For many brands, the Christmas season is an important time of the year, with a substantial part of their annual turnover depending on the success of their ad campaign. This means making a significant investment in effort and resources to persuade consumers, but it also means that even a few minor details can make the difference between loss or ultimate success. For this reason, ad testing during Christmas is absolutely essential. And this is more imperative than ever now that the pandemic has changed consumer codes of conduct, making them more unpredictable than before.
1. Improve your advertising effectiveness with research
Consumers are exposed to a plethora of messages during the holiday season. In the face of so many stimuli, advertising effectiveness will determine which brands will be the ones that raise awareness, persuade consumers, and expand sales. Those companies that have previously validated their advertising strategy through ad tests will be closer to optimizing ROI and avoiding frustration later.
Some key questions to consider: Is the advertising message compelling to the target audience? Does it leave a lasting impression on the consumer? Does it generate a predisposition to purchase? There is no other possible way to answer these questions without Pre-Testing advertising. Relying on research from the beginning of the creative process will not only help to correct mistakes but can also help to prevent them. Further options to ensure advertising effectiveness are Ad-Tracking, monitoring active campaigns, and Post-Testing, which measures the results of an advertising action once it has been finalized.
2. Why you need to conduct Christmas ad testing
Market research has to be present from the beginning of the advertising campaign to support the whole creative process with data that facilitates decision-making. Through advertising Pre-Tests, we can evaluate several alternative messages to determine the degree of acceptance, understanding, and credibility they generate. Beyond assessing brand recall among consumers and gauging their likelihood of making a purchasing decision, ad Pre-Tests can also help identify which aspects of our communication can be improved in time to correct them in the final versions.
3. Keep Holiday Campaigns On-Target
The pandemic drove the most significant change in consumer behavior around the world in decades. Our routines changed. We don’t shop in the same way, we don’t work the same, we don’t travel the same, and we don’t interact with others in the way we did in Christmases past. We have become a constantly moving kaleidoscope, adapting to the ever-transforming evolution of our way of life.
Therefore, campaigns from previous years will almost certainly be obsolete this Christmas. Continuing to use those same campaigns without first subjecting them to an advertising Pre-Test is a high-risk sport. Brands have the difficult challenge of reconnecting with a consumer who is responding to a changing logic that is radically different from the parameters of just a year ago.
4. Stay Agile in a Changing Market
How can brands rediscover the customer and connect with these new sensibilities? One of the essential aspects of research platforms is their ability to interact with consumers in an agile way, obtaining insights in a matter of hours. Throughout the creative process, you can take the pulse of a representative sample of consumers to validate (or not) every detail of the holiday campaign.
The speed of launching an ad test like an advertising Pre-Test allows campaign managers to make decisions in real-time, correcting mistakes quickly and reducing the margin of error based on reliable data. With smaller but more frequent studies, the agility of research platforms becomes a key tool to reconnect with the consumer.
Even as we have changed, the need to optimize advertising ROI is still essential. Ad testing during Christmas is more important than ever, and there is no time to waste. Zinklar’s platform gives you the agility and speed of mobile research to test advertising in a few hours and make decisions in real-time; at any creative stage and by both brands and agencies. Today more than ever, ensuring the ROI of your Christmas campaign is in your hands. Start today, join Zinklar!
