7 lessons from Sprout Social’s year of creative testing on social media

One of the first things you learn as a marketer is that your audience is everything. It drives conversations around your brand, fuels your business and informs the content you create and share. 

There are certain assumptions you can make about what creative assets will resonate most with your target audience based on industry benchmarks, platform demographics and general observations. But why assume when you can take the guesswork out of it with creative testing? 

Creative testing is a way to assess which images and copy combinations support your goals best. It can help your brand enhance ad campaigns before they launch, create more impactful creative assets, understand which concepts steer your audience through the marketing funnel and so much more. 

Backed by data, marketers can apply logical and results-oriented insights to their strategies. At the same time, they can relay these insights to their creative partners to show the value of their work and inform future projects.

At Sprout, the test and learn approach is tried and true. In the last year, Sprout’s organic social media, digital advertising and creative teams put a renewed focus on testing and built a framework to help them track, understand and improve creative results. In this article, we’ll share the most valuable lessons from our experiments that can help guide your own creative planning.

The seven lessons we’ll cover are…

Testing requires transparency between marketing and creative teamsStart with a broad hypothesis then zero in on specificsPaid and organic can and should work togetherTesting is an opportunity to build relationshipsYou can still test on a tight budgetDetermine the testing structure that works for your goalsEverything is a learning experience

Testing requires transparency between marketing and creative teams

Sprout’s creative testing initiative focused on a full-funnel approach, from awareness to acquisition. While the organic team focuses on increasing awareness of our brand—measured by impressions, clicks, engagement rate and video views—paid focuses on acquisition through direct response and lead generation.

At Sprout, the goal for direct response campaigns is to get users to sign up for a trial or request a demo, which then ultimately leads to a subscription. Lead generation campaigns promote gated content and require users to fill out a form in order to download a free guide or watch a webinar.

Creative assets and messaging pave the path to those goals. They’re what make your audience click on an ad, watch a video, like a Tweet or download gated content. Testing, therefore, requires transparency between social and creative about your hypotheses, performance and results.

Start with a broad hypothesis then zero in on specifics

Your hypothesis is the starting point for your testing and should focus on specific assumptions you can clearly prove or disprove through testing. The key is to start broad and get more specific as you test. For example, perhaps you start by testing illustrations vs. photography, or video vs. static images.

Marketers often think video is king and video converts the best, but it actually depends on your objective. “Video ads are great for awareness because people will watch the video and hopefully take something away from it. However, that doesn't always translate to direct response, which we found through testing,” says Shelby Cunningham, Sprout’s Digital Marketing Lead. “Getting people to watch a video, go to a landing page and sign up for a trial just didn't work for us. We've actually found that static ads drive a higher conversion rate for direct response, which is not what we would have assumed at the beginning.”

Sprout’s organic social team also had hunches about what kind of content and creative works for awareness goals. Testing creative assets and sharing their results with the creative team helped them get buy-in for new and different types of creative assets. In the last year, the organic social team’s main KPI was impressions, and conversely to paid, video was driving those metrics. With that data in their back pockets, the team made a case to spend more time on video rather than just static images. 

Once you hone in on specific metrics that identify what is successful and what is not, you can get more granular about what you’re testing. If you find that static photography or illustrations work best for your goals, you might consider testing whether people or product-focused imagery converts better. Or perhaps you want to know if a headline in your image would drive more clicks than an image without a headline. These are all creative variables you can test.

Paid and organic can and should work together

“The organic and paid teams both have our own individual goals, but a big part of the last year was finding ways we could work together more cohesively and therefore work together better with brand creative,” says Cunningham. 

The Sprout Social Index™, one of Sprout’s largest campaigns each year that is built around an annual data report, requires collaboration across the organization and open lines of communication between the organic and paid teams.

“Knowing the ideas our organic team already has in mind for a great video or promotional images for the Index, I can easily say, ‘I love this idea, and here's how I think we could tailor what you're already doing to get a version for paid,’” says Cunningham. “Then, we can come together and have one ask for creative that's tailored for both paid and organic but based on the same concept.”

Having these open conversations can help build a stronger relationship between organic and paid teams—which can provide huge benefits beyond the realm of creative collaboration. While these two teams have different goals and metrics they're focused on, working together on testing is a great way to find commonalities and ways to maximize the resources you already have.

It’s all about building trust, transparency and credibility. We’re not just saying, ‘Our gut is telling us that we think a colorful illustration is going to work better.’ We have the data to prove it.