Getting Started: How to Create the Perfect Social Ad

Let’s be honest; social advertising has opened an entirely new, unknown, and exciting form of ad creation to businesses and companies. With the creativity and possibility associated with social networking, there also comes an overwhelming sense of confusion when determining what is going to be the most effective ad type for your product or service. How do you know if you’re spending too much on Facebook (or any other social media) ads? You have to understand a few key ideas before you can be sure:

• Creating a CTA and focus for your ad
• Deciding if an image or video will be best for your ad
• Defining your success metrics to test
• Maximizing ROI by comparing organic and paid advertising

The Key Starting Place for Creating a Social Ad: Focus on a CTA!

CTA, or call to action, is the purpose of your ad. The CTA is what you want your audience to do after they see your ad, whether this is to purchase something, sign up for a subscription, or visit a website for more information. Creating a clear call to action is very important for cutting through the madness on social media to ensure that your ad stands out!

Making the CTA work for your audience is a science that often confuses marketers. Effective social ads will drive a direct action, like a purchase. It works in your favor to be direct with your audience and not waste time! The CTA is clear for your audience, and they’ll appreciate that when scanning through Facebook.

Use the description section to go into a bit more detail about what your ad is about. This helps remove the hesitancy related to your ad. Use descriptive words to sell your product or service and outline your call to action more thoroughly. You can also explain the benefits and features to the product that you’re advertising. The description section should be directly related to your CTA to make it clear to your audience what you want them to do. A direct CTA and effective description will increase the clicks associated with your ad on Facebook!

Using the Marketing Funnel

The “Magical Marketing Funnel” is an important tool to use when determining what your CTA should be. Isolate what the goal of your ad is going to be from a part of the funnel, and then create your ad description and visuals to explain this to your audience. Decide if you want your ad to:

• Generate awareness, affinity, or consumption
• Start a conversation
• Have specific intent like, “learn more”
• Convert your audience
  

Having a clear focus will help create an ad that will communicate directly with your customers and avoid confusion.

Titles, Titles, Titles

After determining your CTA, it’s time to come up with a title and image that will attract attention. Having a clear and catchy title that uses powerful and even controversial language is proven to be more successful than a simply descriptive title. Include numbers in your title to prove your product is better than the competition. The perfect title is key to inspiring interest. Then, use the description to explain what the title is trying to say. This will help keep things streamlined on your customer’s newsfeed and increase potential interest in the product, service, or article.

Image or Video?

Choosing an image or a video is the next important step to constructing your social ad. If you decide to go with an image, choose one that has creative tension with the title. The image should be eye catching and not the same as your title. Interest and tension will encourage people to want to find out more. Colorful, confusing, even abstract images all will attract consumers to your article. Below is a good example of contrast between a title and picture that Slack created to promote how “good it feels” to use Slack for business communication. The image and title don’t have any relation, but their descriptive tagline emphasizes the word “feel”, therefore tying in the images of rainbows and kittens.

However for Facebook, the stats suggest that videos are more effective than just pictures or articles. The majority of the social population on Facebook watches videos. The popularity related to videos and brand advertising is increasing every year. When choosing to advertise with a video, make sure that it’s created for social media consumption. This means that the videos should be short and watched without sound. Most people scroll to a video on their newsfeed without the sound on, therefore, the CTA must be conveyed without volume. This is a challenge, but it can be extremely effective, especially for Facebook ads! Here’s the link to an article that shows 21 great Facebook video ad examples if you need inspiration!

Tracking Metrics of Success!

How do you know if all of these things will even work? To test the success of Facebook ads, before you publish it, add Facebook tracking abilities to your computer to see the ROI (return of investment). Facebook has great analytics associated with Facebook Business Manager that can help you see what’s working and what isn’t. You can also try using Google Analytics which can expand into more than just Facebook ads to include SEO, among other things. Set clear goals to determine success for your ads and track these specifically. Creating these goals will help you to generate true data about the success of your social ads, as well as keep you and your team focused throughout the trial and error process.

Another way to track success is called Custom Audience Engagement. This specifically tracks engagement to see if there’s a correlation between interactions  with the social ad and your brand. You can set this up to see if the publishing of a social ad increases brand awareness or not, thus showing if the ad was effective for your company.

Test many combinations of ads and audience specific metrics to see what is most effective. Maintain your organic ads as well to compare the data between paid and unpaid advertising too. After examining the data, you can determine what kind of advertising yields the maximum ROI for your company!

Wrapping it Up

The testing process is important to determine if your company is spending too much on paid advertising when organic ads would work just fine. Once you decide what kind of social ad you want to run and decide to take the time to run the experiment, you’ll generate important data that will help determine what kind of advertisements are most beneficial for your company.