Learn more about designing social media ad creatives that engage target audiences.
Social media platforms have entirely usurped traditional marketing platforms like television. TV ads used to reach a wide audience, but with very few personalization options. They used to cost too much.
But with the number of social media users skyrocketing, the amount of TV viewers has shrunk dramatically. But with more than 4.5 million users posting so much content on social media platforms, grabbing your potential customer’s attention has become harder.
Brands are now spending most of their digital advertising budget on social media ads. Social media ads had worldwide revenue of $153 billion in 2021. So how do you win in this insane competition? The answer is pretty simple — by standing out.
And one of the most effective ways to stand out on social media is by working with your ad creatives. Because how persuading your ad looks is as important as how good your offer is. Using attractive, engaging, and high-quality ad creatives takes the conversion rate of your campaigns to the next level.
Let’s dive right in to find out how you can create ad creatives that make your customer take the next step.
What Are Ad Creatives?
The ads served to users in the digital environment are called creatives. It can be an image, video, or other visual formats. These creatives must be added to line items for them to serve ads in a better way.
Wondering why they are so crucial for your social media campaigns? Here’s why.
Social media users don’t read as much as they used to a few years ago. And even the attention span of the audience is at its lowest. No matter how attractive your copy is, it’s not enough to “hook” the customers. And that’s where creatives come into the picture.
You can simply make your potential customers stop scrolling by using a stunning visual creative. And it works every time because:
- Our brain is wired to process and interpret images in under 13ms.
- According to MIT, 90% of the information that our brain receives comes in a visual format.
- More than half of humans are visual learners. They can only remember images rather than texts.
These stats show why the competition for visual hegemony in social media ads is so fierce.
However, even after being one of the most effective parts of the ad, social media is still saturated for creatives. And for them to deliver what you want, you need to stand out. Let’s discuss more on this in the next section.
How to Make Social Media Ad Creatives That Convert?
You can only grow a loyal customer base when you provide the audience with the right messages and creative designs. Implement these best practices in your new ad creatives to boost the CTR and conversion rate.
One Creative, One Message
Don’t try to sell it all with just one ad creative. When you try to send more than one message at a time, there’s a risk that you must confuse the audience. If your potential customers need to think hard about what you’re offering, they will lose interest in your product.
Look at this simple ad creative by The Wiselap that sends one strong and straightforward message. These ads are highly approachable. And despite a mundane design, they deliver outstanding results.
Different Creatives for All Stages of the Funnel
To convert more with paid ads, you must prioritize your customers in different sales funnel stages.
Your ad creatives should be different for the audience that has never heard of your brand and for those who know what you can offer.
Here’s a graphic that can help you determine the content of the creative based on the stage at which your target audience is.
Be Consistent With the Landing Page
This point is quite significant for ad creatives that you’ll use to generate leads or website traffic, where you need to redirect users to a landing page to take the next step. Your ad creatives will deliver better results when the landing page is in continuation with its content and theme.
The landing page’s colors, font, text, images, and message should align with your ad creative. When they don’t align, the visitor loses the initial connection and needs to rethink the purpose of the visit. This can lead to less number of sign-ups.
Lifestyle Imagery Over Product Images
More often than not, it is observed that the audience connects more with lifestyle imagery compared to non resonant product images. When you use lifestyle images (like someone using your product) in your creatives, the ad becomes more relatable to the audience.
Images of someone using your product inspire the audience to go for it as they imagine themselves as the person in the ad. Moreover, these creatives are more natural for the platform. And the less it looks like an advertisement, the more people will want to take the next step.
However, if you don’t have a dedicated photographer to click crafted lifestyle shots, you can use user-generated content too. Using UGC as a creative makes the ad more authentic. And evens love brands that share their content.
Address Pain Points
Your product is meant to solve a problem. You can show via your creatives why your solution to the problem matters. Doing this will improve your ad rankings, and people will be more inclined to click on it.
If you want your creatives to convert effectively, you must ensure that they deliver what your audience wants to see. The more it explains their pain point, the higher are chances for conversion.
Here are some questions you can answer with your explainer creatives:
- Why should the customers use your product?
- How is it different from others in the market?
- How easy is it to use the product?
- How will this product solve their problems?
Look at the thumbnail of this ad creative by Happy Wax. Innovative, flame-free, and natural — these are bold and strong words to catch anyone’s attention. This video further explains how the product works.
Short Video Creatives
Talking about video creatives, it’s a type of format that people engage the most with because it’s easily digestible. And you don’t need a professional video editing team or high-end equipment to create good video ad creatives. It can be easily done with a tool that almost everyone has — a smartphone.
