When I sent my email 2 weeks ago, I asked everyone to send me their "million-dollar question" and there was 1 questions that made up the majority:
- How do I test a brand launch without investing heavily into the company?
At this point, you've got some idea of what you want to launch or build. You have done some amount of research (if not yet, then this tweet has ideas) or information gathering to narrow down the focus of what you're hoping to put out. Now it's time to set up a test.
There are 5 main things you will want to put together:
- A competitive analysis
- A landing page
- A conversion event
- Ad creative
- Reporting (at the end)
If everything works as planned, you'll want to also add:
- A survey to the people who converted
- A company, because people clearly want what you're offering
Let's dive into it.
Competitive Analysis
When running a test for a new brand, product, or idea, you want to make sure you have some kind of competitive edge. It's almost silly to think that a consumer is NOT going to do any research when they're going to make a purchase, especially a large one.
Your goal with a competitive analysis is to understand a few key things:
What is it what my competitor is *actually* selling?
When running a test for a new brand, product, or idea, you want to make sure you have some kind of competitive edge. It's almost silly to think that a consumer is NOT going to do any research when they're going to make a purchase, especially a large one.
Your goal with a competitive analysis is to understand a few key things:
What is it what my competitor is *actually* selling?
Not just talking about the physical product here, but what's the angle? If the product is a commodity, like a journal for example, what is the angle they're selling? Is it mental clarity? Is it more peace of mind? Is it more control of your life?
What are common questions they are getting?
A bit harder, but very helpful. Search the brand on Twitter Search and look for tweets that are questions, complaints or concerns. Do the same across their Instagram posts, Tik Tok videos, Facebook posts, etc. If you want to get really savage, go to their site, put something in your cart, wait for the retargeting ads to pop and look at those comments. Those are comments by people who likely also haven't purchased, so you'll see a lot of what people are thinking. All good data points for YOU as you think of how you construct your test.
What resonates with people the best?
From an organic social standpoint, it's really easy to understand what works well — just look at the engagement on each post. If you see on Instagram that their infographics outperform anything else, well you know what to focus on.
With the paid side of things, look at their Facebook Ads library. In most cases, when you see a creative being run at high volume with different copy variants, there's a good chance it's because that video or image is crushing it for them. Take note of that.
A Landing Page
Once you have an understanding of where the gaps are in the competitive landscape, you can turn this into something that people want. It's the basic "problem, solution" page.
Frame up a problem consumers have, which you have now validated, and let what you're looking to put out, be the solution.
You don't have to be incredibly fancy with this page, but it does need to be functional. You can easily create one without the Shop sections from our landing page guide (download here). Instead figure out what that conversion event is, and insert that into the shop section.
From a technology standpoint, if you already have a Shopify account you're working with, I would suggest doing this with Builder.io's page builder. The main reason is that you'll get a lot of the data from Facebook's server side integration with Shopify, versus just using a pixel. However, if you don't have Shopify, the easiest way to put it up is Unbounce.
The page should be designed for a mobile-first experience, and ideally doesn't have much functionality outside of explaining what you're solving and a way for someone to convert.
The Conversion Event
With the landing page that you put together, you want to make sure you have a "conversion event" that you're optimizing toward. Aside from this being what you align your landing page and creative to, this helps Facebook also understand what you are trying to get done.
For your conversion event, you want to figure out how to get something tangible into someone's hands. But if you can't do something physical, then the next best thing is something digital that makes them go "Woah" or "Wow". If you're not able to evoke that reaction, this isn't going to work. Remember, you're asking a stranger for their opt-in, so you better have something meaningful. What would it take YOU to give up your personal information?
My favorite recent example of a conversion event is Jolie Skin, a new company being launched by Ryan Babenzien, the founder of GREATS (the sneaker co that recently sold to Steve Madden). I love it because of how involved you become as a consumer, with the conversion event.
Jolie Skin's goal is to solve the root of all skincare, haircare, and beauty problems — by bringing clean water to everyone's home with their product being the solution.
