Craft the perfect message for your brand using ad data. Why waste hours (and money) conducting user surveys and market research when you can easily find customers who are interested and who self-identify? By communicating your brand and product with simple, powerful language, you can effectively reach the audience you want to reach, and most importantly, make sales. Key Takeaways: - How to start marketing based on your assumptions, to confirm or challenge them.Identify the most important secondary features to highlight in your messaging. - How the broad audience in your sales market responds to your messaging.How niche audiences respond to your messaging, noting any differences from the broad audience.

1. Message Testing: Finding
the Right Audience and Right
Message Using Ads - For Less
MASTER
CLASS
Angela Arnold
PRINCIPAL
ARNOLD MARKETING CONSULTANTS
HOUSTON, TX ~ MAY 26 - 27, 2022
DIGIMARCONSOUTH.COM | #DigiMarConSouth

2. Prepared By Arnold Marketing Consultants
MessageLab 101:
Agency Marketing Approaches
on Small Biz Budgets

3. Table
of
Contents
Step By Step, How we Approach it
How It Works
03
What It Is
A brief overview of the MessageLab™
approach
01
Why We Do It
What was the common pain point that led us
to develop this process
02

4. MessageLab:
Why We Do It
Consultants with years of agency and
corporate marketing experience
Primarily small business clients
ADAPTATION IS KEY

5. Why
We
Do
It
Clients Have
Limited Creatives
We Care About The
Data - A Lot!
As professional marketers who came
up in the digital age, we were taught
to pay attention to the numbers!
Careful analysis DOES have real world
impact.
A lot of our small business clients
would come to us with only a logo
or a limited set of creatives they
were running as ads - with little
proof it was the best creative.
Clients Don’t Know
Their Value Prop
When we onboard clients and ask
about value propositions, many small
businesses find it difficult to
articulate - especially props for
different audiences.
We Don’t Like
Wasting Money
Anyone who has run digital ads knows,
most platforms will spend your money -
whether it’s driving results or not! That’s
not good for our clients, or for us
keeping our clients.

6. MessageLab:
What It Is
Short and simple, the MessageLab is a
framework that we can apply to any client
narrow down their approach to digital
marketing..
The regimented approach helps our clients
articulate their Key Value Proposition and
best Feature Messaging, as well as some
insights of their best bets for Creative
Imagery and Audience Targeting.

7. What
It
Is
Getting the most out of your money in
digital marketing means
Putting the Right Message
at the Right Time
in the Right Way
in front of the Right People
Value Proposition
Message
Creative Imagery
Audience

8. MessageLab:
How It Works
The Framework
● Start with the client’s baseline
assumptions about their product,
who wants it and why
● Test 2 Value Propositions; 3
Product Features; 3 Audiences
○ Challenge Assumptions!
● Run Facebook Ads with Limited
Time & Budget

9. Without a constant to test against,
it’s not much of a test.
Your baselines should be the
broadest value assumptions and
the broadest potential sales
audience.
Based on research and
brainstorming with the client, these
audiences are all potential targets for
either the broadest value proposition
or specific features of the product.
We target each audience with 2
versions of broad messaging that
could be alternate key value
propositions.
Often this requires challenging the
client’s assumptions about WHY
their product is valuable.
3 Audience Groups
2 Key Value Propositions
Baselines
3 Feature Messages
We also target each audience with
messaging around 3 specific features
that may have appeal with more
targeted audiences.
These often end up providing
specific taglines or targeted
campaign ideas.
The
Framework

10. The
Framework
Clients and kids love to ask: why?
Why do we test 2 value propositions? Why 3 features? Why 3
audiences?
There’s a sweet spot between spend, effort and insights. This is
ours!
What’s the Magic Number?

11. MessageLab:
How It Works
The Basic Steps
1. Client Brainstorm &
Research
2. Build our Hypotheses
3. Controlled Live Test
4. Analysis (and Iteration)

12. The
Steps
in
Action
THE CLIENT: Fintech Startup launching a banking app for kids and teens. They
had NO existing data to work from for this pre-launch product!
We ASKED:
● Value proposition or mission statement?
○ ASSUMPTION: their combination of real banking with gaming to
encourage saving and financial literacy education
● Their personal reason for starting the company?
○ Worried the next generation doesn’t learn how to save and invest
● Who do they think is their ideal customer – and why?
○ Similar affluent parents like them
● Have they been surprised by a reason people like their product?
○ Homeschoolers love tools for financial literacy!
Step 1. Client Brainstorm & Research
Case Study: FinTech Startup
Case Study: FinTech Startup

13. This is where you get to have fun and CHALLENGE the client!
For our FinTech client, we challenged them to consider:
● Is SAFETY in banking more important to parents
than FINANCIAL LITERACY EDUCATION?
● Are the GAMING aspects a primary appeal,
or secondary?
● Could low-income parents interested in helping
their kids save be a potential audience?
Step 2. Build Hypotheses
Case Study: FinTech Startup

14. We ran the first test over a month spending $500
per audience (3 audiences + baseline = $2,000).
Each messaging hypothesis had at least two copy
approaches, taglines and images tested against
each audience.
Step 3. Controlled Live Test
Case Study: FinTech Startup
Case Study: FinTech Startup

15. At the end of the test, we were able to tell the client that at least one of their
assumptions was correct (upper middle class parents were interested!)
But we were able to
challenge them more,
showing for example
that safety was
CRITICAL to messaging
for parents.
We ended up
iterating a second
round of testing to dig
deeper on insights.
Step 4. Analysis (and iteration)
Case Study: FinTech Startup
Case Study: FinTech Startup

16. Questions?