When did you last pre-test your marketing campaign before spending your hard-won budgets on social spend, brochures or even a splash of outdoor media?
In the commercial sector, pre-testing marketing campaigns has been standard practice for decades, enabling companies to refine their strategies before full-scale launches. These big, rich companies minimise their risk substantially and maximise their return on investment. How many times have you seen an arts organisation do the same? Why not?
Perceived costs can be high, there’s less understanding of how to pre-test campaigns, and in a sector all about creativity, there’s often a sense that we’re great at this and we don’t need to check in with audiences. But surely a marketing campaign is all about maximising audiences and revenue, and we should be embracing every tool available to us to make that happen?
Why pre-test your campaigns?
Pre-testing allows you to gauge audience reactions to your marketing materials before they go live. This process helps identify potential issues, optimise messaging, and enhance overall effectiveness. In fact, wider industry studies have shown that pre-tested campaigns outperform non-tested ones in terms of success. Have a look at this piece from Mark Ritson about why it’s a no brainer to pre-test. As he says, “To push back against pre-testing is to reveal a lack of awareness [...] .of the opportunities it presents to avoid failure and improve effectiveness”.
Benefits of creative testing
- Reduce the risks: You can identify and address potential pitfalls before they impact your campaign's success.
- Save money: Pre-testing can prevent costly mistakes, ensuring your marketing budget is spent effectively and giving you time to explore other options (especially when you can’t afford to create brand new artwork if the first set doesn’t really land).
- Connect better: You can gather useful insight which allows you to tailor your message to resonate more deeply with your target audience, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
Introducing Indigo Share: Discover
At Indigo, we offer a cost-effective solution to de-risk your marketing decisions with dead simple creative campaign pre-testing with Indigo Share: Discover. Using our unique Audience Panel of over 15,000 audience members from across the UK, we gather feedback on your creative concepts in as little as 72 hours, so you can make informed decisions swiftly.
Embrace data-informed marketing
There’s a lot of talk about being more “data-driven” in arts marketing (Baker Richard’s David Reece has written a great series of articles on what it means to be data-informed). But how can you use data to inform your decisions - and to help drive and support brilliant creative solutions - if you’re just not gathering it? By integrating creative testing into your campaign development - especially when it’s something high stakes (the panto, a new membership scheme, a significant new exhibition, a festival that needs to attract younger audiences) - you can be more confident that you’re going to get the results you need.
Let's move beyond guesswork and embrace the insights that pre-testing provides.
Ready to feel more confident and better connect with audiences? Find out more about Indigo Share: Discover and the Indigo Audience Panel and how they can benefit your organisation at one of our free online demos.
