The new importance of ad creative

The visibility of accurate paid social data on which to base your decision-making is becoming harder to come by. But there’s one area in which you can still make a huge impact: creatives. 

By Callum Hall, Senior Paid Social Manager

In a period of industry upheaval, the parts of a paid social campaign that you have control over often seem to be dwindling. With one of the biggest challenges in the past year being the iOS 14 tracking update, marketers need to think of much more innovative ways to get the best results.

It used to be all about the perfect audience; now it’s about the perfect creative, which is the only thing an advertiser can proactively alter and experiment with. According to paid social service platform Aitarget, ‘making attractive, engaging, high-quality ads is the pathway to taking your brand to the next level’. 

Where to start

When coming up with a plan on how to approach a campaign, there are many important factors, such as the combination of audience and platforms to target, but the one thing which really has to stand out and stop the user from scrolling is the creative. Now that the average time users spend on mobile content is 1.7 seconds, creatives have to be good to keep them engaged. You have very little time to capture the attention of potential customers - a tiny window in which you want them to stop, and give enough attention to your ad to read the ad copy and follow your call to action.

But the benefits of good creative don’t stop with capturing user attention. Facebook’s auction algorithm now increases the value of high-quality creatives, which is where you get your quality ranking from. This means that if you offer engaging creatives that shape a good user experience, and your competitors don’t, even if you bid less, your creative will win and be shown to users. This is how quality ranking on Facebook works - so clearly it pays to be smart with your creatives, as they can lead to ranking above your competitors and getting better results at a lower cost. 

Good creative briefs

So what elements go into a good creative brief? Firstly, you need to research and understand what your audience is going to react best with based on the personas you’ve built for them. In a recent study by creative automation platform Hunch, ‘59% of customers say that personalisation has an impact on their shopping decision’. Creatives need to reflect what stage of the user journey your audience is on. If you’re trying to target someone new to the brand or someone who’s shown clear intent previously, your creatives need to change accordingly. Generally, video content works well at the top of the funnel to educate users on what message you’re trying to convey; then further down, static images work to convert the user. But it’s important to remember that you need to constantly test, as something that was working 6 months ago may now have been over-saturated and be in need of change. The more often you update ad creative, the more potential you have for improved performance. In fact, marketing trackers show that the most successful brands produce and launch more creatives than the less successful ones.

What to test and why

But not everyone in an audience will react the same way. This is why you need to have a large variety of creative options available to test. One way to do this is through Facebook’s dynamic creative ads, which are a smart way to test multiple creatives (up to 10 at once) within the same audience (along with ad copy) to work out which one works best for each user. The platform can see the user’s previous behaviour on the platform and show them ads from the dynamic creative ad that they feel will work the best, hopefully leading to an action being taken. They also offer much more in terms of ‘generic ads’, leading to less ad fatigue, less annoyed users, and a more steady delivery throughout the campaign. 

Once you have these campaigns running and performing, now’s the time to continue your research on what else you could be testing in the future, ready to bring in when the previous creatives begin to tire. 

Research, create, test, repeat

The key takeaway here is that ad creatives are vitally important to the success of your campaigns, but you need to keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, meaning you need to research, create, test and repeat for long term brand success. 

Find out more about Paid Social at Kinase and how we can help achieve your business goals.