While their landing page doesn't necessarily explain everything from our landing page guide, it has a clear conversion event, and one that is enticing: a custom water report to see what is actually in your water. I signed up for it immediately, and whatever their product is they end up launching, I will probably buy that after seeing how disgusting the local water actually is.
The water report obviously took some work to put together, but if you don't have those resources, here are some easy conversion events people might like:
- Digital content (guides, routines, recipes, etc.)
- Discounts (sign up & get $10 off at launch)
- Access (sign up to be the first to know & join our group)
- Scarcity (only 100 will be made, be one of the few owners)
- Physical goods (stickers, postcards, etc)
Your goals here are to:
- Understand the conversion rate on the landing page with the conversion event, and there's nothing wrong with testing multiple conversion events.
- Build a qualified list for when you launch.
To emphasize on "qualified list", you want to make sure you're not doing something like a giveaway, or just giving something anyone would want. That's not going to help you understand if something has a good product-market fit, it'll just help you build a list, but with low odds of converting in the future. An endless amount of potential audiences to choose from when thinking through ad targeting, but just like with every joke you need a punchline, with ever audience you target, you need to answer a WHY — what's the punchline for THAT group of people to buy the product?
Ad Creative
Ad creative is important, unless you already have a relevant pre-existing audience you can drive traffic from (i.e. email list, social media following, forum, etc.). If you already have a qualified audience to drive traffic from, you can skip this step.
Your main goal with the ad creative is:
- Drive traffic to this landing page, and have people go through the conversion event.
- Understand what the messaging was that worked to get people across the conversion event.
Referencing your competitive analysis, look to understand what your angle will be to drive that conversion.
Make a handful of static ad creatives using a combination of Figma to put the images together, Unsplash for beautiful backgrounds, and add copy overlays to test value props.
While you can also use the same image with different headlines in Facebook, I recommend keeping the ad text and the headlines the same, and use different images. Why?
Firstly, the image with the text overlay is what people see first, so there's a chance someone scrolling a mile a minute will never even read the headline at all.
Secondly, if you're not an advanced media buyer and don't understand that duplicating the images to make new headlines doesn't actually reset your learnings for the
ads themselves, you'll have data that doesn't represent what you think it's representing. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see Jake's explanation here on Twitter.
Bottom line: I recommend text overlays with all the other variables staying the same.
Reporting
Now that everything is running, it's time to look at what worked, and see if this is something worth pursuing.
Before looking at hard numbers, make sure that your incoming traffic to your conversion event was unbiased. For example, if you drove traffic from your most engaged customers, that's probably not the best read. If you drive cold traffic from social platforms, that's probably more of an unbiased source.
Next, there are 3 main things to look at:
- Click-through rate (CTR) on the ads
- On-site conversion rate
- Engagement on the ads
Click-through rate will give you a good understanding of whether this is something people want, or will click on, in the first place. The average Facebook ads CTR is 0.89%, which is pretty terrible. A good sign of a CTR would be anywhere between 2-6%. In addition, the CTR of the different creatives will tell you which messaging on your creatives performed the best.
On-site conversion rate lets you know how enticing your product is to those who land on the page. The average conversion rate here is 2.5%, but a good sign is 20-50%. The higher that number is, the more confident you should be that this product will do well when it launches.
The engagement on the ads is another great indicator. This doesn't mean the quantitative number of likes, comments, and shares, though that is good information, but rather the qualitative information you get back. What kinds of comments do you see? What are people saying if/when they share the ad on their timeline? What kind of DMs are you getting as you're running the ads?
Using all this data, you can understand whether or not to continue to the next step of this project.
If Everything Works Right
Congratulations. Now it's time to dig deeper. You can build a product like Glossier, where Emily went directly to her audience and asked them what they wanted first, or you can create a community of people who become your beta testers. There's a lot of value in having an engaged community from day 0 to help you get through the rollercoaster of launching something.
Hopefully all of that answered your question! If not, click here to ask me a question and I'll do my best to respond ASAP!
