Work in a vacuum and you’ll never know if your campaign is good or bad. You might think you have the perfect message, but if you don’t test it against other content, you could be limiting your performance. That’s why it’s important to keep both creative and analytics in mind when building out your marketing tactics. Build out compelling messages, but then use A/B tests or analyze for audience fatigue. It doesn’t matter if it’s a social post or a blog series, you should always test to see how far your dollars can take you.

Always Try for Better

You probably have an awesome idea! After all, your team put a lot of work into creating the best possible message they could muster based on the available research, but people can be fickle. Your efforts to make your content more human may fail next to a straightforward call to action. If you don’t make a plan to improve the content over time, you’ll never know the heights you could reach.

1. Prepare your campaign with multiple creative options – the overall message should be the same, but the way you deliver it should be different.
2. Once you see which piece of content is performing the best, further the testing by duplicating that content and making subtle changes to one version – different font colors in the images, more images, or fewer.
3. Continue making duplicates with small changes to your message to see what performs best. You should give your content at least a week to get results before you make any new changes.

Once you’ve worked through the A/B testing process, you likely have a strong grasp of what your audience likes. Make note of these things so you can incorporate them into future content pieces.

Audience Fatigue is Real

People love new things, and whether you like it or not, your content will start to feel old if a user sees it one too many times. This is often seen with long-term campaigns like digital advertising. You’ll see steady performance and traffic in association with your content, and then it starts to taper off. It’s typically slow, but it’s important to catch and remedy it as soon as you can. There are easy solutions, though. Start by adjusting the delivery settings or adding new content. Continue to closely monitor your campaign in case the fatigue quickly returns. You might need to start over with an entirely new campaign message if your adjustments to the content don’t pan out.

1. Your campaign might have legs, but all good campaigns must retire after a while.
2. Don’t stretch a campaign too far, if your newest ideas aren’t holding up to audience fatigue, your next one probably won’t either.

Rinse, Repeat

You can’t recycle the same piece of content forever. Eventually, it will stop making an impact. Instead of prompting someone to purchase, learn more, or save for later, they’ll simply scroll past. Then your performance, whether on Google or Facebook, will decrease as well. Don’t let that happen to you. Instead, always be ready with a content strategy that leverages creative testing to ensure you’re going to reach as many people as you possibly can for the duration of your campaign.