Getting Testy with Your Marketing?

Discovering New Avenues of Growth Through Experimentation

It’s easy for marketing campaigns to plateau. Consumers are bombarded with advertising in their everyday lives, so for each brand to compete, they have to constantly reinvent themselves.

Finding new areas of growth is not easy, but here are a few methods to try that may inspire you to take new directions with your brand.

Create an AdWords Discovery Campaign

You can use AdWords to discover new areas of consumer intent that may not have been obvious to you before. Creating a campaign with just a few broad match or modified broad match keywords allows you to discover a variety of search terms that complement your targeting.

You can find out what exactly consumers are searching for in the Search Terms Report under the Keywords tab in AdWords.

Filter and sort for a high CTR with a large number of impressions to see the most engaging search terms that your ads match up to.

By dedicating a small portion of your budget to these discovery campaigns, you can gain insights about your consumers — finding out exactly what they’re looking for when they start their purchasing journey.

In the Search Terms Report, you tend to see groupings of related terms in new areas that you may not have known about. You can add these terms to other campaigns or go a level deeper and add a representative keyword to your discovery campaign.

Find a grouping of keywords and pick a search term that encompasses the group. Adding this term to your discovery campaign will allow you to narrow your research on what consumers are looking for so that you can capture high intentful audiences.

Note: Be sure to use negative keywords and match types strategically so that your research stays in focus!

Use A/B Testing

A/B testing is a controlled experiment that measures performance between two variants (the A and B). You can A/B test almost any part of your digital presence, such as website form placement, social copy, and call-to-action buttons.

A/B testing might as well stand for ‘Always Be Testing’ because brands should constantly be iterating their digital assets to find new growth opportunities.

Most tools used today have A/B testing functions built in. For example, if you use MailChimp for your email marketing, you can use their internal A/B testing functionality to test subject lines, imaging, and copy.

AdWords also has a tool called AdWords Experiments that allows you to create an altered version of your campaign which you can use to test a variety of ad characteristics. Experiments on AdWords are valuable for testing settings like remarketing audiences, display placements, device settings, and location adjustments — just to name a few.

You can assign the percentage of traffic you want to funnel towards your experiments. It’s important to note that your testing will need a fair amount of traffic if you want to validate your results, but don’t assign too much traffic as it may disrupt your existing campaigns — it’s a balance that you have to feel out and find over time.

It’s important to keep evolving, and testing different characteristics of your business is a great way to do that. It’s not always easy to know where to start, but this two-step process will provide a great jumping off point for growth. Happy testing!