Do you want to improve your advertising productivity? If so, you need to do some research! In this blog post, we will discuss five research strategies that will help you achieve your goals. Research is essential for any business, and it is especially important when it comes to advertising. By using the right research methods, you can improve your chances of success and make sure that your advertising dollars are being spent in the most effective way possible.
1) Test the Advertising Creative with a Valid Performance Standard
Any savvy businessperson knows that before launching a new product into the national marketplace, it is essential to test it among consumers. After all, why would you invest money in a product that may not even be successful?
The same logic applies to advertising. Advertising is simply another product of human ingenuity and craft, and it makes sense to make sure that it will be successful before investing money in it. One way of ensuring this is to set a firm performance standard that says an ad cannot be activated unless it first achieves an above average score in pre-testing research. By doing this, you can be confident that your advertising dollars are well-spent and that you are not putting money behind average advertising.
Identifying superior creative performers is essential for any organization that wants to be successful in today's marketplace. But what are the best ways to identify these performers? One important factor is to make sure that you are using valid measures in your research. That is, the measurements you collect should actually be related to effectiveness in the marketplace. There are a number of ways to ensure that your measures are valid, including conducting focus groups and interviews with customers and other stakeholders. By taking the time to ensure that your measures are valid, you will be able to more accurately identify the creative performers who can help your organization succeed.
2) Creative Should be Rehearsed in Rough Form First
Every stand-up comedian knows that the best way to hone their act is to perform it in front of a real audience. There's no substitute for the feedback you get from a room full of people, whether it's laughs, boos, or complete silence. That's why it's unthinkable for a comedian to take their act directly to a national television audience without first trying it out in a small club. Yet many advertisers go directly into final production of their expensive commercials without any kind of rehearsal in front of a real audience. Companies need to test their ideas on real customers before they launch them on a wide scale. Otherwise, they risk wasting a lot of time and money on ads that fall flat.
Large advertisers will often test many advertising ideas at a rough stage of production in order to save on costs. This is because it is much cheaper to screen ideas in a cartoon known as an "animatic" or with footage borrowed from other sources in a process called a "ripomatic." By doing this, they can also make good ideas even better. Many times, a newborn idea has to come of age before it is launched into the world. No creative concepts are perfect. Therefore, rough production can be essential in making a successful commercial.
3) Experiment with Creative Alternatives
When you're in love with your first idea, it's easy to get distracted from the best solution. Don't let this happen and always take time for research before choosing an advertising campaign that will work well with customers on all levels!
New product development and creativity are processes of trial-and-error. Thomas Edison tried out over 3,000 different prototype lights before hitting on the right way to make an electric light bulb!
The laws of statistics dictate that if you test one idea, there’s about 30% chance it will score above average. Testing two ideas gives 51%, three - 66%. And four- 76%. So for a new product launch where tight deadlines and not wanting to be forced into launching with an average commercial make sense; planning ahead on testing multiple advertising concepts makes strategic sense because binomial distribution arises from series Bernoulli trials.
4) Using Diagnostic Insights to Boost the Creative
The goal of diagnostic research is not only to identify missed opportunities, but also inefficient or ineffective processes that could be improved.
Reworking an average idea into something that’s above-average will give your company a huge boost in productivity. You might spend less time and money on research if you use it as a filter for advertising ideas, which is why diagnostic pre testing can be so valuable!
The diagnostic research process can be used to help answer the following question when faced with disappointing test scores: is this just a little idea that has been executed well, or could there potentially exist other flaws in its execution?
In business terms it's also important for companies struggling with underperforming assets (such as an under-budgeted campaign) - should they invest more time and money into fixing these problems?
The work of diagnostic research is to define a problem as precisely and clearly possible- so that creatives know what they need to fix! For this reason don't just engage in copy testing. Use both verbal or nonverbal techniques for insights into how your commercial are performing.
5) Learn from the Competition
It's not enough to outscore your competition in some historical norm base. You have to take on their ads right now! Your advertised share-of-mind is a function of both how loudly you speak up, and what creative weapons are stronger than the others around--and this needs constant updating based off real time data because things change constantly.
Competitive testing allows you to experiment with different methods of reaching the consumer at someone else's expense. And if your company has more powerful diagnostic tools for understanding why consumers are responding in a certain way, then they may be able beat their competitor by knowing what ads work best on them and why!
It’s important to remember that advertising performance improvement comes with time. It's not an overnight thing and you won't see results right away, but the more tests we do on our campaign ideas or existing ads the better chance for success!
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