Best Creative Practices for Social Media Ads

Best Creative Practices for Social Media Ads

Social media icons

Social media ad campaigns are one of the most important things you can do as a business. When done effectively, they will give your business a strong internet presence and provide many opportunities to attract new users. With more than 40% of digital consumers using social networks to research new brands or products, an ad campaign is crucial to pursue a large sector of potential customers. However, just running an ad campaign isn’t enough to guarantee success. You need to make creative social media ads to get the best results. This guide will cover the creative best practices that will help your social media ad campaigns be the most successful.

Why Creativity is Important

Creativity in your ads is important because it fuels engagement. People get tired of seeing the same cookie-cutter ads all over the place. They’re not going to be motivated to visit your site if their first impression of your ads is that they’re dull or unengaging. Generally, people don’t like being advertised to. They like being entertained. When you have creative social media ads that entertain, you’ll forge a greater connection between your company and audience. It also helps your social media ad campaign stand apart from the crowd, which will get you more attention than your competitors.

Imagery Is Key

The first step to your ad campaign is to have impactful imagery. Imagery is how you draw in the audience and garner an emotional response. People don’t respond as well to text on its own. What catches their eyes are images. Pick the right one, and people won’t be able to help but look at your ad. It can also add an emotional touch. Text on its own comes across as overly logical and detached. Most people don’t buy with their brains, though. They buy with their heart. Capturing an emotional response with the right imagery will elevate your social media ad campaign to the next level.

Picking the Right Image

a social media ad with strong imagery

Finding the right image for your desired results can be tricky, but you can overcome this challenge with a few methods. Typically, you want to keep things bright and colorful. The brighter your ad, the more people’s eyes will be drawn to it. Depending on the types of products you sell, you want your images to capture some emotional connection to it. For example, if your company sells electronics and it’s nearing Christmas, your social media ad campaign can show a child excitedly opening a present with a brand new device. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach; don’t be afraid to get creative with your social media ad pictures.

Keep it Short and Sweet

You want your social media ad campaign to be direct. People have short attention spans. If you have a wall of text or an overly long video, people will stop listening. The best campaigns are as concise as possible while still giving readers everything they need to know about your site. The best approach is to come up with a short, catchy tagline that customers can instantly identify your site with. So, if you’re an electronics store with a huge selection, you can say: “All the devices you could ever need.” Get creative to find the tagline that works best for your company.

High-Resolution Images

For your social media ad campaign to succeed, you need to include high-resolution images. We’re far into the age of HD, with many adopting 4K for displays. If you want your ad to keep up, it has to be high resolution. People don’t want to see low-resolution images anymore, they’ve become accustomed to clearer ones. You can’t pull off a creative social media ad if you include blurry images.

Stay Responsive

Your image should be large for your social media ad campaign, but that doesn’t mean the file size should be too large. The larger the image size, the longer it will take for devices to load. Or, if they have a poor internet connection, it may not even load at all. And the only thing worse than having a low-resolution image is not having an image at all. To make sure your image loads efficiently, you should keep a close eye on resolution. Keep it HD without going over. Also, converting the image to the WebP format will ensure their file size will be kept down.

Sell Directly On Social Media

a home decor business’s Instagram shop

People appreciate convenience in social media ad campaigns. Rather than requiring people to redirect to your site and buy there, you can attract many more buyers if you allow them to buy directly through social media. This isn’t difficult to do, either. If your site uses the Shopify platform, there is built-in Instagram integration available for you to use. Using the integration will be an easy and surefire way to get more customers from your creative social media ads. If you aren’t using Shopify, you can still sell on Instagram, but the required setup will vary based on your platform. The effort you put into this is incredibly worth it for your social media ad campaign, though, it’s worth committing to.

Variations

An issue many companies run into with their social media ad campaigns is inflicting “ad fatigue” on their audience. This is what happens when you reuse the same ads repeatedly with no variation. If you do this, people will get tired of seeing your ads and eventually tune them out. If you want to keep people invested, you need to have variations with your ads. You don’t need to go crazy with the variations, however. You only need enough for it to seem different at first glance. That can be different colors, word choices, or any other small things.

