Very Basic Guide To Social Media Ad Design Strategy

Modern customers spend, on average, 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media each day. It’s more time than they spend watching TV, reading newspapers, or browsing blogs.  Due to this trend, social networking websites are becoming one of the best platforms for placing ads.

If you are considering running a social media ad campaign for the first time, I have some useful tips that you may find useful. Today in my article, I will focus on the designing aspects; what you can do to improve your social media ad design strategy and boost your marketing efforts. Let’s get started!

Why is ad design strategy important?

Do you doubt whether you need to invest your time and money in building a social media ad design strategy? Take a look at the following statistics:

• According to the estimates by some digital marketing experts, most customers are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day. Naturally, customers tend to ignore most of the ads. They notice only those ads that have a catchy design and appealing message.
• Poorly-designed social ads create a negative emotional response in less than a second. It means that if you design your ad the wrong way, it will bring your brand more harm than good.

The quality of ad design will define the success of your marketing campaign and make a long-term impact on your brand. I'm sure you agree that an ad design strategy should not be underestimated in order to maximize your campaign efforts.

Think like a customer

The better you know your target audience, the more effective the ad design strategy you will create. Are you clear about your target audience? If yes, that's great, but if not, you're probably not yet ready to create ad campaigns because it's important to define your current potential customers (age groups, professions, geographically, etc). 

Now you try analyzing your advertising design from a customer's perspective; think about what kind of design would appeal to you the most if you were your target audience. The questions you may want to ask yourself include;

• What kind of topics and ideas do resonate with your audience? 
• What kind of visuals does your target audience find the most engaging? For instance, short videos, memes, 360 photos.
• What colors should you use to grab your target audience’s attention?
• What triggers (e.g., colors, words, images) can you use to generate an emotional response?

Basically, you need to find out what type of social media content your target audience prefers to consume and then design an ad that falls in the same content category. For instance, if your customers adore fun memes, you should leverage memes in your ad design strategy. 

Maintain brand consistency across platforms

You want to make your brand more recognizable. To do so, it is important to maintain brand consistency across all your products (such as packaging if applicable), website, publications including social posts, and advertisement copies. When designing an ad, make sure to use elements that define your brand's visual identity. 

Ideally, you need to refer to a style guide, a document that describes all details related to the design of your brand, including logo, colors, and fonts. If you don’t have such a document, you can create one from a ready-made template. (Canva explains step-by-step and its tool can help you kickstart.) By using a style guide, you will achieve consistency in design and make your brand more memorable whether you use a professional writing service or create ad copies in-house.

What will happen if you ignore this piece of advice and design a social media ad using random fonts and colors? Your customers will not recognize your brand and will not respond to the advertisement. As a result, your social media ad will not work as effectively as it could.

Test your ad design ideas

Testing is one of the most important steps of your social media ad design strategy. Why?  Because you never know for sure how your target audience will react to your new ad in general and some of its design elements in particular.

What can you test to improve your social media ad design?

• Fonts
• Font colors
• Call to actions
• Placement of logo 
• Size of the logo 
• Visuals – images and videos (for instance, photo of your product vs. photo of your happy customer)

Let’s say you don’t know which font color to choose: black or blue. You can create two versions of one ad (version A – black font, and version B – blue font) and run a test. For instance, you can show each ad to 100 users and then choose an advertisement with a higher click-through-rate. 

If you want to design a Facebook ad, you can A/B test your ads using Ad Manager. If you create ads for other social media platforms, you can set testing manually. Just keep in mind that you need to test one variable at a time to gain more accurate and easy-to-analyze data.

Image size guide

Each social network requires specific image aspect ratio (dimension) to advertise on the platform, but the requirements change from time to time. For example;

• Facebook - 1200 x 628 pixels
• LinkedIn - 100 x 100 pixels
• Pinterest - 1500 x 1000 pixels, etc.