5 Best Practices For Social Media Ad Creatives You Need To Know

Dominika Karamanska ● September 29, 2022 | Paid Media, Social Media

Your creative choices are imperative to capturing your audience’s attention when drafting your social media ad, in addition to your compelling ad copy. After all, it’s the first touch point a user has with your brand, before reading your carefully-drafted text or CTA. This means it directly impacts whether they’ll be interested enough to carry on engaging with your ad past this point. With this in mind, we’ve compiled our top considerations to make sure your ad stands out from the crowd.

1. Make it eye-catching

People have grown accustomed to social media advertisements so it’s extremely easy for your ad to get lost in between all of the content appearing on someone’s screen. A simple stock photo simply won’t cut it anymore if you want to be remembered. Instead, try a fun and graphic design with varying elements, and play around with colours and animations to make your ad stand out from the rest. If you’re struggling with where to start, Pinterest is a great platform for creative inspiration and free tools like Canva offer a variety of templates that are beginner-friendly.

2. Consider what your audience wants to see

Try seeing things from the perspective of your audience and what they want to see on their social media apps. Use your creatives to entertain and draw their attention to solutions that you offer, instead of telling them how great your business is. Always remember that users often use social media as their primary form of entertainment, so keep it light-hearted and easy to digest. If you’re an ecommerce business, try working in platform-specific offers for products into your creatives to entice your audience to complete a purchase. Once you’ve launched your campaign keep an eye out for the frequency of your ads as this will help you to determine when to introduce and test new creatives to keep the campaign fresh.

Here’s an example from tails.com:

3. Platforms and placements matter

Have you ever used the same creative across various social media platforms? Don’t worry, we’re all guilty of this, especially when time is of the essence. However, it’s important to make sure you’re preparing different creatives for your next campaign.

Using the same creative across all platforms doesn’t reflect greatly on your business, so take your time to optimise assets for platforms. For example, you may want to opt for an image on LinkedIn and a more light hearted video for TikTok.

Placements matter, too. After all, seeing a horizontal video in a full screen placement isn’t appealing to the eye, so make sure you get the dimensions right. Platforms like Facebook allow you to crop your creatives for the placements directly in the platform, making it one of the easier ones to use if you’re starting to advertise.

Here’s an example from John Lewis & Partners:

4. Image or video – which should you choose?

Video content is dominating most platforms, even Instagram announced that it’s striving to become a video-first platform. However, the format you choose depends on the types of content that are available to you and the platform you’re posting on, for example an image collage won’t work great on TikTok as users are accustomed to short-form video content. Whereas, since Instagram is still very much in a transitional phase, this kind of content could work well there. Before publishing your campaign, your main consideration when it comes to creative is whether it provides a good user experience.

Here’s an example from Nike:

5. Creative and copy need to be cohesive

Your creatives and copy should compliment each other, rather than fight for your audience’s attention. Each should add value to the ad and enrich the consumer’s experience. Remember to capture your audience’s attention with your creative and remain relevant to the message you’re attempting to convey in your copy.

Here’s an example from L’Occitane En Provence: