Beyond copy, timing, budget, Facebook ad creatives are the reason your audience takes a specific action–whether that’s to click on your ad or keep scrolling. That’s why best practices should be applied every time.
6 Best Practices for Facebook Ad Creatives
Ad creatives are the heartbeat of your marketing campaign. It gives life to your message and communicates your brand's mission to your audience in a way that makes them sit up and pay attention. In fact, 75%-90% of an ad's performance is based on its design. Moreover, iOS changes and broadening of targeting options have made creative more important than ever.
In this article, our experts share best practices for making the most of Facebook ad creatives in your campaign. Ready to get a lot more innovative with your marketing? Let’s do this.
1. Use Less Text
You've undoubtedly heard it before: short and concise wins the race. Why? Because it makes your message come off more bold and confident in tone and brand. And although there is no limit to the amount of text you can use on an ad, research shows that ads with less than 20% text perform better.
This implies that focusing on the design of your ads should be your number one priority. The worst thing you can do is cram your ad full of text. Instead, learn to communicate through images by letting your logo, brand, and products tell your story.
When you do use text, aim to make fonts smaller and use fewer words to guarantee that the message is contained in the image.
2. Go Mobile-First
Most people access social media through their mobile devices. Approximately 81% of all Facebook users do so strictly through a mobile device. What this means for you: to optimize your ad campaign, it’s pretty much mandatory to use Facebook ad creatives who are experts in mobile. Moreover, Zuckerburg is pushing Reels as its answer to TikTok. Because of that, slideshows are working well and are an easy way to create a video without doing expensive video production.
With that said, you'll want to ensure that your ads are visually attractive, engaging, and suited for small-screen users.
Best Practices
Use Vertical Videos
Most people consume content on their phones while holding their devices vertically. It’s smart to take advantage of this tendency by formatting your ad to fit a vertical screen space. Just this one move automatically makes your ads more watchable for mobile users.
Trim Your Videos
Mobile consumers flip through content quickly. It takes a really good ad creative to grab their attention. Once you do catch a user’s eye, it's critical to get your message across as quickly as possible. Ideally, your ads should be 10-15 seconds long, which optimizes for mobile consumer behavior and also qualifies your ad for key placements, like in-stream and stories.
Include Subtitles
When are we not multitasking? Mobile users access social media at different times of the day, usually while juggling other activities. That means they may not always be able to watch your content with the sound on. Using subtitles enables you to articulate your message even while your audience is watching, not listening. In addition to being practical, subtitles and captions add to the visual appeal and watchability of your ads.
3. Capitalize on the Carousel Feature
Facebook's carousel feature allows marketers to show multiple images or videos within a single ad, each with its own headline, links, and CTA. It's like showing multiple promotions for your business within a single ad.
Carousel ads perform 10 times better than regular ads. With carousel ads, you can flesh out your ad campaign by showcasing multiple ads in any order you want and your audience can simply scroll through your carousel by swiping on their mobile device. Clever Facebook ad creatives understand how to make the most of carousel ads by using them to tell a story, explain a process, or highlight the best features of a product.
Best Practices
Show Your Best Cards First
With Facebook, you can test each carousel card and arrange them based on performance before your ad goes live. This allows you to put your best cards at the beginning of your ad and put low-performing cards at the back end of the ad. Better yet, eliminate them altogether. Putting your best foot forward is particularly useful if your carousel doesn't tell a sequential story and you can place them in any order.
Use Cohesive Images
Don’t make users jump through hoops to follow the thread of your message by linking carousel images that don’t have anything to do with each other. Your ad images should feel they’re all part of the same ad, creating a sense of seamless continuity. Use the images from the same shoot or images with a similar color palette and design. The continuity adds to the visual appeal of your ad and makes users feel like they’re part of an ongoing narrative.
Each Card Should Have a Link
If you're promoting multiple products, each carousel card should contain a link to the product that it features. Why? Because if a user is thinking of investing in your product and a CTA button is nowhere to be found, you just lost a lead. Be strategic about linking each card to the appropriate landing page, too, for maximum effectiveness.
4. Animate Your Ad
Since visual ads are the most effective way of communicating with your audience, animations take the "show and tell" model of advertising to the next level. After all, users have probably already come across hundreds of promotional ads with the cliche voice-overs and one-liners to sell a product. Give them something fresh! Animating your ad is an entirely different form of visual advertisement and allows you to play around with various styles, effects, and ideas.
Benefits of Animated Ads:
Raising Brand Awareness
If you have a large network of existing customers and warm leads, then the usual explainer ads might suffice. However, to gain a new audience and entice customers to your brand, you need to stand out from the marketing crowd and liven up your ad campaign. Animated ads will definitely make you seem different—in a good way.
Sales Increase
Animated ads have a proven track record of enhancing marketing performance. This is mainly because animations give marketers an original way of hooking audiences with their ads. That’s because animations are still relatively new to the marketing scene and their novelty gives them an edge over traditional marketing methods.
Product Launch
Animations work best when they’re working hard to showcase new products to your audience. When launching something new, it's important to grab your audience's attention from the get-go, then quickly demonstrate what makes your product awesome. Engaging animations strike the perfect balance between visual appeal and functionality.
5. Tell Them What You Want Them To Do
The goal of advertising on Facebook is to bring members of your audience into your sales funnel to begin their buyer's journey. One of the later stages of that journey is a customer clicking on your Call To Action (CTA) button. That button is a big deal: your CTA is what you want users to do after seeing your ad.
You’ve definitely seen ads with buttons that urge you to "Sign Up" or "Join Now". These are CTA buttons and Facebook provides you with the ability to choose them for your ads. The CTA button you select has a massive influence on the ROI of your ad campaign.
How?
Let's assume you're advertising a product to a cold audience. It’s the first time they've interacted with your brand and after watching your ad they see a CTA inviting them to Sign Up. This tactic may come across as too salesy because you're asking them to enter and exit your funnel in just a few minutes. On the other hand, a "Learn More" CTA is a lot more sequential and likely to yield more positive results to a cold audience. Be smart about the right CTA button that matches both your audience’s mood and campaign objective for optimum results.
6. Get Help From Professional Facebook Designers
Making the most of the carousel feature and animations is just the tip of the iceberg for Facebook ad creatives. There are so many more creative variables that can sway your campaign's ROI in either direction: the wording of the text, fonts, color palettes, ad placement, images, and dozens of other details that can make or break your advertisement.
While you can certainly experiment with publishing ads the DIY way, let’s be real: having professionals on your side guarantees a quicker ROI. At Social Ktchn, that’s what we do. We're the mom-and-pop shop of paid social media agencies and we're here for you and your business dream. Our goal is simple: to help businesses grow through successful social media campaigns. If you’re ready to get creative, we’re here for it.