Whether you are in an advertising agency, creating online campaigns, or work in marketing, testing advertising copy is an essential step to take prior to launching a campaign. Without understanding how an audience will react to a campaign concept, you could be losing out on an opportunity to gain brand recognition and drive people to respond to the call-to-action. Many campaigns have the right elements, but aren’t presented in a way that resonates with customers. By testing advertising copy, layouts, and recall, you’ll be ensuring that the money you invest in a media buy makes the campaign worth it. At InterQ, we create market research strategies that leverage advertising copy testing for traditional campaigns (out-of-home, print, TV) as well as digital media. We recommend a two-step process for campaigns. The first is to test concepts, qualitatively, and the final step is to test advertising quantitatively, using online tests. We can also create studies to test brand recall and message comprehension.
Brand Concept Testing
Prior to writing the full campaign, the first step is to test concepts. In brand concept testing, we weigh concepts against each other qualitatively. Using focus groups, we vet ideas and use projective and brainstorming exercises to understand which concepts are strongest. This feedback is essential knowledge that the creative teams can then use to create the actual ad copy and visuals for the campaigns. For digital campaigns, we’ll incorporate language exploration, which involves studying how people frame concepts and mining the actual words they use; this is essential to writing accurate campaigns that reflect the vernacular people use when thinking about the concept.
Advertising Copy Testing
Once the concepts have been identified and the campaign ideas are created, we move into testing advertising copy. In this step, it’s important to look for statistical validation, so we use online surveys, A/B testing, and visual tests to see which headlines, wording, layout, call-to-actions, and visuals are the most memorable. We can use various methods to test traditional media campaigns, UX designs, pay-per-click-copy, and website copy. The goal is to understand which advertising copy is the most effective with the largest percentage of a target audience.
Brand Recall Testing
A final method of advertising copy testing is brand recall tests. Next to mock-ups of other brands, does your brand stand out enough? Can people recall the name of your brand or the main message of the ad? By testing longitudinally over the course of multiple days, we can gauge whether your brand leaves a lasting mark.
