How to test your product idea using Facebook Ads

There are so many ways to market your business in 2022, that it can become overwhelming to decide how to spend your marketing budget on a channel that will make a return.

If you do not have a finite amount to spend, there is double pressure to make sure that the channel you pick works quickly.

Cue a typical conversation we have at The Social Ads Squad on a weekly basis where prospects come to us to chat about whether using paid social or search ads would be that channel.

The first thing that I ask when in this conversation is "how much are you already selling?" as it makes our job easier to do if we know that the product or service being sold is already viable.

Our job is then all about scaling that to the people already buying using our knowledge of ad platforms.

If you don't have a product or service that has sold yet, then we want to know if it's something people sold effectively elsewhere by other businesses as using ads to market something that has already proven to be marketable helps to keep media costs down.

If you're going to use ads to test a really brand new idea then you can't expect your ad spend money back straight away (if at all) and in this case, you are using ads for R&D and not marketing.

There are more cost-effective ways to do test the viability of a product or service and you might want to consider testing direct with loyal customers or a focus group first before throwing your budget at ads.

If you do have budget, then ads can provide an alternative to testing a new idea that could be judged on whether they get high numbers of engagement with a video that presents your ideas or whether users to pre-register interest by signing up to a mailing list.

If the product or service is low-cost then you might even consider trying to sell direct using ads, but you'll need a really good set of creatives to identify the user's problem and sell to them in seconds and be prepared to work through a testing alternative creative.

Our testing plans in this instance would test the following:

Objective

Choosing the correct objective to see whether we need sales, engagement or video views and to know what each interaction would mean for our testing.

Sales would obviously be the best thing to aim for but if we are selling a ￡2000 service then ads aren't likely to convert in the first interaction.

Testing an idea with a low-cost lead magnet and getting users onto your email list to pitch the idea might be the better approach.

Audience

This is where we do most of our work testing with as many cold, warm and hot audiences as possible within the budget.

Ideally we start small with multiple audiences after consultation about market fit doing external research and using our internal knowledge and experience to know which ones might have the best chance of converting.

If we're running social ads - we'll look at interest-based and owned audiences.

If search, then we look at keywords with intent ("I want to buy some glasses" etc)

The broader the audience we can show your ads to over the longer time period, the better as data can take time to hit and we prefer to lean into machine learning from the ads platforms to help us reach the right people.

The creative, landing page and copy would then be tailored to each of these audiences with a control set of 2-3 of each run out in stages, so that we can run a control test effectively.

Creative

Image and video are the staple of what make a Facebook, Instagram or TikTok ads work, and we would be keen to test as many variations of creative as possible based on our knowledge of what is already working and the channel.

A two minute video would probably not hit running in TikTok for example, but a 30 second one would.

We always want to run tests using video and will collaborate with our clients to produce something we feel might work using our bank of scripts and ideas.

Sometimes we're bang-on and sometimes the market surprises us by liking the video that took the least time to produce, but without a variation to test with it's pointless.

Copy

Once we have creative that runs well we will start to try to improve views, conversions and engagement using alternatives in copy whether it's the headline or the body of the ad.

We are aware of what we can and cannot say in ad copy and work hard to scan for any trigger words and issues that may stop your ads being approved.

At the same time that we also want to try new things, we also know what works.

Landing Page

We're also mindful of where we are sending our users and where possible and if we can get involvement will help you test the variation of landing page layout, link name and call to action.

Copy is more important on these pages and can make the difference between your ads working or not because if we're driving the traffic that we've tested but it's falling flat in the second step of the funnel, then we have a problem.

Along each step of the way with any of the above, we will only change 1-2 variables at a time, so images, audiences, copy and updates to the landing page can be carefully measured.

Maybe it's my background working in website and software development, running through hundred point testing plans, but it's an approach that appeals to me. A boom-crash approach to ads management does not.

By the way, if you are setting aside 10-15% of your revenue on marketing then you'll need to set aside another 20% of that budget for a new product or service idea at the very least and don't expect that this will result in sales - we're in testing mode remember.

If after all of this you aren't seeing traction with ads then you may have an offer or a product problem and may need to go back to the drawing board to revise it based on the feedback you have acquired during this testing process.

We love to run tests here at The Social Ads Squad and would love to help you research your next idea so that we can then help you move onto scaling to the audiences using creative that works.

An approach that is measured and not rushed is what we find works again and again. If that sounds like the type of approach you like working with, get in touch.

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It's been a big week in world news and although as much as I would like to comment on what's going in, like everyone else, I'm just a stunned bystander...and no expert, just a human. Please note that publishing this week's newsletter is my way of trying to maintain a sense of "business as usual" during this time, and I hope that it provides the right kind of distraction to read this weekend.