By: Kathryn Hershey
A strong media strategy and clear audience alignment are crucial to reaching target consumers in digital environments where they spend their time. Your work isn’t over once these have been identified, though. When guiding your audience toward your campaign goal, it’s crucial to maintain brand familiarity without inundating your audience with repetitive ads. Show someone the same ad too often, and they might develop ad blindness and begin to overlook your ads. Worse yet, they could become apathetic or begin viewing your brand in a negative light out of annoyance.
This is why we recommend following the recommended creative best practices when developing paid social ads. There are countless best practices out there, but we’ve identified the top five to focus on first. Plus, they work for campaigns across every social platform. These general rules of thumb will keep your campaigns fresh, maintain ad relevancy, and decrease the chances of your target audience suffering from ad fatigue.
- Run multiple ads at a time using visually distinct creatives. Don’t limit your campaign to just one ad. Rotating multiple ads within a campaign can reach more people in your target audience and reduce ad fatigue by lowering the frequency rate at which each ad is seen. Designing ads that stand out from each other helps to leave a distinct impression on the people who see them. Ads that appear too similar might blur together in your prospective customer’s memory.
- Refresh your ads periodically. Routine creative updates help retain audience attention and extend campaign effectiveness. Ads which are live longer than 3 months can suffer from creative fatigue. As a bonus, ad swaps are a great opportunity to test new creative variations to identify messaging that resonates well with your audience.
- Develop creative that will resonate with your core audience. There’s more than one way to tell a story. Explore alternative approaches to communicating your message. Showcasing the rational and emotional benefits can appeal to different attitudes your audience may have.
- Depict people using your product or service. This helps your audience visualize themselves doing so. It can be effective to show people in realistic settings that your target audience can better relate to.
- Test dynamic ad formats and choose assets that make sense together when combined. Dynamic ads are a great option if you have limited resources for creative development. Platforms like Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok let you build AI-powered ads that mix and match assets of your choice. This creates a customized ad experience for your target audience, while leveraging opportunities to produce new ad combinations at the click of a button. Choose one or two ad creatives and copy variations as an easy way to get started.
At the end of the day, what matters most is how your brand’s message is received. Nurturing people through the consumer journey works best when you maintain a rotation of fresh and visually interesting mix of ads. This will keep their attention, support brand awareness and encourage action with each ad impression. In an ever-changing ad ecosystem it’s tempting to “set it and forget it” when it comes to your campaign’s ad rotation. Implementing the five best practices outlined here are going to prime your campaigns for success without burdening your creative team with too many criteria to keep in mind.
