5 Elements Of A High Performing Social Media Ad — A Startup Founders Guide

👋 Quick question: How much time and money are you spending on your social media advertising? Here’s another one: What kind of ROI (return on investment) are you seeing from those ads?

If just thinking about the answers fills you with dread and despair, don’t worry — we’re here to let you know, you don’t have to keep pouring money into campaigns that don’t work. To run successful, high-performance ad campaigns on social media, you’ll need to understand a few basic concepts and strategies to help you drive customers and start to see an increase in sales. Here, we’ll take a look at some of the elements of all successful social media ads.

🤷‍♂️ A Tempting Good Offer -

You may think the “offer” is the same thing as the product or service you are promoting, but it’s actually more involved than that. In social media ads, you offer is the combined grand sum of your deliverables, price and even how it’s being delivered. It’s your pitch. That means that for a single product, you could potentially have hundreds of different offers.

The offer is probably the single most important element of your ad. You could have a good offer and nothing else and still see results on your ad; but if your offer is off, your campaign is doomed to fail from the start. In order to be successful, your offer needs to clearly communicate how the end result will benefit and change the audience’s life.

📚 Clear, Compelling Copy -

The term “copy” in your social media ads refers to the text or the message you’re communicating to your audience. Good copy consists of a strong emotional hook and a clear explanation of the benefits your customers will gain by engaging with your ad or taking your call to action.

The copy is clearly connected with your offer and should be persuasive without relying on clichés or over exaggeration to make an impact. The most important factor in creating a compelling copy is an in-depth knowledge of your target audience and what will resonate with them.

🎯 Clear Target Audience -

It might be tempting to broadcast your ad campaign to the widest audience imaginable, but successful ads rely on very specific niche audiences. You’ll want to pick a demographic that could benefit from your product or service and then figure out a way to isolate that audience while delivering your ads. For example, if you are targeting women that are interested in high fashion, you’ll want to figure out a certain topic, public figure, or brand that only that demographic would choose.

For example, bigger brands like Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton are known to nearly everyone, but a brand like Khaite that has gained its fashion notoriety more recently will only be known by true fashionistas.

👩‍🎨 Quality Creative -

Your ad creative is basically your ad’s accompanying photo, graphic or other form of media. It should capture your audience’s attention but also help communicate your offer. Don’t let the term “creative” intimidate you either — it doesn’t have to be. One of the best techniques when choosing your creative is searching to see what images come up on Google when you type in your keyword or service; then use those to gauge what images communicate your offer in the clearest way.

👃 The Right Ad Scent -

This sounds crazy, we know, but for your ad to perform well it needs to have the right scent. An ad’s “scent” is a term that refers to the overall feel of the entire ad. Does the offer match the tone of your copy and your creative? Does clicking on your ad take your customers to a page that looks and sounds like the ad? If the answer to any of these is “No,” your potential customers are likely to get cold feet and exit the situation in a hurry.

So, make sure the content and wording in your ad matches that of the landing page and try to maintain a cohesive feel between all of the elements of your campaign.

👇 Let us know in the comments if you agree or disagree with our thoughts! What’s worked best for you guys?