• High-quality ad creatives can help your company’s ads stand out from the competition.
• When businesses try to develop ad creatives on their own, they can accidentally use images that don’t align with their brand or use low-quality photos and videos.
• By working with a skilled ad creative agency, you’ll be able to run ads that meet Meta’s best practices.

Upgrade Your Facebook Ads With an Ad Creative Agency

What’s the first thing you notice when you look at a digital advertisement? For most people, that would be either the photo or the text used by the ad in question. Visual and messaging elements like these are called “ad creatives,” and they play a pivotal role in the success (or failure) of any advertising campaign—including ads on Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Ad creatives are responsible for getting people’s attention and convincing them to use your product or service. According to one Neilsen study, 47% of the sales lift associated with advertising campaigns can be attributed to these campaigns’ creatives (a larger percentage than any other element). With that in mind, you’ll want to put some serious thought into the creatives your own ad campaigns use.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you need to do everything by yourself—in fact, this could lead to all sorts of unexpected problems. Instead, the best way to take your Facebook ads to the next level is to find and work with a skilled ad creative agency.

Understand Meta’s Ad Formats

When you team up with an advertising partner to build ad creatives, you’ll need to know where and how these elements will be used. Meta offers a wealth of advertising formats for companies to choose from, such as:

• Image: Photo-based ads are a relatively basic form of digital advertising, but they can deliver fantastic results if your ad team knows a thing or two about creatives.
• Video: Adding motion to your ads is a simple, effective way to grab viewers’ attention.
• Carousel: If you have several photos or videos to share, consider a Carousel Ad—this ad format allows you to present a gallery of up to 10 images or videos.
• Instant Experience: With an Instant Experience, you can promote your products or services by taking visitors to a fullscreen experience with the tap of a finger.
• Collection: Finally, the collection format presents viewers with multiple products and takes them to an Instant Experience when they interact with your ad.

Watch Out for These Rookie Mistakes

Having an ad format in mind for your campaign can be helpful, but you’ll still need to ensure your creatives are on point. When you try to put together ad creatives without fully understanding what you’re doing, you could encounter common issues such as:

Brand Misalignment

Your ad creatives should be totally aligned with your business’s brand identity. Naturally, you won’t be able to succeed if your ad doesn’t define what your brand is all about.

Overspending on Production Values

Though it may seem counterintuitive at first glance, Meta’s research suggests some videos with lower production values can actually give brands a boost—especially with Gen Zers. One study found that campaigns featuring less polished videos delivered higher ad recall than flashier campaigns did.

Using Subpar Creatives

Keeping production costs to a minimum is helpful in more ways than one, but this isn’t an excuse to use bad photos and images in your advertisements. If your creatives are low-resolution or poorly composed, you’ll have a surprisingly hard time attracting people’s attention.

Resting on Your Laurels

After you’ve found ad creatives that seem to get the job done, you should be good to go, right? Wrong—even if your images, taglines, or other creatives are working as they should, there’s always the possibility that a different version of these materials could do even better. Because of that, it’s wise to work with an ad agency that understands the basics of A/B testing and other ad testing methods.

What Are Meta’s Best Practices for Ad Creatives?

To avoid pitfalls like these, you’ll need to know that the creatives you plan on using are up to par. To that end, your ad creative agency should be ready to follow Meta’s best practices for advertising materials:

• Use a combination of images and videos. Photo and video ads both have unique strengths, but they work best together. When your digital marketing experts include videos and still images in your campaign, you’ll be able to maximize sales and awareness.
• Make sure you have a strong brand identity. Your company’s logo isn’t the only part of its overall brand identity worth considering. Along with that, you’ll need a brand kit that covers everything from your mission statement and value proposition to your color palette and typefaces.
• Keep things simple. Instead of shelling out for a pricey video shoot, ask your ad agency to take vertical photos with a mobile phone. It definitely requires a professional eye, but from there, they can quickly turn your photos into videos with Reels templates.
• Keep your text under control. Short, focused text is perfect for digital ads. Your primary text should be no more than 125 characters long, your headline text should be no more than 40 characters, and your description text should be no more than 25 characters.
• Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Does your business already have organic posts that are performing well? If so, ask your ad team to expand on the concepts behind these posts in your advertising efforts.
• Put your ad creatives to the test. By testing two different versions of your ad, your ad agency can see which version delivers the best results. Meta’s A/B testing tool and Experiments tool can help simplify the testing process.

