How can social media be used to test and validate brand concepts?

As a brand management and strategy leader for cross-industrial brands, I firmly believe social media can be a powerful tool for testing and validating brand concepts. - By conducting social media tests, brands can generate powerful insights to support their next steps. - Social testing allows brands to understand through a data-driven lens what works and what doesn't work for their brand, rather than relying on blanket best practices or other people's benchmarks. - Social media tests are structured and measurable, and they help brands identify specific variables and walk away with a clear picture of what will drive success for their brand.

What social media provides ahead of traditional advertising means is well put together analytics and data. Data collected from social media campaigns provides a good ground to analyze and to validate and test a brands concept.

Also, - Before conducting social testing, brands should have an understanding of the overall goals of their business. - When designing a test, it is important to have one specific goal and start small if you're getting the hang of it.

Brand concept starts with a vision: How do you want your clients/audience to feel when they interact with your brand. Everything from your colors, logo, tone, message and branding should revolve around this vision. You can then craft a message from the vision.

- Use social media polls and surveys for direct feedback on brand concepts. - Monitor engagement metrics and discussions around relevant hashtags for qualitative insights. - Analyze shares, likes, and comments to gauge public sentiment and validate brand ideas.

I think brand and marketing has a lot to do with experimentation. A clear understanding of your brand and who its for, can enable you know where to test the concept. This can be done by observing the digital behaviour of the target audience. Because social media feeds on content and engagements, these can be the yardstick for measurement of the concept. Sentiment analysis would also enable you understand the perception of the concept.

You have to know where your audience hangs out and what type of content they like to consume. Do they like to read blog articles Newsletters Listen to podcasts Watch videos And then craft content around the platform for your audience.

Being on all social media platforms is ideal. I would recommend all brands to embrace YouTube primarily, and then experiment with other social media pages. If their ideal customer spends more time on LinkedIn, that is the best platform added to YouTube. Likewise for Instagram and Tiktok. Ideally, content should be repurposed for all platforms and then track performance and the quality of leads from the various platforms and then work from there.

Being consistent is vital: A/B test times/days Find out when your audience is most active Engage with your ICP Train your audience to look for your content Speak to the transformation and share your story.

Making it easy for your brand to be identified is a must. Brands should employ consistent colors, logo types, visuals to ensure this identifiable and consistent. Adding to the consistency, brands should communicate very well with their content, mixing it up with content types that provide value, educate, inform and show will make the brand unforgettable. The tone of voice should be consistent with all communications.

Using split testing is the easiest way to learn how your audience responds to certain creative concepts. Some things to remember though: -get a sizeable sample size in terms of spend, length of the campaign running, and people reached before using the data to make a decision. -when testing two creative concepts against each other make sure all other factors such as audience, campaign objective, and when the ads run is the same. If you run one concept one month and the other the following month, that’s not a true experiment as there may be other factors causing a sway in performance.

Benchmarking and a large sample size here are really important for determining "success". A/B test some concepts with similar audiences in order to decide what's working, and don't make a call based off a small audience.

Analyze attention in your A/B concept testing in social! A few elements I always look for: 1. Scroll Stopability - what % of viewers' interest was piqued enough for the video to start? 2. The Drop - track the drop-off curve during those first few seconds to understand what % of viewers resume the scroll vs those whose attention you've captured. 3. Can you hear me now - remember to monitor if the content is audible. Is the sound on and loud enough for it to be heard? Not only can these measures help you understand how your new concepts compare to your benchmarks, but having this deep understanding of how consumers engage with your content can help you improve creative in the future.