Testing More Than Just Design: Why Your Marketing Strategy Needs Content Testing

Everyone is “testing.” 77% of organizations do A/B testing on their website and 60% on their landing page. 

The testing process helps your brand identify audiences, the proper market channels, and continually refine and improve — driving your strategy while saving you time and money.

However, most experimentation and testing still occur at the artifact level and center on user experience (UX). In other words, most brands are testing buttons and colors when they should be testing something else — the words on the page.

Yes — reimagining on-page flow and interactive elements can significantly impact the consumer experience (and your bounce rate), but a massive piece is missing from most marketers’ testing. That’s content. 

Why Test at the Content Level and the UX Level?

Words might be free to use, but how you use them can cost you. Big time. Content testing can highlight the price you’ll pay for using the wrong ones, and the wealth that can come from using the right ones. 

Don’t diminish the power of words. Words move hearts, and hearts move limbs (Hamza Yusuf). Words compel people to act online and in person because words are the point of connection between the brand (the creator) and the customer.

“Buttons move hearts” sounds as natural as “Bing it.” Nope. It’s words that move people, and when in doubt, “Google it.” 

Test your words to find just the right ones to: 

Increase Conversion Rates

Do your site visitors need a paragraph about style or one about functionality? A comparison chart or a pros/cons list? A causal, 20 words, or a comprehensive 2,000? Learn what drives conversions.

By testing different versions of the content on your landing pages, emails, and ads, you can identify the elements that resonate best with your target audience and increase your conversion rates.

Reduce Risk

If you don’t make moves to manage risks, you’ll never know if your new ideas will connect with customers or if they’re worth the end investment. Testing content minimizes the risk of a drastic business impact. 

Identify potential issues with the content in your marketing campaigns before you invest a significant amount of time and money. Pinpointing ineffective content reduces the risk of launching campaigns that fail to achieve your desired results — conversions.

Enhance the Customer Experience

Testing at the content level helps you to understand your customers’ needs and preferences, enabling you to create copy and marketing campaigns that resonate and even update old content. Almost half (44%) of SEMRush content survey respondents said updating existing content has boosted their content marketing value.  

Even if a content test doesn’t turn out as anticipated, you can still use your findings to identify what customers don’t want.

Provide Strategy-Driving Insights

Testing your content provides valuable insights that you can use to optimize your content creation efforts moving forward. By analyzing the results of your tests, you can identify trends, patterns, and opportunities that you may have otherwise missed.

Why Aren’t More Marketers Testing and Experimenting At the  Content Level? 

With the disruption of single-search and AI content generators, creating content that connects — and lots of it — is more critical than ever. So, why don’t more marketers hone in on their efforts to test at the content level?

Content creation is time and resource intensive. Creating quality content requires hours of strategy, idea generation, and editing. And when you’re talking landing pages and product descriptions, you’re talking hundreds of pages and thousands of words. 

That’s a lot of output and a lot of line-by-line head-scratching.

Generating these massive amounts of copy for testing purposes in-house can bog down your creative team. It’s simply not feasible. 

An astounding 19% of organizations don’t have a dedicated content team or person, and only 36% have a content team of 1-3 people. If you opt to freelance or use AI content generators, you’ve now taken on the stress of proofing and fact-checking content, ensuring unique outputs, infusing your brand voice, and figuring out how to host and monitor it. (Oh yeah, and all those freelance invoices!) 

Logistics alone make creating “excess” copy for testing an intimidating feat.

That’s where GPO comes in. 

Use the testing and optimization platform of your choice to its max potential quickly and easily — GPO’s Amplify Content allows you to test at the content level. 

Amplify Content provides hundreds of unique pages of human-written, AI-empowered content (and fast). With Amplify Content, you can generate hundreds to thousands of unique content pages with minimal oversight. Our in-house writers adapt to your brand voice, integrate your marketing messaging, and ensure a clean output that passes AI-generator detection. 

Get in touch now to learn more about how you can pair GPO’s Amplify Content with Optimizely and advance your marketing testing.