1. Social Ads ≠ Traditional Ads

It’s important to remember why people are on social platforms in the first place… and it’s not to see ads… When you create an ad for social, you’re not competing against other ads, you’re competing against the cat video someone could watch if they skip your ad. What I’m getting at here is you have to give people a reason to watch, otherwise they’ll skip your ad immediately. 

To make a successful social ad, you’ll want to create value-add content that people want to watch and figuring out a way to fold your brand (tastefully!) into the messaging. A good rule of thumb is to create ad content that falls into one of these three buckets:

1. Entertain 2. Educate 3. Inspire

These are the kinds of videos people want to watch, so if you don’t want to get skipped you should give the people what they want. 

2. Hooks

Speaking of “not getting skipped”, Hooks are the single most important element of a social ad. Why? Because if your Hook is bad, people will skip your ad immediately.

A “Hook” is the opening 3 secs of your video. It’s your opportunity to entice viewers to stick around for the rest of the video. It needs to have an immediate impact, so focus on eye catching imagery,  bold or controversial statements, a funny set up, or anything that’s going to disrupt a person’s scrolling.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and try things that seems odd or untraditional. 

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3. Keep it Fresh

One of the biggest mistakes brands make when running social ads, is running the same ad for too long. Even if an ad is successful at first, if people keep seeing the same ad over and over, they’re going to skip it. This is known as “viewer fatigue” and it’s very real. The longer an ad runs, the less and less effective it’s going to be.

This is why it’s extremely important to refresh ads on a monthly basis. This ensures that you’re continuing the conversation with people who are potentially interested in your product, and it’s also giving you the opportunity to test new creative that might be even more successful or unlock new audiences.

4. Test, Test, Test

Since we’re on the topic of testing, let’s dive into why testing is so incredibly important when running social ads. One of the biggest differences between traditional ads and social ads, is the ability to get real time performance analytics. This gives diligent ad creators a massive leg up on the competition, since they now have the ability to test out different ad types, ad tactics, messaging, and ad versions to see what’s working best. 

Even when it comes to a singular ad, it makes sense to test multiple (A/B) versions of that ad. A slight change to the opening imagery, or the text, or the audio can have a substantial impact on the overall success of the ad. 

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5. Scale the Winners

The last trick to advertising on social is finding and scaling the winners. When you have a new piece of ad creative that’s ready to run (and hopefully you’ve made multiple versions of that ad) you’ll want to run the ads for a week or two on a moderate budget to see which ads and ad versions are working best. Once you’ve found a clear winner, you can feel confident increasing the spend on the higher performing creative and turning off the underperforms. If you’re doing a good job running new ads every month and testing different hooks, ad types, talent and CTAs, you’ll start to find some ads excel in specific analytics but not every analytic. Maybe one ad has a great thumbstop rate, but not a great hold rate, and another ad has an exceptional conversion rate but a very low thumbstop rate.  

This is a good problem to have because it allows you the opportunity to let the ad’s “powers combine” to make a superhero ad. By taking the winning elements from each of the ads and combining them, you can create a winning ad that captures people’s attention, holds their interest, compels them to click through, and make a purchase. Those are the winning ads that you’re going to want to scale.

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