As we’ve been enabling Bigcos to de-risk ideas by conducting smart, fast, iterative experiments, we’ve been leaning in on how to best leverage digital marketing and advertising tools such as Facebook advertising. With Facebook’s expansive user targeting abilities, easy-to-use interface, and split testing capabilities, this tool enables you to test assumptions quickly and inexpensively. We’re always on the lookout for new ways to harness this powerful tool.
We recently heard from Sean Lee, former Senior Brand Manager from Procter & Gamble, current VP of Digital Marketing at Pure Romance, about how he and his team leveraged Facebook advertising and readily available consumer information to get answers on three questions while launching a new product: Will the consumer buy the product; Can we sell the product efficiently; And does the MVP meet the expectation the consumer has?
Throughout his talk, he referenced a some helpful digital marketing tools to enable you to test assumptions and de-risk your idea:
AdEspresso.com: AdEspresso allows you to launch variations of Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads, and auto-optimize so that the spending shifts to the variation that is doing the best. This is one of the more fool-proof ways to split-test via online advertising without having to manually setup and change assets such as varying copy, imagery, video, and more.
Unbounce.com: Unbounce is a Landing Page tool that enable you to test conversion of the messaging and conversion oriented content. Using AdEspresso, or another ad split-testing tool, you can keep the ad copy the same across your test ads, but leverage different landing pages to test what converts, working to lower your cost per acquisition. Leveraging tools like Unbounce also enable you to improve your quality score of your ads and therefore the ad positioning of them due to the better experience and relevance of the ad to the landing page. If you’re testing with Google advertising, this means that you’ll actually reach more people for less.
Online Customer Reviews: Once the product is out there, and people are starting to purchase and use, use ratings and reviews to optimize the product itself and messaging of it to make sure the customer is getting what they wanted when they bought. Sean confirmed that until they were able to get to 4 or 5 stars on average, they kept working with their R&D function to tweak the product.
1Q: One of the quicker testing tools that Sean mentioned he uses when testing assumptions about products and ad tests of products was 1Q. On this site, you target who you want to respond to your question, pay 1$ per response, and receive the answer within about 15 minutes. While this goes against the principle of “measure what people do, not what they say they do” it does enable you to quickly vet questions with consumers that you might have while you’re building your test.
We’ll continue to share tools and resources we come across as we ride through more Build-Test-Learn loops. What tools do you leverage when running experiments to de-risk your ideas?
