Improve Your Marketing with A/B Testing

Photo by Diego PH

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One secret of marketers is the power of A/B Testing. It’s essentially an experiment in which you test two or more variants to see which performs better for whatever the goal is. Once you have the data, you pump all of your efforts into the specifications of whatever provided the best results. It’s like sampling ingredients to see which you are going to use to cook the main dish!

Normally when you hear someone mention A/B Testing, they’re usually referring to it in the space of paid advertisement. With ads, Marketers like to A/B Test everything from content to copy to the audience, tweaking things until they get the perfect combination. That’s cool and all, but I also like to think that you can A/B Test with damn near anything! I’ll give you an example…

Let’s say that you’re looking to integrate posts on niche Instagram accounts into your marketing strategy. You already have a budget and a solid list of pages you’d like to post, the only thing you’re unsure about is the actual content to use. You believe that a clip of the music video would be best, but your friend thinks that impromptu video you shot in the studio would work better. You don’t want to waste your money on the wrong content, so what should you do? A/B Test of course! Do this:

1. Out of your list, pick 3 pages you’re going to use to test. Preferably the cheapest ones.
2. Post Content #1 on all 3 pages. Wait a week. Post Content #2 on the same 3 pages.
3. Analyze the results. See which of them got the most engagement, better response, etc.
4. Take the best performing piece of content, and have the rest of the pages post it. Follow through with your plan!

When used correctly, using A/B Testing can save you money and stress from uncertainty. Remember all you need is different variants to test and a large enough sample audience to test and collect data from! Consider doing it in your next campaigns in order to figure out what combination of variants are best for you to use!