How to run a low-lift validation test on Meta

_{⏩ Forward this email to: a new founder}

👋 Hi, I’m Amanda. I’m a fractional head of growth with a decade of experience working with rapidly-growing B2C startups. If you’d like to explore working together, start here to tell me a bit about what you’re looking for. If you’re not quite ready yet and have growth questions you want to chat about, you can book office hours here.

I recently spoke with a new founder about marketing validation testing. She’s working on launching a tech hardware product, and wanted to see how to best validate demand for her idea before investing in it further. Specifically, she wanted to understand how to forecast her realistic revenue opportunity and how to message her product to the market, and had a small budget to work with.

If you’re in a similar boat, there are a bunch of ways to approach this, depending on the lift you’re willing to take on.

The “goldilocks” test approach

Here are the main tactics you could use to size and message to your market, ranked by level of investment, how quickly you can get answers, and how accurately those early signals will translate when you go live.

Surveys and interviews: Surveys are as low-lift as it gets — you can create a Google form for free and share it with your network. Interviews will require a bit more of your time, but will get you richer data. However, your results might be biased if most responses come from your own network, and it might take awhile to get enough input to inform any decisions.

Meta ads: Running a meta ads test requires some budget and some light technical set up (a landing page, some sort of conversion event you can use as a directional signal, and campaign setup), but will yield you a clear, data-backed signal within days. You’ll also be able to quickly gather directional signal on all your different messaging.

Kickstarter or preorders: Seeing what a conversion rate for actual purchases might look like is of course the most “accurate” test, but there’s probably a significant marketing lift here if you’re this early in your journey. Presumably, you also probably intend to ship product at the end of your pre-order campaign so as not to risk reputational damage to your brand, which means you need product ready to go.

Given all your options, the versatility of Meta as a channel makes it the “just right” balance of lift, speed, and accuracy for most founders at the earliest stages of their journey.

How to run this test on Meta

Before you get started, there are a few elements you’ll need to have ready to go. If you’re at the earliest stages of your journey, this might be the first time you set these things up:

• A Meta ads account

• Messaging and ad creative to test

• A landing page with some sort of action a user can take (ex: submitting their email to get on the waitlist)

• Conversion tracking set up on Meta for the action you decide to track

Once you have your ad account set up, you’ll want to think about your messaging and creative. This is a good time to start clearly defining the persona(s) that make up your audience, and the unique value props that speak to them. From there, you can build a few iterations of your marketing messaging. See more about building value props, and why they matter, here.

Then, you’ll need a landing page. I typically recommend the landing page builder Unbounce because it’s drag and drop, affordable, and has built in A/B testing functionality (that I’d recommend using later, after you gather your first signals). But depending how your site is or will be built, you may be fine with something like a Squarespace, or a Shopify landing page builder app.

On your landing page, you’ll need to have some sort of conversion action that a user can take, that you’ll use to validate demand. This can be something like a preorder or deposit, an email capture to get on the waitlist, or watching a product explainer video. Of course, the more similar this event is to your ultimate purchase, the more accurate your test results will be, especially if your product is niche or has a high price point.

How to interpret data from your validation test

Once all your elements are set up and you’re ready to launch your test, here are the data points you’ll want to pay attention to.

To understand the right messaging approach: Directionally assess click through and conversion rates per ad to determine the most engaging messaging. Your ads should be set up so each one speaks to a distinct persona in your audience, with a distinct message (Marketing mistake #1: Trying to speak to EVERYONE who could possibly be interested in your product. Your messaging will end up feeling bland and generic, and you’ll end up reaching no one). 

To understand your potential market: The funnel from Meta impression to click to conversion can help you approximate different layers of your market:

• Your total addressable market (TAM) can be very roughly approximated by the age, gender, and locations of the users Meta serves your ads to

• The portion of your TAM that makes up your serviceable market (aka the users you could realistically serve) can be roughly approximated by your click-through rate

• The portion of your TAM that makes up your obtainable market (aka the users you could realistically win) can be roughly approximated by your conversion rate, depending how close your test action is to your ultimate conversion event

Once you’ve run a test like this, you’ll have a really good idea how your product will be received by your audience, and where the strong and weak points are in your initial funnel. Then you can continue iterating on your audience definition, value props, marketing messaging, landing pages, and product development, so you can launch with a bang 💥

P.S. — Want to set up a marketing validation test of your own? Just respond to this email if you’d like to work together!

✨ One marketing thing: Will OpenAI’s decision to stay a nonprofit mean less likelihood of ads in Chat GPT? Discuss!

✨ One fun thing: The second episode of the new Seth Rogen show on Apple TV is one of my favorite episodes of TV I’ve seen in a long time.

Was this message forwarded to you? Need a little Growth Therapy? Sign up below 👇

Questions? Comments? Topic requests? Just hit reply ↩