Finally, your ad team will need to use their creative expertise to optimize your content for the format you’re leveraging. These details can be highly subjective, so you’ll want to make sure they have a solid track record of performance. 

Valuable Video Content

Creating incredible and effective video content is an art form, and getting it right can be the difference between a winner and a flop. A great ad team can help you:

• Pick the right aspect ratio. When you’re trying to capture someone’s attention with a video ad, filming vertically (a 9:16 aspect ratio) is your best bet. However, you might need to convert your video ad to different aspect ratios for different ad placements—and in that case, Ad Manager’s media cropping tool can help.
• Make sound a priority. Music, VO, and sound effects can all give your ad creatives some added impact. If your ad experts have access to the Advantage+ suite, this AI-powered product can automatically choose a song for your campaign.
• Stay inside the lines. No digital advertiser wants the most important aspects of their ad creatives to be obscured—but if you aren’t careful, Facebook and Instagram’s UI elements could get in the way. An experienced ad agency can avoid this issue by keeping text overlays and essential visual elements within the “safe zone” (that is, outside the top 15% and bottom 35% of screen space).
• Create engaging videos. Digital ads should be entertaining, easy to understand, and relatable to your target audience, but creating content that fits this description is easier said than done. As you might expect, working with industry professionals will give you much better results than you’d get by handling this task on your own.
• Put a face to your name. According to an analysis of Facebook and Instagram Reels Ads, advertisements with a human presence benefitted from a 25% higher click-through rate than other ads. The takeaway is simple: it’s a good idea to give viewers a face they can connect with, whether that’s a professional spokesperson, someone working for your company, or a satisfied customer.
• Share your message right away. In the world of social media, you only have a few seconds to grab a potential customer’s attention. You’ll want your ad team to include the primary message of your ad in the first three seconds of your video.

Perfecting Your Pics

On the other hand, Image Ads can be equally tricky to dial in. Here are some of the areas an ad expert can help you explore:

• Focus on what you deliver. If your business is advertising a product, you’ll need to make sure your images put it front and center, even if your ad team needs to crop your images to accomplish this. Meanwhile, companies promoting services should use pictures illustrating the value their services bring to customers’ lives.
• Keep aspect ratios in mind. As is the case for video ads, your photos need to be framed differently depending on how you plan to use them. Ad formats like Reels and Stories use 9:16 images, Feeds, In-stream, and Carousel Ads use 1:1 images, and Right Column and Search Results Ads use 1.91:1 images. (Ad Manager’s media cropping tool can help you modify your photo ads, too.)
• Don’t skimp on image quality. The fact is, high-resolution images look better no matter where they are—including Facebook ads. Because of that, your ad experts should follow Meta’s recommendations for image quality while assembling ad creatives.
• Make full use of your branding. Typically, people are willing to do business with brands they already trust or businesses that appear to be trustworthy. That’s why images that clearly display your brand’s logo or name are ideal.
• Use text the right way. Text can go a long way toward helping your ad stand out, but adding too much text to your image can result in visual clutter. Your ad agency should use reasonable amounts of text in a clean, modern font that’s easy to read.
• Think carefully about backgrounds and lighting. Even if your marketing firm follows the other guidelines listed here, a poorly lit image or a picture with an overcomplicated background won’t deliver outstanding results. Instead, your advertising images should feature good lighting and simple backgrounds.

Get the Best Results With an Ad Creative Agency

Since creatives are the core of any advertisement, the photos, videos, and text you use for this purpose could make or break your next campaign. And even though anyone can take snapshots on their phone, that doesn’t mean these images are ready for use as professional marketing materials.

In truth, anyone can benefit from the skills and knowledge that a top-notch ad creative agency will bring to the table. That’s why teaming up with Social Ktchn is a great idea—by doing so, you’ll receive exceptional ad creatives built with your brand’s image in mind.

Social Ktchn has been Charlotte, NC’s go-to boutique digital ad agency for decades, and we’re more than ready to deliver the creatives you’re looking for no matter where you are in the US. If you’d like to get started, drop us a line and let’s brainstorm!