Eye-Catching Social Media Ads Thumb Stopping Creative
There’s no such thing as a silver bullet when it comes to social media marketing but here are a handful of best practices.
Mobile First
Today, we use our smart phone for just about everything.
This obviously includes social media. In fact, social media lends itself to mobile design. Whether you’re uploading a gif to broadcast your mood or sharing a picture of your favorite meal ever, chances are high you’re posting from your smart phone. So, design your social ads for mobile devices because chances are good that they’ll be primarily experienced on a phone.
Here are some additional tips to guide you through content creation:
Experiment with Color
Give your audience a reason to take notice…
It’s all about getting people to stop their infinite scrolling. The offer is important but when social media users are inundated with a million flashy images a day, you need to give them a reason to take notice.
Sometimes the difference between people stopping to click on an ad and moving on in their feed is a simple change in color. Don’t be afraid to experiment!
Go HIGH Resolution
Google, Facebook, Instagram and pretty much all the other platforms where you’ll be dropping images will automatically resize and format your photos so they’ll display properly on the site. Minimize how much your images get degraded by starting off with high res photos at close to the right size (try to hit 2048 pixels wide if you can).
Always Be Testing
The great thing about digital marketing is that it eliminates much of the guesswork of the past. Technology allows us to market to a much more defined audience and to make changes to web pages and digital advertising campaigns. Digital is dynamic! There is always a better way to get a message across and there is always more we can learn about our avatar (target customer).
Particularly on Google and Facebook/Instagram, the ads manager platforms can provide you with a LOT of information. However, the sheer amount of data can be overwhelming even to a seasoned digital marketer and is often all but meaningless to a company manager or owner. Skipping the myriad details when setting up the Facebook pixel, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and other tracking and analytics tools, you can get a pretty good idea of your ads performance straight out of the ad platforms.
Here are the biggies:
The number of times an ad was served.
The number of people who saw the ads (always less than impressions because some people see the ads more than once).
Total number of clicks on ads (including link clicks).
The number of clicks on ads that led to the intended landing page. Doesn’t include clicks to the page profile or reactions, comments or shares. Always less than # of clicks.
The ratio of clicks to impressions. This is a good indication of how relevant the ads are to the users. Benchmark = 0.90%
The ratio of link clicks to impressions.
The average cost for each click or link click.
Brevity is the Soul of Wit
Get In and Get Out
We’re not going to go into crazy detail with the Facebook video specs here. Presuming your video fits the platform, our recommendation is to make an impression as quickly as you can (aim for 2-3 seconds) and then wrap it up as quickly as you can. Test your video length but we generally try to keep it under 30 seconds. People are fickle, especially on social media.
Some other things:
1. Keep it to a single key point.
2. Go with square videos.
3. Use captions (most users watch videos with the sound off).
There’s a TON more to say but these tips are good things to keep in mind when you’re running social media. When you’re ready to take it up a notch, we can help you integrate and manage your social accounts.