
In digital marketing, audience testing is a cornerstone for success, particularly in the Aesthetics vertical, where often messaging and creative have severe regulatory limitations. Aesthetics marketers face unique challenges and opportunities when it comes to reaching their target audience. Digital marketers have historically looked for large audiences to maximize awareness metrics like reach and impressions. In 2025 and beyond, consumers will be constantly presented with advertising that meets their exact needs and wants. In 2024 digital ads have been proven more effective than ever despite the competition for consumer ad space. The savviest marketers are using varying degrees of personalization to connect with consumers and drive better marketing efficiency. While in aesthetics marketing, there can be limitations that keep us from hyper-personalization, we can use audience testing to create specific audience sub-segements that we can tailor our content to for dramatic efficiency improvements.
Understanding Audience Testing
Audience testing, in essence, involves experimenting with different segments of your target audience to determine which demographic, psychographic, or behavioral profiles respond best to your advertising efforts. This can include variations in age, gender, location, interests, and behaviors, among other factors. Through testing, healthcare marketers can identify the most promising audience segments and refine their campaigns accordingly, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates. While several healthcare marketing platforms are designed to target users specifically by diagnosis or prescription history, this is typically done with modeled data to protect user privacy. While these models are powerful and can drive highly targeted users, CPM rates are typically 2-10x more than Meta and engagement rates are much worse, making metrics like Cost- Per-Click orders of magnitude more expensive.
Why Audience Testing is Crucial in Aesthetic Marketing
1. Precision in Targeting
Aesthetic product manufacturers and service providers cater to specific needs and conditions, making precision in targeting essential. Audience testing allows Aesthetics marketers to pinpoint the exact demographics most likely to benefit from their services. For example, with cosmetic fillers we have found meaningful performance differences in different age demographics depending on the area of treatment being marketed (lipstick lines vs laugh lines). In 2025, broad marketing will continue to become more expensive and less impactful. The new focus of savvy aesthetic marketing is to find the highest level of alignment between the audience and the treatment being marketed.
2. Optimizing Your Aesthetic Marketing Budget
Effective budget allocation is a critical aspect of maximizing your digital marketing outcomes. Without audience testing, an aesthetic marketer might spend a significant portion of their budget on ineffective ads. Many are quick to blame the ad creative or messaging when it is actually a misalignment of the ad and audience. By identifying and focusing on audience segments, marketers can segment their ad spend against each audience side and ensure that every dollar is invested wisely. This not only improves return on investment (ROI) but also maximizes the impact of the advertising campaign.
4. Enhancing Aesthetics Consumer Engagement
Engagement is a key metric in any advertising campaign. In Aesthetics, engaging with potential patients in a meaningful way can lead to increased trust and, ultimately, conversions. Audience testing allows marketers to experiment with different messages and formats to see what resonates most with their target audience. Whether it's through educational content, testimonials, or interactive elements, testing helps refine strategies to enhance patient engagement.
Steps to Effective Audience Testing
1. Define Clear Objectives
Before beginning any audience testing, it's important to define clear objectives. What do you hope to achieve? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive appointments, or promote a specific service? Clear objectives will guide your testing process and help measure success effectively.
2. Segment Your Audience
Segment your audience based on various factors such as demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. Use tools available on meta advertising platforms to create these segments. When structuring your tests it can be helpful to test new segments against a high-performing baseline, often a look-a-like audience based on site visitors or email lists. Meta is not very transparent about the full scope of audiences so try to test as many clear demographic and behavioral differences to try and limit the overlap of the audiences being tested.
3. Use Varied Placements Types
Often times in Aesthetics marketing it can be a challenge to get multiple ad themes created and approved for legal compliance reasons. As an alternative consider taking one content theme and building it in multiple ad creative types. You may find that Instagram stories perform better if the demographic target for your audience skews younger, where Reels and Carousel placements of the same theme perform best with older audiences. Make sure you are maximizing your placements and optimizing to serve the best ad placement types for the audiences you are testing.
4. Run Tests and Gather Data
Deploy your ads across different segments and monitor their performance. Use metrics such as CPM, click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and engagement metrics to assess the effectiveness of each ad. Gather as much data as possible to inform your decisions. While lower funnel metrics like conversion rate can take a long time to gather meaningful data you can start to see performance differences in engagement and click through metrics that are statistically significant within 2 weeks.
5. Analyze and Refine
Once you've collected sufficient data, analyze the results to identify which segments and content performed best. Use these insights to refine your targeting and content strategies. Continuously iterate and test to ensure ongoing optimization.
Audience testing in Meta advertising is not just a strategy but a necessity for Aesthetic Marketers. By broad definitions, most aesthetics and beauty brands are aimed at the same audience. How do you cut through the noise and make sure your brand connects? Using audience testing, you can find more tightly defined sub-segments of the general beauty audience and create ads that appeal to them at a significantly higher rate than more general assets designed for a mass market. In 2025 and beyond, consumers expect personalization in marketing, they are looking for products and services that specifically speak to them. The best way to refine that personalization is through rigorous audience testing.
Want to learn more about EvolveMKD and how we can help you find your ideal audience? Reach out to us to learn more.