Facebook advertising: Crafting a better Facebook visual.
Facebook advertising requires many varied ingredients to come together to realise an ultimate digital marketing goal. Take a minute to watch this little vid.
A Few Good Creatives
The line that you should print and stick somewhere prominently is
“We write great ads or people die.”
It’s a bit extreme, to be sure, but it drives home that crafting a message and making it creative will set you apart from your competitors. Facebook is the one space where it’s highly competitive. Its also a space that you only really have a maximum of three seconds to grab a user. Remember people are scrolling through Facebook and not staying in one place for any length of time.
This post seeks to show you how to craft and deliver a Facebook ad that works to attract attention and how to convince the user to click the ad that you are paying to serve to them. There are a number of factors: The first is the most obvious, find someone who can understand the power of visual thinking. Doing a Google search and then just taking any image that looks pretty, will not do it, in fact you may be breaking copyright rules by doing so. Ultimately hiring a graphic artist who understands how to craft a visual will go a long way to providing you with Facebook ads that work.
Creating the best visually appealing Facebook ads
The following are some examples of great Facebook advertising that work. Keep in mind boosting a Facebook post that is essentially someone else’s content will probably give free advertising to the original poster. You may get likes and shares, they will get viewers and followers for free. So always keep your content original. Also keep top of mind why you are boosting the post or creating the ad. Your digital strategy must contain a goal. You goal should never be “get more likes” your goal must entail a recovery on the money you spend to advertise. You must at least turn some of those spent clicks generating revenue.
Facebook advertising is less about hard sells and more about engaging responses from potential customers.
Visually Facebook would prefer that you have beautiful, stunning visuals to attract attention. In most cases this is achievable. Sometimes adding text is unavoidable, but if you follow some simple rules you will get maximum exposure for your ads.
Facebook’s 20% rule is a key ingredient to having a successful Facebook advertising campaign. What is this 20% rule? Simply put, no image appearing in an Facebook ad can have more than 20% of its area covered by text. See these examples below:
In recent times, Facebook has relaxed this rule, but it impacts your chances of the ad being served if the image has more text. Let me be clear on this: Facebook ads are not press ads. They work better with no text in the image. Your branding is also regarded as text, so design your ad image with an area designated for you logo. So those fancy headlines your press ad has for your promotion, may work against you on Facebook. If you would like to check how much of your image contains text. Use Facebook’s own handly tool. Just upload the image and Facebook will tell you how your ad will do.
You can also just use this template in Photoshop or Illustrator or any Image editing software you prefer.
Facebook Advertising image sizes
On the internet you design for mobile devices first. This is a web design requirement where 60% of all website traffic comes from a mobile device. A general rule of thumb is to create an image that is simply a square, so it works if the device is rotated in a landscape position. A good habit is to have the design stay as much as possible in the center in the event that cropping occurs. Facebook uses the size 1200x628px for their ads but if you are boosting a post, 1200x1200px is fine.
Use the same template as above and you should be ok.
Different types of visual themes that you can employ in your ad
Visual artists can come up with a thousand ideas, but will all work? Not really. What’s important is synergy between the message and the visual and the most basic of these is “Emotional appeal”. Emotional appeal shows a human element that evokes an emotional response. A happy baby, a smiling or angry person, even a cute animal but that doesn’t mean all your ads should have emotional appeal. Some ads require a more serious visual. You know what your audience will respond to based on your particular strategy.
Budget your campaign to test visuals every week. One visual may not work as well as another, there is no definite rule to dictate that success is a guarantee every time. Some visuals will work, some won’t. So don’t be afraid of failure.
Sometimes simple graphics like a graph or illustration may work better for your brand. Maybe you are a financial advisor and one of your ads shows growth for an investment, a upwardly trending bar graph is all you need. Run that in conjunction with a well done headshot of the advisor and it brings across the idea of approachability and expertise. Maybe it needs to be quirky and humourous. Whatever the approach keep it with the DNA of your brand or company.
NOTE: Facebook has partnered with Shutterstock to give you access to thousands of stock images. This can help you in a pinch and its free, but ideally you should find more imagery, especially more local imagery for your market than the generic ones found on a site like Shutterstock.
Color is very important. But the absence of color can also be important.
Black and white imagery if produced properly can grab the attention. If your brand colors are generally muted try to produce advertising visuals that possibly use primary colors that contrast with what you are known for for example. Color plays an important role in keeping a user engaged.
If you know nothing about color theory then there is a free tool online that you can use to help you understand the relationship between color. You can use Adobe’s own color matching system. Play around with the tool and you can discover ways of using color in your visuals. Bright reds or muted yellow, contrast between the stark white of Facebook’s white background and grey text, for example.
Craft great Facebook Advertising
In summary, choosing the right visual for the right audience is crucial to winning the advertising game on Facebook. But a great visual only works with well written copy, since you can’t put information into the visual itself, then make sure you write a proper headline and body copy in the ad, and keep in mind that space is limited. If you’d like more information on Facebook advertising you can go here to the Ultimate Facebook Ad Types Cheat Sheet or sign up for AdMocks and experiment with creating different ads and see how they look with your copy.
If you’d like further information or would like to share your own learnings please comment below or get in touch and let’s build some great Facebook advertising before people “die.”