Why A/B Testing is a Must for Your Local Social Strategy

Darcy Bickham

Why A/B Testing is a Must for Your Local Social Strategy

You’re likely already familiar with A/B testing as a multi-location marketer, but how often do you implement it into your localized marketing efforts? A/B testing is an excellent way for your multi-location business to understand what resonates best with your target audience. While A/B testing can be used on various marketing tactics, we’ll focus on A/B testing and local social throughout this blog. Whether you’re just getting started with A/B testing or are looking to improve your efforts, this blog can help!

What is A/B Testing and Why Is It Important

A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of something to see which performs better. With A/B testing, you select a specific variable you want to test while keeping all other variables the same. By doing so, your business can ensure that any changes in traffic you see result from the variable changed. So now that you know what A/B testing is, why is it so important? A/B testing allows your business to understand what type of content your target audience wants to see. Why have your marketing team spend time and effort on a local social strategy if it doesn’t resonate with potential customers? That’s why A/B testing is a must.

Different Ways to Incorporate A/B Testing Into Your Local Social Efforts

When it comes to A/B testing on local social, we’ve already done some of the hard work for you! Data from our Localized Social Content Guide found that localized content performs 12x better than content that is not considered localized. Similarly, 72 percent of user engagement and 66 percent of brand-related impressions happen on Facebook location pages, not corporate pages. If your multi-location business was considering testing whether or not consumers prefer a local experience, the answer is yes!

So what else can your multi-location business leverage A/B testing for? While it’s clear that local content is a must, you can test various types of local content. For instance, does the same local social post perform better with a GIF attached to it or a 15-second video? Does the CTA you use at the end of a gated piece of content affect the number of downloads it gets? Does “Download Now” or “Get The Inside Scoop” perform better? These are things to consider when deciding what to A/B. Other ideas for A/B testing on local social include, but are not limited to:

The length of your post. Does a shorter post perform better than a post with three sentences?
The time of day you post. When is your audience most active?
The type of content included in the post. Does a question perform better than a statement?
Test various types of imagery as well. How does an illustrated image perform against a real-life picture?

Things to Consider When A/B Testing

Now that you know what to test in your local social strategy, it’s time to get started, but before you dive in, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

Plan how you’re going to track your testing. Does your business care about reach, clicks, downloads? This is something you need to decide ahead of time.
Understand where your business is starting. How much traffic are you currently getting on your local social efforts? A starting baseline is a must.
Decide how long you’re going to run your tests. The longer you run your test or, the more people who see it, the more statistically relevant it becomes.
Determine what you’re going to do with the information gained from A/B testing. How is your business going to implement it?

Once you have a fully thought-out plan for A/B testing and understand what your business will test, how you’re going to measure success, and how you’ll implement findings into your social strategy, it’s time to get started. As mentioned earlier in this blog, social content at the local level is non-negotiable. While managing social efforts across 100s or 1,000s of business locations might seem daunting, SOCi is here to help. SOCi’s streamlined social media management solution enables multi-location businesses to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at both the enterprise and local levels.

This unique tool will help your brand elevate its digital presence across local social while saving your marketing team time and effort to focus on other aspects of your social strategy, including A/B testing. For more insight into how SOCi can help your business dominate its local social strategy and other localized marketing efforts, request a demo today! What are you waiting for? It’s time to reach your target audience, and A/B testing is a great way to start!