Project Summary

The Client
Upsiide is an innovation insights platform that helps marketing and insights pros predict the in-market appeal and performance of their ideas.
The Challenge
The challenge presented to research was to identify messages and creatives that align best with the customers' needs.
The Solution
We leveraged Upsiide to test different ideas for messaging and creatives.
The Impact
The team discovered winning messages for the marketing collateral and identified formats and visuals that the customer finds the most attractive.

Creating an effective brand communication strategy is tough. As a marketer, you’re rummaging through tons of internal and external data to find out what makes users tick, how to write copy that converts and how to adjust your messaging to attract users’ attention. And even that is not enough to achieve the goals you’ve set.

This case study is a special one because it’s about us. While developing the communications strategy, Upsiide’s Marketing & Communications Director Meagan Healey was looking for a way to realign the brand’s goals with the messaging that resonates best with our buyers. Luckily, she didn’t have to look far.

After doing message testing work for our clients all the time, we thought we should probably do the same for ourselves and make sure that we are actually going to market with the right messages at the right times.

Buyer needs shift and adapt all the time, and it’s difficult to predict what kind of messaging will attract users tomorrow.

Our Research Process

Kristi de Asis, Upsiide’s Senior Growth Marketing Manager, comments on the problem that the marketing team faced:

Most of our strategy and communications work was based partly on anecdotal data gathered from chats with the sales or client service teams, and partly from experience and intuition. We needed some accurate, quantifiable evidence that could show us what motivates our current and prospective customers to act. And based on that data, we can ensure that our budget and resources are well spent.

As a marketer, you develop some preconceived notions about what your customer needs and wants. But to stay on top of market trends and drive your brand in the right direction, it’s always good practice to put your assumptions to the test.

Here’s what we wanted to test:

Messages and claims - this is one of the most important things that the team needed to test in order to create a coherent and effective messaging hierarchy. Upsiide wanted to understand what pain points potential Upsiide customers might have, and which statements and topics would get them excited to try the platform.

Creatives and formats - online ad trends change every day and users tend to click on some ads more than others. While social platforms allow you to A/B test formats, they don’t allow you to gather feedback on each ad in isolation. We used Upsiide’s Idea Split feature to assess each ad against our own measures of success..

With this plan at hand, Upsiide was ready to ‘Upsiide’ itself.

Setting Up the Study

After analyzing all of our past communications data from search and social ads, the team started validating different statements and creatives.

To get more unbiased results, the marketing team compiled a variety of statements that highlighted different aspects of Upsiide, including results quality, our methodology and audience scale. Some of the claims performed just as expected, confirming the team’s assumptions. But some of them opened their eyes to fascinating insights. Meagan commented on her experience of seeing the results:

There were messages that we thought were least likely to rank highly because they were so widely used in the industry. But with certain buyers, it appears that those exact claims performed the best, which surprised us in a good way. I think it just gave us the confidence to go-to-market with messages that intuitively appeal to buyers at the end of the day.

Kristi added that the filtering tool was especially valuable because she was able to filter the audience demographics against the data itself:

Upsiide helped us discover that occupation strongly impacts people’s choices - i.e. directors and consultants were swayed by different claims from analysts and managers. This insight is super valuable because we can now tailor our messaging based on which decision-makers we’re speaking to.

Another section of the marketing study was dedicated to testing designs and formats for the Upsiide creatives. The new Idea Split feature on Upsiide came in handy because we were able to test ideas against indicators of success. The data gathered from Upsiide not only showed us which ideas were most relevant and appealing but also provided qualitative proof of success thanks to the sentiment analysis tool.

Kristi notes:

Knowing which aspects of our ads people like most is powerful. The sentiment analysis tool allowed us to have a two-way conversation with our customers and hear their thoughts about our creative and messages.

How We’ll Use the Insights

The Upsiide Marketing team is now geared up to tackle their communications, events content, and performance marketing. The insights from the Upsiide data will be used not only to develop targeted copy and creative for specific audience groups but also to create the right events and content campaigns for paid activity.

Kristi adds:

Upsiide changed the way I approach ad optimization. Before, I simply put spend behind the ads, tracked their performance over time and optimized accordingly. But with Upsiide I actually know why to attach spend to specific messages and formats. Since the platform can predict in-market performance, it’s as if our ads are already pre-optimized.

And we can’t forget to mention the speed at which we collected B2B insights. Meagan noted:

Having worked in the DIY restech industry for many years, I’ve never seen a platform collect B2B insights in a matter of a few hours. It’s shocking, in the best way.

Do you want to improve your brand’s messaging and make better marketing decisions? Follow our lead and try Upsiide yourself - our team would love to show you around.

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