Every successful strategy starts with insight. Not just data, but a real understanding of what makes your audience tick. Think the emotional drivers that influence customer decisions. Their aspirations. Their fears. Their desired identity.
These emotional insights are pivotal, shaping everything – from your messaging to your product development. Without them, you’re just driving blind.
Take Duolingo – which wants to understand what keeps people motivated to learn, and engaging with the app. They have hundreds of A/B tests on the go at any one time to make sure every decision, from tweaking a button to launching a new feature, is based on real human behaviour.
Before Instagram became what it is today, it was Burbn – a location-based social network that was about as exciting as watching paint dry. But the founders watched how people actually used their app. People couldn’t care less about checking in at places, but they loved sharing photos of where they were. With this insight, they stripped everything back to focus on just photo sharing. A struggling app morphed into a $114 billion-dollar brand.
The insight gap (the background)
Getting to these meaningful insights isn’t easy though. You often face several hurdles:
- Resource constraints: the time and budget needed for customer research can be limiting for most businesses
- Siloed information: often, valuable customer data is spread across different departments, making it difficult to form a cohesive picture
- Rapidly changing preferences: what customers want today might not be what they want tomorrow
- Data overload: while having lots of data is great, it’s easy to get lost in the numbers and lose sight of the insights that actually matter
So how do we bridge this gap? How do we move from surface-level data to those deeper insights that drive business growth?
One smart shortcut: A/B testing
As marketers, we all know the power of A/B testing during campaigns. But here’s what most miss: it’s a continuous learning tool you can use in a lot of different scenarios. From early research through to ongoing optimisation, it’s about constant learning, not just campaign performance.
This approach is especially powerful when:
- You’re entering a new market or targeting a new audience segment
- You want to deepen your understanding through real-world testing
- You need real-time insights to adapt quickly to your audience’s changing preferences
Testing in action
OK, so you’re ready to dive deeper with your A/B testing. But how do you make sure you get the most out of it?
1. Ask the right questions:
Get specific about what you want to learn. Don’t just ask “Which content works best?” Instead, ask questions that help you understand ‘why’.
How about:
- “Does our audience engage more with industry insights or practical tips – and why?”
- “Do they respond better to authoritative or collaborative language (and why)?”
- “Which pain points resonate most strongly with them?”
- “What can we learn about what drives our customers from how they respond?”
2. Choose your testing ground:
Pick what you’re going to put to the test.
Maybe it’s:
- Content format (i.e. static posts vs. videos vs. carousels)
- Message style (i.e. are we teaching, provoking, or problem-solving?)
- Visual approach (i.e. slick and corporate vs. raw and real)
3. Set up your experiment:
Choose your testing platform. LinkedIn’s campaign manager, for instance, makes it easy to serve different content to target prospect audiences. Looking beyond social? Other testing platforms let you experiment with everything from email to web content, while specialist insight tools take you deeper.
Tools like Optimizely let you test messaging and features across your digital touchpoints. And you can use Wynter to gather direct feedback from your ideal customers.
4. Look deeper:
Sure, count those likes and shares. But don’t stop there.
Ask:
- What does this tell us about our audience’s priorities?
- What unexpected patterns are emerging?
- How does this affect our broader business goals?
Practicing what we preach (our experiment)
We’re running A/B tests on our LinkedIn ads right now, since we’re trying to learn as much about our audience as possible.
Alongside our video production team, we’ve been asking ourselves two questions about our potential video clients:
- Will they engage differently with social-optimised video content versus traditional video formats?
- Should our ads be simple and descriptive, or show off our creative chops from the get-go?
Here’s how we’re getting answers:
Test 1: To optimise or not to optimise
While everyone else rushes to create short, vertical videos optimised for social media, we’re wondering if video buyers might respond differently. When our ads pop up in the LinkedIn feeds of senior marketing and comms leaders, what format stops them scrolling, and convinces them to engage?
Optimised DHL video
Original DHL video
Our hypothesis: even in a busy LinkedIn feed, decision-makers might be more likely to stop and meaningfully engage with traditional video formats than social-optimised versions (shorter and vertical). Why? In a feed full of quick, vertical content, a well-produced horizontal video might not only stand out, but also better demonstrate our video storytelling capabilities – the very service they’re looking to buy. Especially if it’s super sector and audience specific.
Test 2: Show don’t tell
If you’re looking for creative services, you probably want to see that creativity in action. We’re testing whether showing our artistic flair straight away drives better engagement than playing it safe with simple designs. So we’ve created two different carousel versions:
Ads that showcase our creative work, featuring stills from the video alongside the copy.
Ads that let the message speak for itself, with copy set against a minimal background.
Our hypothesis: buyers want to see our creative work, right from the start. We’re measuring if dynamic, visual ads yield different results than their text-focused counterparts.
The takeaway
Every test peels back another layer of understanding. It’s not about spotting how your audience responds – anyone can do that. Instead, it’s about uncovering why they do it. And those little “aha!” moments? They’re what turn good businesses into market leaders.
Stay tuned to see what we learn.
Written by Mitch Foot, Planning Executive at Definition.