they are doing that are performing well. Insights is a very useful tool for tracking results. These in-depth results are helpful when you are creating paid advertisements because you can maximize your current audience - whether by gender, location or any other demographic.
Instagram- Instagram has a similar option as well for Business Insights. To access this, you must be using a business profile. Once you’re in, you can see detailed information on your followers (ages and locations) and what actions people took on your posts. You can also see all of this information by clicking individually on posts - click view insights and you’ll see how many visits, bookmarked, comments, reach and likes the post achieved. Instagram is a little different than Facebook in this sense because you can increase your organic likes by tagging people in the photos and adding various hashtags.
Ads Manager
Facebook- Once you’ve checked that out, you’ll want to start ads manager. All you have to do for this is type in ‘ads manager’ in your Facebook search bar. Before setting anything up, you’ll want to clearly understand your goals? Do you want to increase your post likes? Do you want to increase page followers? Do you want to drive people to a site to increase conversions? Once you’ve decided on your goal, you can walk through ads manager to start setting up your ads. This is where a lot of trial and error comes in. If your goal was to drive people to your website, Facebook just developed a handy add-on called split testing. This makes it worlds easier to split your audience in half randomly and test creative, placement, audience and delivery optimization. Want more tips? Read our blog post on Facebook marketing.
Instagram- For Instagram, you have the ability to create ads directly on Instagram but the tricky part with Instagram is that is has to be on your phone. I found the easier way is to just go into ads manager on Facebook and create combined Facebook and Instagram ad placements. This way your traffic and visibility is getting increased on both platforms.
All in all, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram, constant strategic analysis and testing is critical. If you’re strapped for a budget or even if you’re not, you want to be able to maximize your efforts. And if you’re not doing that, you’re wasting time and money. Putting in that extra effort by analyzing results and making adjustments is when you’ll start to see results.
As with social, it’s important to always look at what you’re doing to determine what’s working vs what isn’t, and email is no different. To start, we’d recommend creating a spreadsheet (doesn’t have to be anything fancy) with all of your email results. What you’ll want to include is information such as send date, send time, subject line, unique click % and unique open %. After, you’ll want to do a thorough analysis. Some things to look at is what days and times are outperforming the others, what common trends can you establish from subject lines (read our blog here for more on subject lines) and what people are clicking on in the emails. Is there a certain CTA? Are short emails outperforming the longer ones? Analyzing results will then lead you to creating more effective emails which you can in turn test. You can read our blog post here for more email tips.
Testing means getting to know your audience and when you do, you are able to market to them more efficiently.
Traktek Partners is a digital marketing agency with a quantitate data driven approach that assists B2B and B2C clients on email and social media marketing. Are you looking to increase conversions and engagement within your email marketing and social campaigns? Contact us and we can help.
