With over $67 billion dollars spent on social in 2022, navigating the bustling world of paid social media can be a challenge. With a staggering amount of content and ads vying for audience attention, it's crucial to understand that ad relevance goes beyond just keywords. The creative assets chosen by brands play a significant role in capturing attention and adding visual value to your brand. Moreover, strategic use of creative assets can even help reduce costs while effectively reaching your target audience.
To make your brand stand out and reach the right audience, it's important to follow some best practices. Here are a few of our top picks:
Creating Personas: Knowing your audience is the foundation for creating social assets. Asking the right questions eases off the process, like defining the demographics of the buyer, choosing the right set of social platforms, and knowing what problem the product you are selling solves for the consumer. Knowing the pain points and choosing the communication on the right platform with brand tone is a pilot focal point.
Audience Funneling: Marketers need to differentiate their audiences amongst three stages depending on the journey they are on, namely;
Awareness - Product inclusion in consumer lifestyle through real-time images, and videos. Communicating the value proposition at the awareness level amplifies the chances of tapping a ‘Like’, ‘Follow’ or ‘Subscribe’.
Consideration - The aware consumer now would like to know more about your product, hence delivering content that communicates functional value, and utility will be beneficial. It is important to keep the creatives interactive like quizzes, Instagram story questions, Yes or No games, Comments on posts, etc. It will help push your prospects toward making a purchase.
Conversion - Once the prospect has become a customer, giving offers is a great way to keep them hooked and communicate it to them on paid social. Customers attract more customers and that can be done by sharing feedback from customers is a great tactic. Sharing a customer feedback video is useful as well.
Testing: Testing helps understand the top-performing creatives and understand your audience's behavior better. While testing, the below should be considered:
Use data-driven creatives
Decide what behavior you want to learn from the particular test
Design separate creatives you are trying to test
Set the Key performance indicators (KPIs)
Launch and run your ads
Analyze the results and measure if you achieved the results you were looking for
Online Reputation Management (ORM): Using online reputation management as a strategy is a successful tactic to develop a community for the brand. Community management is a rising tactic to develop brand loyalists and the essence of the brand is useful to be shared with online communities.
POVs (Point of View): Developing POVs is a powerful creative strategy that makes the buyer feel as if they are doing the process with you. You gain leverage for lifts in Click-through-rates by implementing Point Of View creative assets.
Optimizing Mobile Creative: With major social media consumption happening on mobile, the brands continue to design creatives only desktop optimized. It has a hurting impact on creating a brand reputation on social with Millennials and Gen Z being absolutely specific. Here are tips for making the mobile optimized creatives that work:
UGC - User Generated Content is trending and trustworthy content for hooking your Target group. With the addition of voiceover and narrations, the content becomes more interactive and sellable.
Video over Static images - Video helps capture the audience's attention quicker than static images. Meta confirms that there was an increase in conversions for the brand implementing a video creative strategy
Subtitles - The users do not necessarily appreciate playback music in their content. And therefore increasing the need to use subtitles in each video content. Using subtitles will keep the audience engaged for a longer period of time, increasing the chances for users to get to the purchase journey.
Capturing the ‘AHA’ moment - With an overburdening of content for audiences, the attention span has gone down and therefore you need to create the “hook” or so-called ‘AHA’ moment of your product in the first three seconds. The use of brand assets like colors, logos, and product value propositions in the most creative messaging is rewarded by the customer.
Resizing of creatives - It is particularly important to resize creatives according to the format you eye to promote. Stories, Display ads, Reels, Organic, and all other possible formats have different sizes. If not taken into consideration, the creative gets cropped while executed.
Customized messaging - Make sure to communicate the benefit for the customer, call-to-action, and a customized message for the audience depending on the stage of the funnel they are in.
Mastering the art of paid social creatives is no small feat, but armed with these best practices, you have the tools to take your campaigns to new heights. Remember to keep your audience at the forefront, tailor your messaging to each stage of the buyer's journey, and optimize for mobile consumption. Continuously test and refine your strategies, harness the power of online communities through reputation management, and engage your audience with captivating point-of-view assets.
Learn more about how we are implementing these best practices for our clients and connect with our team.