Optimize the best strategies to make your Facebook advertising stand out to keep driving customers to your business and reach your goals.

Looks matter. It’s a simple and undeniable truth. In marketing, visual impact is just as important as focused targeting.

When it comes to promoting your brand on Facebook, the best way to stand out and leave a good first impression is to deliver great creative. This goes beyond inspiring content, strong images and vibrant colours. It requires cohesive, engaging design that captures your target audience’s attention and relays your brand’s key message in just a few seconds.

This is becoming even more challenging as a growing number of businesses tap into the reach of Facebook and increased mobile device use changes how people consume content.

Fast fact: People consume content 41 per cent faster from a mobile news feed than from a desktop news feed. They also recall the mobile content at a significantly higher rate.

Postmedia Solutions has pulled together six best-in-class Facebook creative ideas for small business to help you stand out.

Know your customers

How would you describe your target market, the key group of consumers who will gain the most from using your products and services? Taking the time to create detailed buyer personas for each of your market segments will help you understand what motivates your ideal customers, the challenges they face and how to best influence their decision-making.

Once you have a clear picture of who your ideal customers are, you can design Facebook ads with the visuals and messaging that will inspire them to choose your brand. An added benefit: buyer personas will also provide the information you need to serve your customers better.

Tip: A buyer persona is a fictionalized version of your ideal customer. It should include personal information, such as their age, where they live and work, how they spend their time online and off, their likes and dislikes, and their interests.

Choose high-quality images that tell buyers who you are

What story are you telling potential customers with the images you share? Visual content is a critical part of any social media marketing strategy. Take the time to select the images that best represent you and will appeal to your ideal customers — wherever they are.

Facebook accounts for 80.4 per cent of social media referrals to e-commerce and retail sites in the United States. To make the most of the power of Facebook advertising, run multiple campaigns and adapt your ads and images to target specific geographic regions.

The social media giant recommends using multiple images, known as carousel ads. These help boost engagement and creativity, and strengthen your messaging. Lifestyle images will help engage prospective customers, while product images are more attractive to people who have already visited your website to check out your products.

The size of the image matters. To make the most impact, creative should take up the whole screen. When designing mobile ads, go vertical because most people hold their phones vertically. This will maximize the screen space and help your ad stand out.

There are several online resources to find high-quality images, including  Unsplash, Pixabay,  iStock, CompFight and MorgueFile.

You can use free online tools, such as Pixlr Editor, Snappa and  Canva, to edit images for extra impact. Editing images can help you leverage negative space and vibrancy — two big difference makers when it comes to standing out on social media.

Tip: Animated ads are more likely to stand out in a Facebook News Feed. The social media platform offers free templates that will automatically animate Stories ads.

Tap into emotion

People want to know how you can help them, but they also want to feel an emotional connection to what you’re offering. Knowing what makes your target customers tick can help you design ads that focus on the user experience and create an emotional response.

Tip: Keep text short, clear and crisp. Research shows the human brain needs just two to three seconds to engage with most desktop ads and trigger a positive or negative reaction. This drops to 0.4 seconds for mobile ads.

Use videos

According to research conducted by the Mobile Marketing Association, video ads are twice as likely to create an emotional response as static ads.

This is particularly true of Facebook users. More than 1.25 billion people visit Facebook Watch to discover and share videos. For marketers, video offers a creative, engaging way to show viewers your brand’s personality and what you’re all about — and build a competitive advantage.

Video ads can be shared in Facebook Video Feed, Stories and News Feed, as well as in the middle of other videos (a.k.a. In-Stream).  

Facebook recommends these tools to help build videos: Hyperlapse, Boomerang, Videoshop and Adobe Spark.

Help your target audience choose you

You created your advertising strategy to get people to buy from you. To help make sure they do, include a strong call-to-action (CTA) in your ad campaigns. This is your opportunity to be direct with potential customers and tell them to do something specific, like visit your website or your store. Including a CTA button in your ad will reinforce the message and make it easy for them to do what you’re asking. Test your designs and targeting

Consumer behaviors are always changing. To make sure your ads are appealing and resonate with your target customers — and that you’re targeting the right people — create and test multiple ad designs, copy and images. Facebook has made this easy by offering marketers the ability to split test ad campaigns created anywhere on its platform.

A split test, also known as A/B testing, allows you to compare ads to help you create high-performing ads. You can test creative elements and you can also test the same ad on different audiences.

Tip: Stick to the recommended dimensions when it comes to designing Facebook ads, otherwise they’ll be resized to fit its format and won’t look as good.

Creating strong, effective social media advertising is critical to getting potential customers interested in your brand. It’s complex and involves the right targeting, vibrant visuals, inspiring copy and cohesive design. To stay relevant, campaigns evolve to keep up with consumer behaviours. Experts who know how to create high-performing creative can make sure your ad campaigns deliver results.