How to Use Test Marketing to Gauge Your Campaigns (2024)

Imagine your best friend is about to run a marathon and you want to make the perfect sign to cheer her on. You’re unsure, however, which of three possible messages your friend will like best, so you poll 10 people via text. The results show seven favored, “Pain is just the French word for bread.” Decision made.

Your informal poll is an example of the kind of test marketing that marketers and business executives use to help with everything from product design to social media campaigns. Curious how you can use test marketing to better reach consumers? Here’s a breakdown of different types of test marketing, along with steps you can take to conduct your own.

What is test marketing?

Test marketing is a trial run that allows you to gauge how real customers might respond to your new product, service, or marketing campaign. This process, also frequently known as a marketing effectiveness test, lets you make adjustments as necessary and avoid any disastrous outcomes before an official campaign or product launch. There are many ways to go about it, but in each approach, test marketing lets you examine the viability of a new offering on a small scale before spending heavily to bring it to a wider market. It involves collecting data and analyzing positive and negative feedback to inform the development or rollout of products, services, or marketing strategies before they reach your target audience.

Types of test marketing

There are several different test marketing methods to explore:

A/B test marketing

Also known as split testing, A/B testing examines the performance of two variations of the same element to determine the best result. For example, your soda company might test two different packaging designs for the same product to see which resonates most with a test market.

Multivariate test marketing

Multivariate testing compares several variations across multiple elements to identify the best mix of attributes. Designing a social media test marketing campaign, for example, may involve collecting data on engagement rates and conversions across shoppable posts on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

User test marketing

User testing tactics involve consumers directly through focus groups, surveys, interviews, and field studies. User testing helps your company better understand consumer behavior, demand, and product improvement opportunities by collecting feedback straight from the source.

Content test marketing

Content testing is designed to test your company’s written copy. This might include the text visible on your product packaging, website, or Instagram bio. Content tests may take the form of customer surveys, polls, or supervised interviews. During these tests, you evaluate the quality of the content itself as well as its visual appeal, including factors like font, color, and placement.

Alpha and beta test marketing

Alpha and beta testing involve previewing your product with internal employees first (alpha testing) and then collecting feedback from actual customers or other external stakeholders after making initial improvements (beta testing). Alpha and beta test marketing is common among tech companies because it’s an easy, cost-effective way to gather early feedback on apps, software, and other digital products.

Sales wave test marketing

A sales wave market test involves giving discounted or free samples of your product to the general public to test its acceptance and viability on the market. This helps you get a general feel for how a product may perform while also letting you collect feedback from real consumers in different markets.

Standard test marketing 

A standard market test involves rolling out your campaign in select regions or cities before opening it up to the national market. This is an effective way to test your wider marketing strategy, track sales, conduct surveys, and collect feedback across test markets. A common example is releasing a movie in a few cities before launching it in theaters nationwide.

Simulated test marketing

A simulated market test typically involves inviting a focus group of customers to your store or website and giving them exclusive discounts for certain product categories. In simulated testing, you might also place new products alongside older products to see which performs better.

How to conduct test marketing

1. Select your audience
2. Set the parameters of your test
3. Collect data and feedback
4. Use your findings to make improvements
5. Launch your product

Let’s say you’re a marketer for a women’s fashion brand with a national audience. You’re launching a new product line of outerwear and would like to take your social campaign strategies for a test run. These are the steps you would take:

1. Select your audience

Choose a representative audience and strategic testing groups that reflect your target market. Select the right mix of cities and geographic regions for your test markets, with a demographic breakdown that mirrors your national market. Since you’re specifically marketing outerwear, you decide to select a handful of cold-weather locales to test, skipping cities like Los Angeles and Miami.

2. Set the parameters of your test

Next, set your test marketing parameters, including identifying which elements you specifically plan to analyze and the duration of your experiment. For your digital marketing campaign test, you may decide to track conversions and engagement on one social media platform, such as Instagram. You opt to share two Instagram posts that communicate the same message but with different visuals and copy to see which generates more sales.

3. Collect data and feedback

Once the test is live, begin collecting your data: Track likes, engagement, followers, conversions, and sales to determine which version performs better. While the duration of a test will vary depending on the company and its specific objectives, you should allow for sufficient time to fully track progress against your benchmarks or selected competitors.

Given the seasonality of outerwear, you select one month—from mid-November through mid-December. You track conversions by post and per region using spreadsheets, charts, and detailed reports to understand which pieces of content perform best. As you’re tracking the data, you conduct focus groups in each market for direct feedback from consumers about the social media posts and which one they prefer.

4. Use your findings to make improvements

Once you have your data, use it to decide between the two campaigns. One of your posts clearly has higher engagement, more conversions, and stronger anecdotal feedback, so this is the one you build on for your national campaign.

In the case your data is inconclusive, you can use your findings and customer feedback to develop new concepts and run the test again. And if both perform equally well, you may decide to stagger your posts or save one concept for later in the season. Not every test will be a conclusive home run the first go—practice makes perfect.

5. Launch your product

Now that you have a data-informed social media marketing strategy that your target audience supports, you’re ready to launch your campaign. Push out the sponsored Instagram post nationally. Continue to track engagement, followers, and sales to help inform future campaigns.

An example of test marketing

Ahead of the launch of its Dasher running shoe in 2020, Allbirds wanted to create an Instagram campaign to spotlight the new product. The company took a multivariate testing approach and developed four different concepts: The first three videos separately focused on brand storytelling, product benefits, or innovation. A fourth video combined elements of all three.

Allbirds teamed with Instagram to set its parameters. The social media platform shared the ads with US adults above the age of 18 for two weeks. All the ads had a Shop Now button to facilitate measuring conversion rates.

The findings indicated a 48% increase in purchases across the creative and a 46% gain in purchases for the video focused specifically on brand storytelling. Allbirds used these findings to inform its broader social media advertising strategy.