Building share of voice, amplifying your brand story and forging a strong connection with your audience is key to increasing market share and achieving ambitious growth targets. But there’s no getting around the fact that digital marketing can be expensive.

Irrespective of whether you’re spending on paid promotion or investing months of team time into an organic content campaign that’s designed to grow your digital footprint, every extra view, click, download or form fill has a (significant) price tag attached.

Exact costs vary according to industry, but the 2024 edition of Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report suggests that the average business is spending 19% - 22% of its total marketing budget on activities designed to ‘win mindshare’ (or share of voice). 

It’s important to remember that this is just the cost of promotional activity too. If you stop to consider the amount invested in the average marketing strategy - including the cost of segmenting audiences, developing narratives, designing assets and building strategic campaigns - it becomes clear that very few (if any) UK organisations can afford to invest in digital marketing without validating their efforts, or showing that they’re amplifying the right messaging. 

Can’t we just track revenue?

The first and most obvious way of validating your marketing strategy is to look for an increase in conversions and revenue. Logically, we know that investing in branding and digital marketing is supposed to help us engage with and convert the right people, so it follows that any successful effort to amplify a story that resonates with a given audience will drive a surge in sales that can be measured in your bank account. 

Unfortunately, customer journeys are rarely instant, and a sales cycle report published by ex-Google Ads PM Tomasz Tunguz suggests that the average buying journey is actually lengthening by as much as 44% in some niches, which means that you’re unlikely to get bottom-line feedback in time to pivot or adjust your strategy without wasting money. 

Here, we’ll look at three alternative methodologies that you can use pre- and post-launch to check that your story’s landing with the people that matter most to your business.

These methodologies can be used individually or in concert. They’re highly scalable, don’t cost the earth and allow you to build out a more rounded - and reliable – understanding of your messaging’s overall resonance. 

Generally, we think of validation as something that’s done after the fact, but we can validate brand messaging before we push it.

The traditional approach is to run one or more focus groups prior to campaign launch; presenting the planned messaging/story and gathering feedback – taking particular care to ensure that you’ve selected a good cohort of participants, and defined objectives that allow you to gather clear feedback on the power/impact of your messaging.

Mailchimp have published a fantastic guide to running a marketing focus group if you’re inclined to head in that direction, but it’s worth noting that running multiple focus groups can be expensive and time consuming. 

They’re a great solution for big brands with a healthy marketing budget. But if you are trying to operate efficiently, you could look at polling pre-existing customers, or friends in the correct demographic instead. Agency side, copywriters constantly validate with their peers and the digital marketing managers they work with, but there may be no easy mechanism to achieve this if you’re in house, and it’s also worth noting that it’s always important to test a story or message on people from the correct demographic.

Unless you are selling to marketers, you want feedback from the people you’re trying to persuade. 

Other alternatives to focus groups include one-on-one interviews, and paid user testing. One-on-one interviews are powerful, and cheap to set up. As UserLab point out in their article on focus group alternatives, they allow you to drill in and probe feedback, generally only demand payment for a few hours of someone’s time and provide very clear results but they are prone to bias.

User testing via a third-party service like UserTesting is a happy middle ground. You use these services to find willing members of a specific demographic and pay them a nominal amount to video themselves completing a variety of tasks on your website.

These services are often used for uncovering UX issues on websites, but because you can define the activities/tasks testing agents will undertake, you can use them to get members of your target audience onto a campaign landing page and ask a bunch of questions about the messaging/story, how well it resonates and whether it would successfully convert them. 

User testing agents tend to be painfully honest, which is exactly what’s needed when trying to avoid waste and ensure that you’re pushing the right story. 

The only ‘con’ is that user testing services make it hard to validate messaging across various touch-points. If you are running ads that tease a story that’s revealed on a specific landing page, or a multi-channel campaign that assumes familiarity with other assets (like self-referential Youtube shorts) they’re useless. 

Post-launch validation is generally more straightforward. Here, we are going to launch a smaller, proto or test campaign that enables us to reach a small pool of potential customers before drilling down on signals like time on page, engagement rates, or specific ‘events’ like button clicks to assess the ‘stickiness’ of our messaging. 

To do this, we rely on platforms like Google Analytics, Hotjar or Google Tag Manager, which can be configured to fire specific event triggers when users complete an action that we want to track.

That’s a lot of technical jargon, but it’s (relatively) straightforward once you break it down: Good messaging will (hopefully) convince visitors to sit and read a page, or engage with content in a specific way and we can set up

The important thing here is to identify the right KPIs, and make sure our tracking setup does everything it can to remove bias. In no particular order, we’d always recommend assessing a mix of the following metrics:

Average Engagement Time

Average engagement time is Google’s replacement for the (retired) time on page metric most of us used to track user engagement prior to the rollout of GA4. It’s a better metric in a lot of ways; allowing you to track and record engagement time for single-page sessions which is very useful if you’re trying to validate messaging.

In simple terms, average engagement time enables us to measure stickiness. Good messaging that resonates with 

Unfortunately, there is no benchmark for a ‘good’ engagement time. Industry, content length, the presence of multimedia assets and a whole host of additional factors influence this metric and it’s often necessary to use it comparatively, comparing the average engagement time of a new page with the average engagement time of an older campaign page or content of a comparative length.

