Massimo Chieruzzi is a journalist, speaker and CEO of AdEspresso, a self service tool to help Small and Medium Businesses succeed in Facebook Advertising. In the constant quest to find the perfect formula for Facebook Advertising, he has analyzed more than $50 Million dollars of ads across every country and industry. He shares all his findings in AdEspresso University.
With more and more brands and businesses flocking to advertise with Facebook Ads, the competition for your users’ attention—and their clicks—is harder than ever.
Having a well-designed ad that can motivate your specific audience will make the difference between whether or not your ad converts or not. Designing an outstanding Facebook Ad can seem like a difficult feat, but when you’ve got the right strategies and techniques in place, it’s much easier to accomplish.
To help you create ads that grab your users’ attention and convert, I’ve compiled a list of 6 tips to design an outstanding Facebook Ads.
1. Create Urgency
If you’re able to create a sense of urgency with the offer or content on your ad, you’ll see a lot more conversions. A sense of urgency will drive users to act right now, instead of thinking “well I’ll remember to come back to this later,” which they rarely ever do.
To create urgency, you want to alert users to a limited supply of something. That can be a dwindling supply of limited edition products, or time that’s running out.
Key phrases to create urgency include:
- While supplies last
- Before it’s too late
- Only x hours/days left
- One day only
- Last chance
This Groupon creates urgency with a limited time offer.
Visual cues to create urgency, if relevant to your ad, can feature clocks or countdowns, though highlighting the urgent nature of your offer is often most effective through your copy and allows for a more relevant image.
No one wants to miss out on a great opportunity, and reminding them that your offer and opportunity is in limited supply can help your ad convert.
2. Use Sequenced Ads
Just going off the exposure effect, continued exposure to a brand’s ads can cause a user to like or trust that brand more. This can mean that they become more likely to click. But then there’s the downside: if a user sees the same ad multiple times, the frequency of the ad gets high, and they might actually be less inclined to convert.
The solution to this problem is to use sequenced ads, or a series of related but different ads that are shown to the same audience. These ads focus on one sustained call to action throughout the different ads, and offer different reasons or benefits for why users should take that desired action.
Facebook did a study and found that when users were exposed to sequenced ads, they were 87% more likely to visit a landing page, and there was a 56% increase in subscription rates among those who visited the sequenced ads compared to those who viewed non-sequenced ads.
Sequenced ads lead to increased exposure, building brand awareness and rapport with interest users, but it keeps the frequency down and your ads interesting, leading to more conversions.
3. Keep the Text Brief
Keeping the text and copy brief on your Facebook Ad often bodes well for engagement and conversions. Users have to put in less work to see what you’re offering, and your CTA will stand out more.
At AdEspresso, we’ve found that the most popular headline amongst users is only 5 words long; it’s brief and to the point, but still descriptive enough. This is also easy for users to read, and they can grasp what you’re advertising before they lose interest.
This ad from Modcloth has text that is brief and to-the-point, and it gets it’s message across quickly.
The ad post text (the text above your image) and your description (the text below your image and headline) can both be longer than the headline, but still need to be brief; the ideal ad post text is about 14 words, while the ideal description will be around 18 words. The concept here is the same—it offers just enough to get your users interested enough to click without drowning them in information.
Keeping the text brief goes for your images, too; Facebook’s 20% rule requires that text makes up no more than 20% of your image.
Save all the details for your landing page, where interested users will be happy to find them, and keep your in-ad text brief and to the point to create strong copy for a well-designed ad.
4. Create Ads For Unique Customer Types
Within your whole target audience, there will be different niches and sub-niches within it. A sports equipment retailer, for example, will have an audience than is interested in fitness, but that breaks down into sections of the audience who only run, do yoga, lift weights, or play tennis. By focusing those niches within an audience, you can design an ad specifically for your different customer niches with buyer personas that increase conversions.
Banana republic has different audience members; men and women, with casual and formal clothing. They separate their ads accordingly.
Singling out different customer types and creating ads with images and copy that appeals specifically to them will help you create stronger ads in general; they’ll be more focused, you’ll be able to find better benefits and features that will connect with your audience, and you’ll gain more conversions. The more relevant to your audience the ad design is, the better off they’ll perform.
5. Always Test Multiple Designs
When you want to design an outstanding ad, you always want to test multiple designs—even if you think you’ve created and designed the best ad of all time.
I recommend that for every ad you want to run, to create 4 variations of it and test each with split testing.
This offers several benefits. The first is that you’ll be able to identify which ads are performing well and which aren’t. You can change or stop the ads that are under performing, funneling all your ad spend to the ones that are doing well. This also will increase the relevance score on your campaigns, which lowers the cost of your ads. And helps to keep your ads more interesting for users; they’ll see different variations of your ad, with different images and/or copy, and just by having multiple different looks to the same offer you can increase conversions.
While Blue Apron’s two ads are presenting the same offer, they have different images, headlines, and ad post and description text, and one has much more engagement than the other.
Finally, testing your designs over and over again will help you to find trends in what works with your audience and what doesn’t. This will strengthen your overall ad design (and lower your cost) overtime, as you can continue to design ads that are more and more relevant to your particular audience.
6. Consider Hiring Someone to Create the Ad Image for You
Not everyone has the tools, time, or ability to create great images for your ads or Facebook banners, and that’s ok. Thanks to the growing options available on the internet, there are plenty of places you can find someone to create these images for you. This saves you the hassle of creating them yourself.
Final Thoughts
There are a lot of factors that go into creating an outstanding Facebook Ad that will perform well, and these 6 tips can help increase conversions of all types. When you’re able to create strong ads that perform well, not only will you increase conversions, all the engagement on the ad will increase your relevance score and will actually lower the amount you’re paying per action/conversion/click taken on your ad.
What’s your experience with Facebook ads? Let us know in the comments.
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