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Welcome back!

We hope everyone had an awesome weekend! Now that we’ve done a deep dive into what creative testing actually is, we can look at how to incorporate audience targeting and segmentation into the picture— think of it as picking the perfect costume for different parties. For a family gathering, you might go for a lighthearted Bugs Bunny costume, while a club rager might lend itself to something a bit more risqué. Just like those costumes cater to the vibe of each event, your content needs to adapt to resonate with each audience segment.

Let’s dive in! 🏃‍♂️🚀

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Tools + Productivity

Strategy

Who you lookin’ at?

We’ll start with the most obvious way to segment your audience for creative testing — which is by basic demographics like age, gender, and income.

Let’s look at Nike’s “Dream Crazier” campaign to see how. First, Nike divided their target audience (women in sports) into three teams:

1) Young aspiring athletes (13-18)

2) College-level female athletes (18-22)

3) Professional female athletes (23+)

Visuals of young athletes visualizing and realizing their future successes appeal to the first category. For the second, the theme of balancing athletics with life— from studies to friends to doing laundry— resonates more. Finally, pros relate to the imagery of athletes accomplishing incredible feats.

The main campaign video, narrated by Serena Williams, focuses more on the third category. For your brand, you might test different imagery that resonates with varying categories and assess each one’s effectiveness to focus your edits.

If you’d rather focus on one major campaign (like Nike’s video), you might test different focuses on different demographic groups across videos to understand which targeting is most effective.

This has the added benefit of helping you understand your own audience better— if your ads targeting college-aged students are especially effective, you might be surprised to discover that this group represents a major untapped market.

Mindpower

If you want to maximize the effectiveness of your customer segmentation, you have to look beyond the obvious, external stuff and dig deeper, bucketing your target audience based on lifestyle, values, and interests.

Airbnb has lots of opportunities to implement psychographic segmentation by appealing to traveler’s diverse motivations.

Let’s look at the “Live There” campaign, geared towards travelers seeking authentic, local experiences. This ICP is made up of action-oriented individuals and cultural enthusiasts.

Creative testing can be used not only within different psychographic profiles but also as a way of determining which profiles your customers primarily align with.

Airbnb’s ad testing determined that most travelers surveyed wanted to experience a place like a local, with ads showcasing unique, local experiences performing better than those highlighting generic tourist activities.

They also found that ads emphasizing the emotional aspects of travel (connecting with new people and feeling at home) and featuring immersive, first-person perspectives of travelers engaging in local activities had higher engagement rates.

How does this translate to creative testing?

In terms of messaging, it means using words/phrases that appeal to these values (“Don’t go there. Live there.”)

For imagery, it means showcasing authentic, non-touristy locations and experiences.

Back again?

Behavioral segmentation is especially powerful because rather than making assumptions and even stereotyping to attract different groups, you’re working with tangible past actions to keep customers coming back for more.

This can take the form of purchase history-based testing, which takes different creative approaches for buyers of different frequencies, or engagement-based testing, based on listening habits (if you’re Spotify) and engagement levels.

Amazon uses customers’ purchase history to segment its audience and test different creative approaches for product recommendations, between first-time buyers, frequent purchasers, and category-specific shoppers (ex. electronics, books).

Spotify also segments its users based on engagement levels, testing different playlist cover art designs for casual listeners, regular users, and power users, finding that power users respond better to minimalist designs while casual listeners prefer more vibrant, eye-catching cover art.

iPhone, Laptop, or TV?

This category is less about segmenting your audience and more about tweaking your creative compositions for different kinds of devices. The ad format also might overlap with your audience segmentation.

For example, ad copies in newspapers or magazines are more likely to reach adults and seniors, and although everyone uses phones nowadays, mobile ads are probably your best bet for reaching gen z.

People already tend to avoid ads, so any clunkiness in the design due to incompatible digital interfaces will reduce the chances of a potential customer pressing “buy now!” close to zero.

Obviously, mobile ads should be small, precise, and to the point, whereas desktop ads can get away with more buttons or links, as well as more text-based CTAs like “learn more!”

Mobile ads should be content-first and spotlight your brand rather than wasting precious space with too many pushy CTAs.

Also consider print formats, like magazine cutouts. Nivea promoted its’ brand by distributing tearz-out bracelets in Brazilian magazines, allowing parents to monitor their child’s location and receive alerts if the child wandered all by downloading the Nivea app:

Notice how the ad content appeals to an audience segment (parents) that would be more likely to flip through a magazine (especially if it’s Good Housekeeping or Food Network).

Looking Ahead

Creative testing and audience segmentation simultaneously complement and inform each other. Think of it like a chef starting a new restaurant and crafting a menu for a diverse group of diners— experimenting with different dishes tailored to different tastes (spice lovers, vegetarians, etc) doesn’t just help determine the perfect combinations for each segment, but also highlights which dishes perform best to inform the restaurant which niche it caters best. From there, the restaurant might adjust its resource allocation to focus on its’ primary customers.

If you’re interested in automating your marketing processes to grow faster, click here to learn more about how Loopgenius can help you.

Stay tuned for next week, where we’ll dig into landing page optimization!

Creative Testing

Week 1: Message testing
Week 2: Creative imagery testing
Week 3: Audience Targeting & Segmentation (this week!)
Week 4: Landing Page Optimization

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