Given the multifactorial nature of average engagement time, it’s also important to ensure that you never look at this in isolation. All too often, it’s slanted by something trivial like a particularly arresting graphic, engaging layouts or a striking video. It is also prone to inflation via negative elements, like a convoluted content structure or tricky messaging that takes potential customers 30+ seconds to decipher. 

Still, if used in conjunction with other metrics, it does give us our clearest post-campaign signal and should be at the forefront of any effort to validate a marketing message.

Click Through/Ad Interaction Rates

For most (but not all) campaigns, the first touchpoint will be an ad of some kind; either on Google search or on a social media platform like Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram. The web’s a busy place, and people only click or engage with an ad if it strikes a chord so looking at click through or interaction rates can be a useful way of validating your message.

There are a few caveats here though. Firstly, high CTRs only prove that your messaging compelled people to click through in the first instance. Clicking an ad is low-commitment, and there’s nothing to say that the people clicking an ad will go on to engage with your long-form copy and/or convert on your landing page. They suggest effectiveness, but don’t demonstrate it. 

Secondly, it’s important to remember that interaction rates are only a good measure of resonance if you’re actively asking people to interact; ads without a call to action, or a clear next step may register with your audience but can’t – by definition - compel people to act. 

As a result, you can end up in a situation where you’re running, say, a brand awareness campaign and seeing low click through rates on ads that are resonating with people, despite the low uptake. 

You can also end up with situations where people are clicking a particularly invasive ad to get rid of it or just clicking out of idle curiosity rather than a compulsion borne of good messaging so it’s always worth measuring interaction rates with another, clearer user signal like average engagement time, event rates or similar. 

Conversion Rate

Conversion rates tell us what percentage of visitors/users have undertaken a specific action – generally defined by the marketing agency/manager running a given campaign. Given that most messaging is geared towards getting a potential customer to undertake a specific action, looking at conversion rates can give us a great steer on the effectiveness of our storytelling. 

Just make sure that the conversion you’re tracking is realistic: If you are running a general brand awareness campaign, or trying to get people to start thinking about using a new service you’re rolling out, tracking something like sales, which is a bottom of funnel (BOFU) conversion won’t work. 

Similarly, if you’re working on pushing a specific range of luxury watches, tracking general web enquiries won’t give you an accurate assessment of your messaging’s effectiveness. Be specific, understand the action that you’re asking people to make and ensure that you’re tracking in a robust manner. We’d also strongly recommend looking at conversion rates alongside on-site engagement because there will be instances where, for example, your messaging is resonating and people are dwelling on a page, but your button CTA is deterring conversions, or your forms aren’t firing properly.

Again, it’s all about looking at things holistically. We want to know whether your messaging is resonating, but we can only do that by analysing performance indicators that are relevant to your campaign.  

Dive into an older post on validation and you may see someone mention bounce rate. This is a devalued metric (it literally doesn’t exist in GA4) but it’s always been a pretty poor measure of resonance/impact. 

To explain, bounce rate is a measure of the percentage of people who land on a page and then ‘bounce’ off without navigating to another page or completing a conversion action. Thing is, a great many campaign landing pages aren’t designed to encourage visits to other pages of a site, In fact, a great many are designed to be completely self-contained and may not encourage an immediate conversion either. 

All in all, we’d stick with a cluster of more meaningful and transparent metrics. 

It is worth mentioning Hotjar here though. While Hotjar doesn’t give you a specific metric to measure, it does let you watch the ay users have interacted with your content. You can see them reading and either absorbing or skipping past your messaging in real time, which, while gruelling to watch and very prone to bias, can be slightly more approachable than pouring through dry stats.

Hotjar also produces very nice heatmaps that show you where visitors have focused their attention. If you are testing messaging on a landing page with a clear flow and hierarchy, these heatmaps can be a great way of picking out the bits of your story that are drawing people in.  

What About A/B Testing?

A/B testing is a great way of testing different messaging, but it doesn’t really help you validate a specific message prior to investing in a significant amount of paid amplification. 

To be 100% clear, A/B testing is a methodology that involves showing two different pages, or messages, to randomly selected members of your audience.

In most A/B tests, you split an audience 50/50: Showing half of them message A, and the other half message B. You can then look at all the engagement stats we’ve highlighted above to see which message had more impact, but this is the real problem with A/B testing to validate campaign messaging: The test only demonstrates comparative superiority. 

Sure, ‘MEGA BIG DISCOUNTS’ generated slightly more engagement than ‘PRETTY BIG DISCOUNTS’, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve hit peak impact or got anywhere close.

Generally speaking, we want to use A/B testing to iteratively improve on messaging after we’ve validated. If we want to demonstrate that a given story has landed, it’s generally much more efficient to go straight for the stats. 

Proving that a message resonates is often key to getting sign off on increased spend, or demonstrating the value of paid promotion. If you think you’ve uncovered a compelling story, you can test and validate 

• before you launch, using focus groups, user testing services or one-on-one interviews with members of your target audience
• after launching a smaller test campaign, by looking at a cluster of relevant engagement metrics

Success is predicated on your ability to identify the right user demographics (or engagement metrics) and decipher feedback that isn’t necessarily as black and white as we’d like. And remember; the idea of any validation exercise is to evaluate effectiveness to ensure future marketing budget is invested wisely. We’re not looking to prove that we were right, and keeping an open mindset is key to learning the right lessons. 

Our team of brand and digital marketing specialists are always happy to help improve or validate your narrative.