However, if you’re a luxury brand or a B2B company, having a professional video editor can help you make videos that you can use on a big scale.
In your video creative, don’t try to explain everything at once. Somewhere below 60 seconds is the sweet spot for the video’s length. If the videos are longer, customers drop off, no matter what you’re offering or how engaging the video is. Keep the video short, crisp, and to the point.
Create Platform-Specific Video Creatives and Add Captions
When you create video creatives that are native to the platform, they don’t look like an ad. And people engage more with content that’s not an ad. If you’re using posting ads on Instagram reels, then the aspect ratio of the video should be 9:16. For feed ads, however, the aspect ratio of the video can be 16:9 or 4:3.
You should also add captions to the video creatives to make it easily understandable for everyone. Because there are people who watch Instagram videos on mute, and there’s no point in your ads being in front of them if they don’t know what you are conveying.
Moreover, by adding captions, you also ensure that your content is accessible to someone who’s hearing impaired.
Add Testimonials in Video Creatives
Adding testimonials in video creatives is one of the best ways to humanize your brands because people will always trust other people more than they can trust any brand.
When you add testimonials to the creatives, people get excited and want to see what the hype is all about. It’s based on a psychological principle, social validation. It plays a huge role in customers deciding whether to go for the product or go against it.
This way, you don’t even have to worry about writing an ad. You can just let the customers tell the potential customers why they should be using the product.
AppSumo’s ads always have leveraged testimonials and features in the best possible ways. This company uses recognizable logos and quotes from the features. When recognizable logos are used, customers find it easier to trust the brand as the feature is coming from a brand that they know already.
Leverage Color Psychology
As we mentioned already, we are all visual creatures. And colors play a major role in how we think and perceive a particular product or brand. Every color is associated with a specific emotion in our mind. As a brand, if you want your creative to perform better, you need to be mindful while selecting colors.
For example, if you’re a finance company, your go-to color should be blue as it makes you appear trustable and dependable. For NGOs, on the other hand, it’s best to go with green as it sends a peaceful message.
Cultural Relevance
The design should strike a chord with the potential customers the moment they see it. And for this to happen, the creative should be culturally relevant to them.
You know your audience, you know their age group, and you know where they are from. This knowledge is enough to make ad creatives that connect with them.
You can use festive themes at the time of festivals to make the content of the creative more relevant. Using the right colors and festive elements, you can add to the spirit of holidays and can potentially convert more customers.
Send Shock and Humor
When you can’t think of anything for the high-converting ad creatives, you can go with humor and shock factor to grab the attention and deliver your message. These factors trigger customer emotions, which makes them listen to what you have to say.
In research of 1400 successful ad campaigns, it was found that campaigns that use these emotional factors performed twice as well as those that leveraged just rational content.
Make Them Unambiguous
You can’t just fill your ad creative with all the pieces of information. It will only make the design cluttered and hard to understand. Your creative should be able to say what you want to convey in the simplest possible way.
The quicker your potential customers can understand the creative, the higher their chances are for conversion.
Add CTA to Your Creatives
A creative is the most conspicuous part of any ad. And whatever you add on it will get more attention than any other place.
Yes, it’s important to have a CTA button. But adding it to the creative is even more essential as it helps you create a solid first impression.
How to Foolproof Your Social Media Ad Creatives
The abovementioned tips can take your social media ad creatives to another level. But as long as you don’t have data to back your ad creative strategies, it’s all just guesswork. And guesswork can only take you so far.
You need to leverage data to make your ad creatives foolproof. How do you do it? You do it with the help of image analytics.
What is Image Analytics?
It’s a branch of social listening that’s capable of analyzing images and other rich media formats to understand the sentiments behind them and identify how it’s related to brand perception.
In the image analysis process, your sentiment analysis tool gathers data from social media images, memes, brand logos, etc. The data generated after the analysis can help you make marketing decisions (which includes ad creatives too).
Learn more about image analytics here.
Create Better Ad Creatives With Image Analytics
Did you know that 96% of untagged brand mentions are simply ignored? People might be sharing your brand photos, logos (on product packages), etc., but you wouldn’t know about them without a good image analytics strategy.
Images are posted in an entirely different context compared to text mentions. It gives you an idea of how different people are using your product. The way people are using it is the ideal way to advertise the product because that’s how the customers like it.
You can take inspiration from the analyzed posts and use it in your ad creatives. This will eliminate all the guesswork, and your creatives will convert more customers.
Go Creative With Ad Creatives
The most valuable thing that you can get from your social media audience is their attention. And relying on data to make creatives is a surefire way to get that.
Implement the tips mentioned above in your upcoming creatives to increase the chances of conversion.
Explore Radarr today for accessing image analytics via social listening.
