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Research shows that creative accounts for nearly 50% of your ads' success.
This step-by-step process will help you design Facebook ad creatives that drive conversions.
Facebook offers several different types of creatives: a static image, a video, a carousel, or a slideshow. This strategy works for any of them. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend to focus on static creatives at first, and then add other types once you gain a better understanding of what works for the brand.
Check out other brands’ ads.
You can check any brand’s ads using Facebook Ad Library. First, take a look at your direct competitors. What value propositions are they focusing on? What words do they use to describe the benefits? What kind of imagery do they include?
Once you have an overview of your industry’s ads, it doesn’t hurt to check unrelated brands: often, you can adapt their angle to your own product.
Define and articulate the key value propositions of your product.
How does your product benefit the user in a tangible way? What makes it different from your competitors? What do your reviews say? What does the user miss out on if they don’t use the product?
Now, try phrasing these answers in a way that sounds like a call-to-action. Pick 5-6 most compelling ones. Using the rest of this guide, design a different ad creative for each.
If you can, create a special new user offer.
Including a first-purchase promo-code in your ads is an additional investment, but it’s likely to help increase the conversion rate, thus lowering your overall cost of acquisition. A discount can help the user overcome the hesitation to try out a new product.
Make a dedicated ad about this offer and mention it in those focused on the general benefits, too.
Start with the image copy.
The value propositions you have defined in step 2 and the new user offer are going to be the text you’ll put on your images.
You might be tempted to use plain photos or videos, especially if your product is aesthetically pleasing. But the reality is that most people don’t pause to read your copy (i.e. the text description that goes along with the ad) unless they were hooked by the creative. Image text featuring an attractive value proposition will prevent your creative from blending into the feed.
Source your assets.
Top-notch imagery is key to great performance, especially if you’re selling a physical product.
You don’t have to pay for an expensive photoshoot — UGC-style content taken on an iPhone can work just as well.
If you don’t trust your own photo- or video-skills, you can collaborate with creators who can help you produce the content. Platforms like Modash, Swipehouse or #paid will help you find the perfect creator for your brand.
If you’re advertising something that is impossible to take a picture of — like an app or a SaaS — you can use stock images, UI screenshots, or even plain text. But you still want your ad to look unique: spend extra time on the layout to help it stand out.
Find a way to “show, not tell”.
You get extra points (and conversions) if your imagery not only illustrates the product in general, but communicates the specific value proposition of your ad. Show the end result of using your product, a happy moment associated with using it, or induce a bit of FOMO.
Create a very specific brief.
It absolutely helps to have a professional designer visualise the concepts you have in your head. But make sure to provide a detailed brief, especially if they aren’t very well-versed in ad design specifically. The easiest way to do that is by including a very specific reference from step 1 and describing how it should be adjusted to fit your brand and value proposition.
If there isn’t a designer on the team or enough budget to hire a freelancer, it’s fairly easy to create a good-looking static ad creative on your own using a free tool like Canva or Figma. Kind of like when working with a designer, your best bet starting out is to find a layout that seems like a good match, and then recreate it using your own components.
Produce the creative in 3 different formats.
Manual placements is something worth testing, but usually, automated placements is the way to go. “Automated placements” means Facebook will show your ad across all its available placements: including Instagram and Facebook feeds, Instagram stories, Messenger ads, and a bunch of other ones.
To make sure your ads look good in each of these, design the creatives in 3 formats: square (1:1), story (9:16), and landscape (16:9). Later you can assign each format to the appropriate placements in Ads Manager.
Keep in mind that the story placements generally don’t have the extra text description: consider adding a bit more text to those to make sure your value proposition is clear enough.
Get a little weird.
The first challenge with any ad creative is to get someone to look at it long enough to at least read your image copy. You can help draw people’s attention by making your ad a little unusual (without detracting from aesthetics or a clear offer).
Maybe make the number take up 1/3rd of the image, start your video with a close-up of someone’s face like this Fiverr ad, or put two sets of sunglasses on your model like in this creative from Klarna.
Test and iterate.
Following this process should help you generate enough ad creatives to start with — their performance will then give you enough data to iterate further.
You don’t need a complicated A/B testing set-up to make sure you’re using the right creatives: ~90% of your Facebook ads should be optimised for conversions, which means Facebook will automatically allocate your budget towards the ads that bring most of them. After a few weeks, sort your ads by the amount of budget that was spent on them, and you will easily understand which creatives resonated with your audience the most.
Then, make your conclusions, use them to guide the creation of 2-3 new ads, and launch them in place of those that performed the worst. Rinse and repeat every couple of months to avoid ad fatigue (i.e. when people have seen your ads so many times that they stop noticing them).