C-Level Senders

The term “C-level senders” refers to higher-ranking individuals within your organization, including the CEO, CMO, etc. You want to post content and articles from these figures in your social media ad campaign to build the authority of your messaging. Authority, also known as Ethos, is one of the core tenets of persuasion. People will believe an argument or ad from someone they can trust. A C-Level sender is one of the highest-ranking officials within your company, which makes them a good authority on your company operations. To capitalize on your creative social media ad, credit them as the authors of content you put out.

Stay Professional

When you use C-level senders for your social media ad campaign, you should always keep your content professional. For one thing, people expect the leaders of a company to be professional consistently. If you post content that appears more casual, you risk lowering their authority. Plus, you may fall into the “How do you do, fellow kids?” trap. If you try too hard to appeal to social media users, it can come across as trying too hard and might damage the reception of your content. There’s a balance to be made between relatability and professionalism. When you’re writing from the viewpoint of a C-level sender, always lean towards professionalism.

Personalization

A static social media ad campaign can be effective, but it doesn’t take advantage of everything social media can do for your marketing. Social media offers many opportunities for personalization that will help your content connect with people on a personal level. Fortunately, all of that data is public and easy to use. You can use social media macros to get the names, usernames, job titles, and more information where relevant and attach them to messages to make them highly personalized to the recipient. When combined with your creative social media ads, this will ensure that each communication has a special touch.

Check All the Boxes

a red check marking a blue checkbox

When you set up your social media ad campaign, you’re going to come across many different components that can be added to your ads. For example, you can check a box to enable banner images for message ads, which allows your message to take up more screen real estate for viewers. If you want to make the most out of your ad campaign, it’s imperative to check all these optional checkboxes. They won’t harm your content. Instead, they will give viewers many more opportunities to see your content when done correctly. When in doubt, always say yes to optional add ons for your ads.

Keep Campaigns Running Constantly

A social media ad campaign isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s something that you need to constantly monitor if you want to get the best results. And, make sure there isn’t a lot of downtime between your communications. Almost three-fourths of email marketers send emails at least once a week. You want to be able to match and potentially exceed that target. It’s a marketing principle that the more frequently people see your content, the more likely they will be enticed to buy something. Just make sure you aren’t running the same ads over and over again — keep your content fresh. Maintain consistency, but make sure your social media ads are creative.

Bullets Instead of Paragraphs

To keep your ads concise, you want to base your social media ad campaign on bullet points rather than long paragraphs. People don’t want to read through long, dense content. Even if it’s easy to read, the mere sight of large blocks of text can turn people away. Bullets, on the other hand, are simple, to the point, and appear better on the screen. From a visual standpoint, they’re much more pleasing and catch the eye more easily. As long as you don’t have overly long content within the bullets, they’re also easier for readers to understand. A simple approach is to take whatever content you have, break it down to one bullet per sentence, and stick to four or five bullets maximum.

The Power of Video

A lot of companies limit their social media ad campaigns to text and images, forgetting that video is an option. Videos may have more production costs than standard text and picture ads, but they can also be much more effective. In fact, video ads yield the highest returns of all ad platforms when used correctly, with a share rate 1200% higher than text and links combined. If you omit video from your creative social media ads, you’re going to miss out on many potential customers, especially younger users who primarily use video-dominated social media like TikTok. The effort that goes into creating video content will ultimately return so much more.

Videos on their own in your social media ad campaign can get more eyes on your site, but to really be effective there are a few rules to follow:

Clips over Long Videos

Viewers are used to instant gratification with video content. Give them something short that tells them exactly what they need to know upfront. Longer content will only turn people away.

Captions

Accessibility is an important factor to keep in mind while you create your video content. It’s essential to engage differently abled people, and many people simply appreciate having captions so they can always understand what people are saying or if their phone is on silent. It also helps Google crawl your ads.

Improve Your Social Media Ad Campaigns With Coalition

Featuring creative social media ads throughout your social media ad campaign will ensure that it is engaging and will help it attract the most potential customers. There are many different techniques you can use for improving the quality of your campaign. Impactful, high-resolution images will ensure that you can establish an emotional component to your ads. Brevity will prevent you from boring viewers. Using C-level senders and personalization adds extra trust to your messages. Lastly, don’t forget the potential of video for your ads. These techniques will help maximize the effectiveness of your social media ads.

For more social media and marketing information and services, choose Coalition Technologies. Contact us today to learn how we can help improve your marketing.

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