Fail to prepare; prepare to fail
In these straightened times most organisations are competing for customers like never before yet many will fail to optimise their digital marketing campaigns prior to launch, missing the opportunity to maximise ROI, customer acquisition or retention.
But why should this still be the case? It’s down to pre-testing. Organisations often don’t invest in the necessary pre-testing to identify and address potential pitfalls within their campaign’s core proposition, its language and content, its layout, its multi- touch point customer experience or the way it is portraying the brand.
Broadly there are three pre-testing options – two of which involve the target audience. The first is to conduct a quantitative research exercise. This will enable campaign owners to identify whether or not there are any significant issues within the campaign. What it will not do is identify what those issues are or what to do about them.
Qualitative research is the second option – for example in focus groups or online. This approach will identify if there are any consumer issues relating to the campaign, precisely where they are and what to do about them in order to improve effectiveness of the campaign.
The third pre-testing option is to do nothing and let the market decide!
Getting to grips with digital campaign pre-testing
In many campaigns, pre-testing through qualitative research enables creative elements, copy, messages and call to action to be adapted to deliver the greatest impact before the campaign goes live. It’s a diligent approach to improving ROI, but unfortunately not without its challenges. Even amongst companies who conduct campaign pre-testing and use the qualitative approach results are often seen to be ‘unreliable’.
Given the depth of investigation in qual research, it seems counterintuitive that despite taking the time to understand audience response to a campaign, those results can be misleading. The core issues that combine to make effective digital campaign pre-testing challenging include:
- Budget – coming where it does in the marketing cycle (after the development of the product, the proposition and the advertising), the research budget for campaign pre-testing is often not available. The result is either no research, or poorly-funded research that is not taken seriously as a result
- Time – campaign development frequently exceeds planned timeframes meaning that the time for pre-testing has to be squeezed to the extent that conventional qualitative research is no longer an option – or must be seriously curtailed
- The role of the communications agency – with dwindling budgets and growing time pressures the agencies responsible for campaign delivery are often understandably sceptical about ‘last minute’ pre-testing by researchers who have not been immersed in the campaign and could even undermine its effectiveness
- The need for numbers –whilst pre-testing requires a qualitative approach if it is to be truly effective budget and time pressures this will typically mean that only 20-30 consumers can be involved in the qualitative evaluation process.
Based on such small sample sizes campaign owners then struggle to accept challenging research findings and recommendations, or even subdue their own concerns about whether or not the exercise has been either representative or objective from the consumers’ point of view.
It’s little wonder, therefore, that so many campaign owners are at best lukewarm on the subject of campaign pre-testing and end up taking the pot luck approach as to whether the campaign will hit the spot.
A new approach to maximising digital campaign ROI
In the case of digital campaign pre-testing, marketers need high-speed, high volume, low cost qualitative research which enables hundreds of consumers to provide detailed and location-specific campaign feedback cost-effectively and quickly.
Until recently, this has been the unattainable holy grail for researchers and marketers looking to solve the conundrum of wanting to conduct campaign pre-testing but not having the time or budget to complete it. To address these challenges, ‘mass-qual’ research has emerged as a new methodology. Driven by bespoke technology, it represents a radical
departure from currently available qualitative methodologies. It recruits from large-scale research panels which contain literally hundreds of thousands of consumers per country to ensure that each campaign is reviewed by a truly representative sample of consumers.
Critically, each respondent assesses the campaign in isolation and there is no central moderation.
This means that qualitative feedback will always be 100% objective rather than subject to the bias which can be an issue in focus groups.
Finally, the participation of so many consumers means that although the pre-testing is primarily qualitative in nature there is also a legitimate basis for quantifying all of the key issues, offering research buyers the benefits of both qual and quant pre-testing for campaigns.
Qualitative campaign pre-testing made easy
It’s time to think differently about campaign pre-testing. The old issues of cost, time, useless and incomplete data are a thing of the past. With these barriers removed, brand owners now need to consider fresh methodologies to build in pre-testing as a matter of course.
Imagine if you could improve ROI by several percentage points at a stroke. You wouldn’t send a rocket to the moon without testing whether it is actually going to land there. With the budget imperative and need to maximise ROI that goes hand in hand with today’s digital marketing campaigns, the era of modern pre-testing is upon us.
