Social media has become one of the most powerful advertising platforms in today’s digital age. However, just having a social media presence is not enough to make your campaign successful. The key to success lies in the correct selection of creative elements that will attract the attention of your target audience and turn them into loyal customers.
What are creative elements in paid advertising and ads?
Visuals are the ad display shown to users on a website, app, or other digital location. Those can be images, videos, audio and other formats delivered to users. They must be added when creating ad digital campaigns to show ads to audiences.
Best practices for paid social media ads
Know your audience!
Users are more likely to respond to an ad if it reflects their interests or needs.
Create user personas to better understand the type of content your customer would like to see. This step is an essential part of developing your creative strategy.
Align your ad with the entire sales funnel or conversion process.
As marketers, we often talk about the importance of a sales funnel strategy. It’s important that we don’t neglect to transfer that logic to our creative approach. Context is key when thinking about what customers see at each sales stage.
Help them generate interest in your product or service. Increasing brand awareness is about communicating what makes your business valuable.
Take the time to understand what you’re trying to accomplish at every stage of the user journey and determine the type of visuals that need to be created for each stage.
Put that into practice as the following creative strategies:
Top of Funnel: increasing brand awareness
In this phase, we want to achieve the effect of increasing awareness of the brand we want to promote. As an example, we can use creative solutions such as images or videos that will be designed in a style that will be recognizable for your brand and so increase the user’s awareness.
Source: Meta Ad library
Middle of the funnel: Consideration phase
It encourages users to interact in order to continue through the sales process. Here we want to provide an incentive through some kind of benefits such as discounts, to help the user decide to enter the final purchase process. Visuals that can be used in this phase are also videos, as well as Collection ads, i.e. dynamic ads that consist of a “Hero image” as well as a series of products that are cataloged below the main visual. Example below:
Source: Meta Ad library
Bottom of the funnel: Conversion
n this final phase, we want to provide users with tangible benefits such as discounts, exclusive offers, free shipping, loyalty programs, competitive prices, and the like, all to encourage the audience to “get the offer” and complete the journey. We can also call this phase “Hard Sell”. Among other things, the best practices of creative solutions of this phase include images, as well as templates for catalog campaigns through which products can be changed dynamically regardless of the number of products you have on your site. This is a great way of advertising your offer when there are hundreds or thousands of products to promote. Let’s also mention that it is cheaper due to savings on the process of creating visuals.
Testing the visuals
A/B testing is key to finding the right visuals. Create multiple versions of the ad with different elements, such as a headline, image, or call to action. Then track the performance of each version to see which gets more attention and gets better results. Testing allows you to optimize creative elements throughout the campaign.
Follow the trends
Social media is constantly changing, so it’s important to keep up with current trends. Track what’s popular on the platforms you advertise on and consider how those trends can fit into your campaign. Correct positioning in relation to trends can increase the visibility of your ads.
Freshen up your visuals
After a while, your target audience may lose interest in existing visuals. Keeping your campaign up-to-date is key to keeping your audience interested. Plan to refresh your creative elements regularly to ensure your campaign remains relevant.
Conclusion
Test constantly – There is no universal formula for success!
When deciding on visuals, you need to consider a number of factors such as:
- The goal you want to achieve. It’s not the same whether you want to reach as many people as possible or simply want to sell a product or service. Perhaps you want to inform users about current events through newsletters, blogs and the like.
- Are your campaigns optimized for mobile devices?
- What are your KPIs?
- Do you want to encourage audience interaction?
Adapt strategy and visuals to the needs of your brand, audience, market and everything that makes your business what it is! No two campaigns are the same, so it’s important to tailor your approach and visuals to the specific needs and goals of each campaign.
Finding the right Paid Social advertising visuals can be challenging, but with continuous testing and modifying, you can create content that will grab attention and achieve great results on social media.