To me, creative is the single most important aspect of your Facebook campaign, for the simple reason that if your creative isn’t engaging, if it doesn’t capture people’s attention in the newsfeed, it won’t deliver you any results, no matter the targeting you’ve used. It will just fail, right there, from the off. Your ad will just be scrolled past and forgotten.

Despite this, I’ve often found that creative is one of the last considerations for clients, who generally jump straight to targeting when their campaign isn’t performing. Getting your creative right, is so so important, that’s why I’ve put together a list of recommendations to help you when you’re building your ads.

Take a look around first!

Before you start trying to put together your own thumb stopping Facebook ad, you can take a look at what other brands are creating on the platform and the types of creative Facebook recommends, by looking in the Creative Hub. You’ll find the Creative Hub in your Business Manager, it’s a great tool that allows you to see what all the big brands are doing and should help to get your creative juices flowing.

It’s also a place where you can start to build your own mock-ups, play around with Facebook’s Video Creator (more on that later) and see how different creatives will look in different placements. If you’re happy enough with your mock-up that you want to use it in your ad, all you have to do is flick a switch, and the ad will show up when you’re creating it in ads manager.

Cut down on the copy

When you see an ad with copy that gets cut off by ‘read more’ on a Facebook ad, what do you do? £10 says you don’t click on ‘read more’ and just scroll right past that ad! I’m right, aren’t it? You owe me £10!

My point is long form copy tends to turn off users and make it less likely they’ll interact with your ad. Users online have a short attention span (and it’s getting shorter!), if they see a piece of copy that’s going to take more than a couple of seconds to read and digest, they’re likely going to scroll past.

Keep your copy short, catchy and to the point. Don’t try and explain something in your body copy (leave that to the copy on your website), entice the user with an offer or a USP, stick in some emojis (I’ve found they work well in catching a user’s attention) and you’re good to go.

Multiple Creatives

I reckon I’ve seen hundreds of campaigns that contain just one piece of creative (usually just a static image). If you want your campaign to be successful, you ideally need to include around 3 or 4 different creatives. It basically just gives the algorithm more choice of what it’s going to serve to who.

As a general rule of thumb, in all my campaigns I usually have one single image ad running, one carousel of images, one video and one story. You could also look to create more advanced ads, like a collection ad or an instant experience. Whatever you go for, just make sure you have more than one ad in your campaign, it’s what Facebook recommends and it’s a small change that could really improve your campaign’s performance.

Video

In my previous section, I mentioned that you should look to include a video ad in your campaign. Now I know, creating videos from scratch isn’t easy. Facebook knows this as well, which is why they’ve added a video creator to ads manager. It’s fairly simple and the videos you can create are quite generic, but it doesn’t take long to put a video together and all the formats are perfectly optimised for the platform.

If you haven’t played around with the video creator yet, once again I’d suggest going to the creative hub, where you can play around with the platform, build all sorts of videos and can import your creations into ads manager if you like what you’ve built.

Placement Optimisation

If you’re running ads with multiple placements, like you should be, you can customise the creative in each placement when you’re creating your ad. This may end up being quite time consuming but it is worth it as now you can make sure that your creative fits with every placement you have turned on, so you can now run the stories and feed placements in the same campaign without worrying one of the placements may have content that doesn’t really fit it.

Summary

There you go, a few tips on getting your Facebook ad creative right. I know it can be time consuming, but making strong creative is really important for the success of your ad campaign and getting it right will be worth it in the long run. If you have any questions, or want help building your ads, please contact us!