Data-driven marketing should inform the important day to day business decisions you make. Data-driven marketing is using a test and learn approach, where marketers are testing every aspect of a campaign—from the call-to-action to images, to channels leveraged. Those who use a data-driven approach are likely to see an increase in the performance of their campaigns.
“Today, everyone wants to say that they are doing data-driven marketing. But I ask a simple question: how many experiments are you running? If you do zero you are not doing data-driven marketing. Everyone is still making assumptions about what will work for their brand.” – Volkan Cagsal, CEO, Adphorus
You should be optimizing for your ultimate business objective and continuously measuring results. This starts with defining clear goals and outcomes that you want to measure for your campaigns.
For example:
These goals are all different and require different campaign banner ad creatives, targeting setups, and measurement approaches to inform and improve subsequent campaigns.
While you may have various campaigns targeting different stages of your marketing funnel, you ultimately need to measure your results and optimize based on your real business objectives.
You can begin to optimize your creative testing efforts by determining what your goals are. Determine what it is you want your customers to do more of. Are you looking to increase conversions, build brand awareness, or get more people to your website? From there, pick ONE variable to test. When we say ONE variable we mean ONE variable. By sticking to only one variable, for example, just switching out the color of your CTA, you’ll understand exactly what increased – or didn’t increase – performance. Additionally, make sure to have an analyst on your team who can analyze the results of the test and ensure it shows statistical significance with a low margin of error.
You can also use the hierarchy of results to determine which creative you want to use depending on your goal. For example, if your goal is to increase conversions for a hotel we have found that exterior images perform best, but if your goal is clicks, we have found that amenity images perform best. Or if you’re put in a situation where you don’t have the ability to use your highest performing image asset, you can always default to the second-highest, third-highest, etc.
The upfront effort of A/B testing can be a little daunting if you don’t have a team of professionals helping you with it. Making the perfect creative will take time, but it’s worth it.
Sojern has a team of professional creative analysts who are continuously creating and running A/B tests for our 8,000+ global customers—implementing and sharing the latest best practices for campaign performance. We take our “center around the customer” company value to heart, and always want to exceed our customers’ expectations and have their ads performing at their best. We do this by offering free creative services to our independent hoteliers.
Adphorus, a Sojern company, offers a creative designer tool for customized creatives at scale on Facebook and Instagram. Creative Designer has been built for campaign managers and does not require any advanced design skills or expertise. It offers a wide range of options to easily customize hundreds of images and create more engaging ads for both static and dynamic campaigns. By creating multiple alternatives of your ads, you can diversify the creatives in your campaigns, customize them based on product specifics, and A/B test various assets.
Are you interested in learning more about creative testing and taking a data-driven approach? Get in touch with our experts today.
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