If you don’t have people pausing on the timeline to look at your ad, then there’s no way to convert them. So today we’re gonna talk about the different types of ad creative you can use for and how to optimise your Facebook ad creative for better results. We’ll walk you through specific examples of each type and where they’re best used. What we’ll talk about today is not just the dimensions, the colours, or specific ad format recommendations. We’ll talk about the two different main types, the specific styles of those images and videos, and how you can create them. But most importantly, the psychology behind why they work best and where they are best used. So make sure you stay tuned to understand what would work best for you and your business!
How to decide what type of ad creative to use?
The first thing that you wanna consider when deciding on the type of ad creative you’re gonna use is what is the purpose of this campaign? Is this focused on educating, building an audience, or is this focused on direct lead generation? Is this a retargeting ad that’s designed to try and get someone who’s already engaged to finally take that next step. Regardless of the type of campaign, your creative will always be important. Creative stops the scroll and copy converts.
Types of Main Ad Creative
Video
Videos are our favourite types of ad creative. Video could be a regular video. It could also be a boomerang and also an animated GIF.
If we’re talking about regular video, there are several things that you wanna consider. Educational videos are the best to use for audience building. It’s ideal to have a horizontal video with a square canvas, coloured background, large headline, and subtitles below the video.
We’ve also got boomerangs, which can be recorded on your phone through the boomerang app or through Instagram. They’re really just gonna be there to create movement and draw the eye a little bit more. You wanna focus on having people in those and doing an action that does require a bit more movement than you may expect.
Lastly, the animated GIF could be something that you simply find online, or we’ll talk more later about the ways that you can create those.
Images
Now we’re gonna talk about images. The first thing to remember when you are selecting images for your ads is that you wanna try and blend in to stand out. What does this mean? People are used to seeing content from their friends, family, or people they look up to on these platforms. If you have images that blend in and feel organic, a lot more people may stop and look because they don’t necessarily see it as an ad.
A simple way to do this is to simply go through your phone’s camera roll. It’s really that simple. Have people in your images. It can be you as the business owner, somebody within the business or it could even be a customer. It doesn’t really matter. In fact, we would definitely encourage you to have a photo of yourself in your advertising, because even if you don’t want a personal brand, people wanna know who they’re buying from. When they can see a face, they feel more connected to the business automatically.
One important thing to note to optimise your Facebook ad creative – if you have images that are in the 9:16 ratio, you will need to crop those. We don’t suggest using these photos because you may not get what you want in that square format. So with almost all photos, try to use the square format or the 4:5 format. There is a crop option in Facebook ads manager and the resulting photo will take up more space on the timeline. That’s what we want, especially on mobile.
Within images there are also graphics. And by graphics, we mean anything that has text or elements on it. These tend to work best when you’re trying to convey very clearly what it is you’re promoting.
Things to Keep in Mind
In the past, there was a rule that if the image had more than 20% text, it would be disapproved. A lot of people still believe that to be the case, but it’s actually not. I would still encourage you to limit your text in terms of the percentage of your image that it covers. Because again, that’s not what people are used to seeing. And if you do have people in the photo, let those people be the highlight of that image.
You really want to have a nice, healthy mix of standard images, videos and then some of those graphic images. There is a way to test which images your audience responds to the best and that is what we call the post testing strategy. We’ve found that the image that you personally love the most is not normally the one that the audience responds to the best. Because of that, you need to try and separate your personal feelings from the creative that you’re using in your advertising. So it’s very important to test these things on a regular basis and let your audience be the judge!
Tools to Create Ad Creative
InShot is a great tool for editing videos very quickly and easily on your phone. This is a great way to add that square canvas colored background and the text above your video!
Clipomatic is another great tool that limits your videos to 60 seconds and bakes in larger captions.
Canva is an amazing tool for images, and creating animated GIFs.
And finally, there is one additional tool that’s actually inside of Facebook that you can use to create your own slideshows. You’re simply gonna go to your ad section when you’re creating an ad, and instead of selecting an image or a video, you’re going to click on create slideshow so that you can create little slideshow videos!
The final tool we’ll share is called Veed, which is another great one to add captions and does a lot of the same things that InShot will do.
If you’re interested to learn more about the different levels of ads that we discussed today or the different post-testing strategies to really be able to test out different images, stay tuned for our article covering that!
