When developing a product, every team eventually reaches the point where they need to understand how the product performs when marketed to its target audience. This is an exciting and sometimes scary time for organizations. Often, this key milestone results in a CEO or GM hiring a marketing agency who builds one expensive creative and then chooses a channel to run the creative on. The team is then left with more questions than answers, especially if the results are poor. Is this the best performance we can expect? What should we do next?
Creative is by far the most important lever you have in marketing your product, and should be the focus in evaluating whether or not you are ready to start marketing at scale. The difference in performance between different marketing messages can be huge, so no single test will tell you much about your product market fit.
Rather than take a one off approach at this stage, leaders should set up processes to learn what works for marketing the product. These processes can be run until there are no significant new things to learn, or indefinitely if metrics show that the product is ready to scale. There is no need to bring on new heads to execute these experiments.
Identify Your Goals
Before you begin designing processes around marketing experimentation, first determine what success would look like for your business. This should be an output from your financial model. When you are done defining your goals, you should minimally have
- The KPI for marketing that you will be testing your creative against. This could be CAC, but ideally should be a return on ad spend metric to most accurately connect the impact of the marketing on the bottom line.
- A low end target, below which the business is not viable
- A high end target which would allow the organization to achieve its goals
Identify Your Constraints
Determine what constraints you have for getting the work done. Outlining these at the start will help you to understand how to build your process, and identify your limiting factor. These include
- Budget available for creative testing
- Man hours available for asset design
- Any deadlines for making key decisions on the future of the product or company
Identify Your Key Players
Who are you going to pull in to get this work done? This will vary depending on what your team looks like, but at minimum you need fill a few key
- Someone to provide input on who the target audience is (ideally someone involved with user research)
- Someone to provide input on what the value of the product is (potentially the head of product or CEO)
- Someone to prioritize creative hypotheses (potentially the head of product)
- Someone to create the marketing assets (potentially a designer or product manager)
- Someone to run the tests and report on the results (possibly a product manager willing to learn an ad platform or a part time contractor)
In a truly lean organization, this could be two or even one person.
Identify Your Target Channel
The ideal target channel to kick off your creative testing will depend upon your product and target market.
- The channel needs to be capable of properly targeting your audience. Gathering creative performance data against the wrong audience or an audience that is too broad could leave you with misleading learnings
- The channel needs to provide real time performance data
- You need to have a high level of confidence that you can quickly produce asset iterations that are appropriate to the channel.
Outline Your Process
Put together a quick outline of your process. The purpose here is to create a document that the key players can reference to make sure they’re serving their function in this process, but also to allow transparency for anyone to question the process. Since you don’t know anything yet, much of the process will be built on assumptions and guesswork. That is not an issue as long as you document and provide the space for these assumptions to be challenged and improved over time. Things to outline include
- How creative hypotheses are generated and prioritized
- How tests are built, how long they run for, and how much ad spend they get
- What metrics are reported on and what success criteria are for a test
Build Your Process Tracking Setup
This piece is very tactical but can prove to be very important very quickly. You will soon find that you have tens of hypotheses and tens of creative tests with hundreds of creative assets and you’ll want to be able to easily review what you’ve done and what the results have been to synthesize high level learnings. You need to have a system where you can easily view metric results right alongside the visual asset that the data is associated with. In a pinch, this can be done in Google Sheets but Airtable or something similar is far superior and more flexible. If your team has already been using something like this through development of the product, go with what is familiar.
Get Started Already
All of the above steps should be done as rapidly as possible so that you can get to the real important piece; starting to learn what works in marketing your product and what the return on investment looks like.
- Have your first creative hypothesis creation session synchronously or asynchronously. Then prioritize the hypotheses for testing.
- Be sure to start with the basics here first. Work on learning what messaging works before working on how to best present the message.
- Produce your first set of creatives based on your highest priority hypotheses. The goal here is to hit the minimum level of quality required to validate your hypothesis, not to produce your first Super Bowl commercial. You want “good enough creative”. Think Figma, Canva, or generative AI, not Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere.
- Make sure all of your tracking is set up properly and launch your first test!
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Bring your key players into a retrospective as soon as you’ve done a couple of rounds of testing and see how the process is going. This should be an open flexible forum to call out issues or areas for improvement, but big areas that should be addressed are
- Are hypotheses being written clearly? Is it clear what we need to build to validate the hypothesis when it is time to go into production?
- Are hypotheses being prioritized well? Do we feel like we’re doing a good job of picking the most important things to test?
- Is creative production going well? As a team are we all bought into building “good enough creative” in order to maintain efficiency?
- Is testing producing the results we need? Are we hitting a satisfactory level of significance in each test? Do we feel like we learned what we set out to learn when formulating the hypothesis?
- Are there any efficiencies to be had in testing? Could we be targeting a less expensive geography and produce the same results? How could experiments be run to validate and improve the testing process?
Most importantly, is there anything we could do to speed up the process? What are the limiting factors to testing more hypotheses and more creative assets faster?
Compare Results to Your Goals
As you iterate through tests and gain new learnings, continuously compare your test metrics against your goals. You should see a wide spread in the test results, but should start to get a sense of what your upper end is. At the same time, your list of hypotheses should have fewer and fewer huge bets that could be big game changers with the remainder being ideas that could have small incremental impact
By this point, if you hit your target goal; great! It’s time to think about what roles to hire first to build out your marketing team.
If you are close to goal (75%+), but not quite there you may consider a quick exploration of a second channel that seems promising or consider doing a higher production creative based on everything you’ve learned so far to see if either of these get you across the line.
If you still have a large gap between your results and your goals, it’s time to consider how the product or the business model might change to close that gap. If you’ve gone through this process well, some of the creative results should give you ideas that point you in the right direction. When you are ready to test marketing again, you already have the process set up and the muscles built internally to test new ideas.