How to Approach Paid Social Creative

Creative has long been the buzzword on paid social and now, more than ever, brands should be prioritising creative strategy over everything else if they want to see success on the channel.

With the rise of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, broad audience targeting and less reliable tracking, creative is now the single most important input of a paid social account. 

So how should you approach it?

Funnel Approach

Whilst the effectiveness of accounts with a clear marketing funnel structure - Awareness, Consideration, Conversion and Loyalty - has reduced, the principles of the old ways should still apply to your new creative approach.

An account still needs:

• Engaging awareness creative that introduces your brand and creates an emotional connection with your target audience that is seeing it for the first time.

• It needs mid-funnel, product or category-focused creative that moves a user closer to conversion.

• It needs content to get potential customers over the line at the bottom of the funnel.

• And, if it fits with your social strategy, you need content that re-engages existing customers to drive lifetime value.

With the increased simplicity of account structures, the emphasis of account management is ensuring the platforms are spending your budget strategically.

We want to see creative variety in an account and a healthy mix of content that suits users at all stages of the funnel.

One of the biggest pitfalls of accounts that are dominated by sales-focused Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns is that see brands spend upwards of 70% of their budget on dynamic content.

Awareness-style content doesn’t stand a chance in these campaigns if grouped with conversion-focused ads. 

That’s a problem, because paid social should have a much bigger role to play in your digital strategy than just driving sales.

Creative Variety

Creative variety is key in an account, but it doesn’t need to be overwhelming. 

We want to test content to refine your approach so you can produce assets that we know will work and connect with your target customer.

A comprehensive creative strategy should have:

1. A wide variety of ad formats - Make sure you continue to test different formats and don’t get stuck in your ways just because one format has worked well in the past - we want to see video content and images applied across all format types.

2. You need content from a variety of sources - High production and UGC-style content, creative from influencers, and feed-based imagery.

Fatigue is likely to set in if your ads always look the same. Don’t be reliant on one type of content - just because the UGC is so prevalent now, it could fatigue in the future when everyone is using it.

3. Similarly, a variety of content styles is important. Serve content that is shot in your studio as well as in the real world. Test flat-lay assets, ads focused on graphics and combinations of all these types of content.

Creative Testing

We want to overlay that approach with a testing framework to determine not only what works from a format, source or style perspective, but also what messaging engages your audience.

And we can break these into testing pillars:

• What are your brand’s USPs: Map out everything that you love about your brand, do you know what resonates with your audience? Is it your brand story, particular categories, focus on sustainability or content shot in-store?

• Test more generic Paid social best practices: Have you run ads focused on social proofing, reviews, featured publications or whitelisted content?

So, broadly speaking what makes a good ad?

We could talk for hours about this topic and this is something that varies heavily by your target demographic and your industry. 

But, as a standard - clear branding, bold overlays, and a focus on video content is key. You need to create consistency across your content so that you're immediately recognisable to your target audience across multiple social platforms, your website and other digital channels.

If I were to pick one creative framework as a standard, it would be Hook & Reward. The growth and popularity of TikTok has made this type of content effective across all digital channels:

• The hook is what grabs your audience’s attention. What’s going to pique their interest?
• The reward is your solution. How do capture that interest? How does your brand solve your target customer's problem?