In recent years everyone has set up an e-shop, and they use social media advertising to bring new customers and visitors to it. Sometimes their advertising is right and sometimes it is wrong, but how can you judge an ad? And how do you come up with smart advertising ideas?
The only measure that can judge social media advertising , or any ad for that matter, is whether or not it reaches its goals.
Online, everything can be measured, so we can tell fairly quickly and very accurately whether an ad is reaching its goals.
What types of ads are there?
To check whether an ad is reaching its goal, we need to look at it in terms of its type. Ads fall into a few main categories:
- Awareness
- Traffic
- Sales
These types of ads of course have their own subcategories, and so on. In short, an awareness ad could be one that tells people about our new online shop or that we have opened a shop in a new location. A traffic ad, on the other hand, could be one that brings more users to our page (whether that is on Facebook or a website). Finally, of course, sales ads are for conversions (sales, for example).
How we judge whether an ad has worked
Each of these categories has its own measure for judging whether an ad is successful. For example, in the first category we want as many people as possible to see our ad, while in the second we want as many people as possible to visit our site.
When to run each type of ad
For our ad to succeed, it has to suit the situation and the stage our product, or our business in general, is at.
If we run sales ads for a new product, they are bound to fail. The same goes for an e-shop: if we run sales ads before running awareness and traffic ads, the results will be very small.
In e-commerce, and online in general, patience is a virtue. Sales and awareness don’t come overnight, unless of course we are talking about established brands.
What a successful, well-made ad looks like
Many factors play a part in an ad finally achieving its purpose.
Ad creative / smart advertising ideas
The first rule of ad creative is that it should be high in quality and visual appeal, and as imaginative as possible.
High-quality creative (image or video) gives the impression that what we will see when we click on the ad will also be high quality (whether that is content or a product, if it is an ad for an online shop). If it is an engagement ad (for example on Facebook or Instagram), attractive creative will greatly increase engagement.
It is very important for the creative to match your audience. In other words, if an ad is aimed at older people and women, we shouldn’t put a young girl, let alone a young boy, in the creative for our ad.
Take a look at some really beautiful and clever ads, with the right colours for the age group they mainly target.
Ad copy
The text of our ads must get our message across. It should be clever and short, give all the information we want and create some feeling or need in the user (for example a sense of urgency or a feeling of love).
In ad copy, it is vital that the first few words “hook” the “customer” and make an impression, so that they carry on and read our whole message.
Below is a very powerful piece of copy from WWF
The ad audience
We mentioned our audience above, and that both our message and our creative must speak to it in the right way.
What types of audience can an ad have?
First of all, we need to understand that there are mainly 3 types of audience.
People seeing the ad for the first time.
People who have visited our page once and may have added something to the basket, in other words people who are generally interested in our product or service.
People who have already received or bought something from us.
Which ad to run for each type of audience.
For a cold audience, an engagement ad or a website traffic ad would be a good choice. For a warm audience, we could run sales ads on social media and google ads. For a hot audience, we could advertise through email marketing or run targeted ads using a mailing list, since they already know us.
This shows us that we need to create a kind of journey to build the need in the potential customer of our e-shop. This journey is what is known as a funnel. The image below shows a funnel, what affects each part of it and what to watch out for at each stage.
Solve the problem
The most important thing in any ad is to offer a solution to a problem. With video, we could highlight the problem and then show the solution.
In a structured series of ads we could highlight a problem our audience has and then offer the solution through our product or service.
Test and run the right ad
To create the right, smart ad we need data instead of guesses. To get data rather than guess, we need to run tests and compare audiences, creatives and, of course, the copy of our ads.
Whichever ad performs best wins, whether we like it or not! The results will show us the winning ad, and our guesses won’t. On the ad with the best results, we will increase the budget and make the most of it.
All tests should be run across all ads with the same budget, over the same period and at the same times, so that the results are fair and accurate. Finally, the test period should be long enough to give reliable results.
The most important thing in all of this is that your ads follow a wider strategic plan for marketing and promoting your business.
We’re here to help you create smart, effective ads
At web-mate we are here to help you create smart, effective ads that suit your brand. We take care of creating your ads and also of managing your social media, so that your message is consistent and strong. Find out more on the Web-Mate social media page
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