Top 10 Tips for Agile Creative Testing (That you can start doing today)
Whether you’re a brand marketer, agency creative, or strategist, understanding how to test effectively is the key to unlocking deeper insights. Yet, traditional focus groups and A/B testing can often lack the agility you need to capture data fast and iterate successfully to persuade your audience.
Here, you’ll find ten essential tips for agile message testing that will help you optimize your campaigns, build more persuasive messages, and make data-driven decisions with confidence. From audience understanding to rapid creative content testing and beyond, these strategies are designed to elevate your approach and deliver actionable results.
1: Understand your audience first.
Messages are more persuasive when they speak to your audience’s world views and aspirations. Grow Progress’ Audience Understanding Surveys let you quickly identify people who are undecided about your question and learn what specifically motivates them.
These innovative surveys use qualitative listening at scale, giving you an actionable brief that goes far beyond demographics. You’ll see the values, emotions, and identities that are at stake when people think about your question, in respondents’ own words. This understanding makes it easy to tailor your messages.
2: Learn from what other strategists—including you—have already tried.
Persuasion Library gives you instant access to an aggregated database of tested content. Filter, customize, and build your insights library over time, so that you can benchmark against performance and quickly find thematic summaries of what works for you, and what doesn’t.
Grow Progress clients who work for political campaigns and champion causes often choose to share their creative test results with other Persuasion Library users, contributing to the largest content repository in the political sphere, with more than 3,000 messages and counting.
Our clients who shepherd brands have total privacy in the platform—your tests are not shared with other brands—making Persuasion Library your fully customizable benchmarking tool. Your greatest competition is often yourself, anyway.
3: Test your messages.
Once you understand who you need to persuade, how they think, and reflect on themes, the next step is testing messages. What framing, ideas, or arguments most effectively persuade people toward your point of view?
Grow Progress Rapid Message tests are affordable, which means you can run multiple rounds of testing each building on the one before. When you test iteratively, you can be confident that you’ve identified the most persuasive message, messenger, tone, and images before putting them all together by testing each element independently. In other words, measure your ingredients carefully before you bake the cake.
4: Content testing isn’t just for ads.
You can test content at any stage of the creative process – messages as simple text, still or moving images, audio, story boards, rough cuts, fully produced content, and clutter reels. While there’s inherent value in finalized ads, the heart of the story is what matters – and is all you need to test a message’s persuasion.
5: Make sure your ads make the impact you intend.
Usually when you follow a recipe the results are delicious. But ads are complex expressions of ideas and images. It’s important to make sure all of the ingredients come together in the way you expect.
In the 2024 presidential election, just one in three ads tested on our platform moved voters toward Kamala Harris. The other two in three ads had either no effect at all, or created backlash. Testing your ad before it goes on the air helps ensure you’re not wasting money – or worse.
Grow Progress’ Rapid Message Tests often finish in less than a day, so even if a day is all you have, it’s still possible and important to test an ad before putting money behind it.
6: When possible, test among the audience you want to persuade.
One of our key takeaways from the 2024 election campaign is the importance of matching your test audience to the audience you want to persuade. We ran two tests: one among a national audience and one among a presidential battleground states audience. We expected to see similar results. Instead, we found that the most persuasive messages in the national test had no effect at all in battleground states. A strategist making decisions about which ad to run in battleground states based on national results would end up wasting their money.
The more specific your audience, the more challenging it can be to collect enough interviews to have confidence in your results. Sometimes it’s necessary to broaden your testing audience to make research feasible or faster. In those cases, research among a proxy audience is far better than no research at all, provided you are clear-eyed about the tradeoffs.
7: Use testing to guide decisions.
Without testing, strategists are left to guess what works or simply go with their gut. With testing, you have evidence and actionable information. Testing allows you to make decisions with confidence knowing whether one ad is more persuasive than another and by roughly how much. It also tells you whether a specific audience is persuaded by a particular piece of creative and identifies other audiences who might find it persuasive.
Still, test results are just one factor among many when it comes to strategists’ decision-making. Consider results within the context of everything else you know, for example, research from other sources, media landscape analysis, and other messages your audience is hearing. Choosing the ad that tests best is usually the right answer – but not always. Testing should compliment human judgment, not replace it.
8: Have a hypothesis before you test.
Random error comes for us all, even with the most rigorous methodology and data collection practices. The more questions you ask and the more subgroups you analyze, the more likely it is that sooner or later your testing will produce a false positive or a false negative. In other words, if you shake the Magic 8 Ball enough times, sooner or later it will give you an answer that makes sense just by chance.
The best way to guard against random error is to state a hypothesis before launching a test. Instead of scrolling through endless tables of crosstab results looking for a result that looks significant, start out by calling your shot.
9: Share what you’ve learned and control your narrative.
Agile iterating also means agile communicating – Stakeholders want to know what you learned without reading through every individual test. Using Grow Progress’s Report Builder lets you pull in different elements from different Rapid Message Test Results, helping you to easily show what worked – and what didn’t. Using drag and drop elements, like text blocks and pre-written statements around null results, can help you to quickly highlight the value of iterative testing while showcasing the data that supports the heart of your campaign.
10: Choose a testing partner who is willing to peel back the curtain.
Not everyone needs or wants to understand what happens between when you launch a test and when you get results. We think our track record of accuracy speaks for itself and we want you to feel confident in our results. We also respect a client’s need to trust but verify. We are always willing to get into the weeds. Ask us about our data collection, cleaning, analysis, or presentation – we’re happy to have you kick the tires.
Effective message testing is the cornerstone of impactful campaigns, and these ten tips provide a proven roadmap to success. By understanding your audiences, leveraging iterative testing, and using data to guide your decisions, you can craft messages that truly resonate.
Ready to see how these strategies work in the real world? Explore our Insights page to dive into case studies, learn more about our cutting-edge products, or reach out for a personalized demo to see how Grow Progress can transform your approach to testing. Let’s create messages that move your audience and drive results!
