6 Effective Social Media Marketing Experiments That You Can Try With Ease

Do you realise that marketers never get bored? Marketing is probably the only professional discipline that is free from monotony. The question, however, is why. The answer is in the dynamism of marketing. This is a field that will never accept standardisation. In other words, it is a field that will always promote innovation and creativity. How does this creativity happen, though? It happens through experimentation.

Marketing experiments have always been around because they result in businesses getting an edge over their competitors. Even though they’ve always been around, they were never as expansive or elaborate as they are these days. Digital technology has truly handed marketers the test tube and beaker to play with. And, what has this resulted in? It has resulted in a glut of social media marketing experiments.

The Relevance of Metrics in Social Media Marketing Experiments

When it comes to social media marketing experiments, nothing is more important than metrics. It is obvious that the metrics will allow you to evaluate the results of your social media marketing experiments. What is not obvious is that metrics will often inform the type of experiments you need to run.

The act of choosing metrics to monitor and evaluate will force you to choose the relevant experiments from the hundreds available to you. Since running the right experiments is tantamount to winning half the battle, we can’t insist enough how important metrics are.

So, what kind of social media marketing experiments can you conduct in your own digital business lab? There is no dearth of options because you can literally create your own experiments on the basis of your experiences.

However, before you do that, there are a few that you should probably have already cracked. We’re going to list them here and, for your convenience, we’re going to arrange them in the order of how easy they’re to conduct – starting with the easiest.

#1: Experiment With Times, Days, And Schedules

The easiest social media marketing experiment you can run for your business has to do with timing. You can change what time you release your posts and that will change the amount of traction you get. This just the beginning, though.

You can take this type of experimentation up a notch by changing the days on which you post, changing the frequency or overall schedule of your posts, or even changing the time zones you post in. The most complicated in this type of experimentation would be the schedule.

Luckily, this is manageable with the various scheduling apps and services available online. The foremost in these types of apps are Hootsuite, CoSchedule, and Buffer.

#2: Play Around With Headlines and CTAs

While playing around with times and schedules is easy, what is even easier is to play with the content you post. Research has shown that the first thing people look at, whether it is in a post, a web page, or landing page, is the headline. In fact, around 80 percent of the people involved in a survey once stated that they decide whether to read the content or not on the basis of the headline.

Along with headlines, Calls to Action (CTA) also play an important role in getting an individual to do what you want them to do. This could be engaging with the post you shared or doing something on a web page. Playing around with your headlines and CTAs is very easy since it just involves changing around a few words.

This experiment also happens to be very effective in terms of your Returns on Investment (ROI). It is very easy and cost effective and when it works it yields great returns.

#3: Modify Content Style and Tone

The only reason we put this social on #3 instead of #2 on this list of social media marketing experiments is that the former yields slightly lower ROIs than the latter. It still delivers more than all other types of experiments in this list.

You would be surprised how many different ways you can write a single message. Your copy can be delivered in the form of a question, an exclamation, a challenge, a declaration, an instruction, or even as a form of personal revelation amongst many others.

Different tones elicit different types of reactions from different types of people. It is all extremely dynamic and complicated. The only way you can decipher it is by experimenting and finding the right ratio for your target audience and your business.

#4: Fiddle With Image Dimensions and Text Size

Images will always be a central part of your updates on social media or even you updates on your own website or blog. One of the easiest ways you can experiment with images is to change their dimensions. Whether you believe it or not, even image dimensions will have an impact on how much engagement you get from your target audience.

Every social media platform tells its users what image dimensions it is configured to handle best. In the majority of cases, these dimensions will yield you the best results because they’ll offer the best user experience on that platform. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t play with it on the basis of the content you’re sharing or posting.

In fact, once you know what kind of traction the recommended dimensions offer, you can tinker with it to see what kind of an impact it has.

#5: Change the Type of Images You Use

While tinkering with image dimensions is easy, a slightly more difficult and involved experiment would be to play with other aspects of the image. Again, there are various ways you can go about doing this. Firstly, you can test using people and objects. Objects are used when you want to highlight products and its benefits while people are used to get the right kind of emotional reactions.

Whether you want to test with people or objects, you’ll still have multiple options within each category. For instance, you can test having multiple objects vis-à-vis a single object. Similarly, you can test having people of different types and different numbers.

Just like this, you can play around with other aspects of images such as the colours, designs, and typography. It is a well-known fact that colour psychology plays a role in how people react to images. Certain types of fonts also have better responses than others. Design, of course, appeals to a person’s aesthetic sense and different people’s aesthetic senses can be quite different.

#6: Tinker with Demographics and Psychographics

This is probably the most difficult of all the social media marketing experiments that you can try but it can also be extremely rewarding. The reason why it is so difficult is that the number of demographic and psychographic options available to you is huge. In fact, when it comes to demographics and psychographic metrics of your target audience, your options are infinite.

At the same time, you can drill down from those infinite options to a select few if you understand your audience and business better. The trick, here, is not to just try different demographics and psychographics but instead to pinpoint relevant but alternate metrics that you haven’t realised till now.

Furthermore, you’ll get access to different types of demographics and psychographics while looking at paid advertising on social media platforms. This will always be a good place to get inspiration on what demographics and psychographics you can target. Once you’re on your way, you can discover newer metrics to target yourself.

So, there you go. We’ve listed six different social media marketing experiments that you can try in-house with minimal effort and investment. Each of these social media marketing experiments can keep you busy for years if you actually delve into them and get creative. It all depends on how well you implement them now.