Is your eCommerce, retail or fashion digital marketing team keeping up with emerging trends and new innovative styles in paid social advertising? If you’re not sure, you’ve come to the right place to find out what your company should be incorporating in your next paid social ad campaign.
Your paid social advertisements need to be visually compelling, but they also must have the right creative execution to convey the characteristics of your company’s services and products. However, if you’re not looking at the range of possible creative executions, then you aren’t entirely utilizing your ad campaigns to live up to their full potential.
The old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” shouldn’t apply when it comes to paid social advertising. One actually could say “if it ain’t broke, make it even better!”—with new creative executions, of course. Testing and iterating creative execution are important and align with the success of your paid social ad campaigns and eventually your bottom line. So where does one start?
Well first…
Stay Up-to-Date with Ad Trends
As they say simple is always in style, and always trendy—so first and foremost, keep it simple. A compelling, clear and straightforward creative message is one that can surely resonate with your audience directly.
As your digital marketing team starts to up the ante in creative testing; find out what your market and other brands are doing in each respective social ad channel. More importantly, what are they doing that you aren’t?
Secondly…
Implement New Design Techniques to Align with Ad Strategy
Think about what it takes to catch your attention nowadays. If an advertisement is not grabbing your attention, it’s probably not grabbing your audience’s attention either. It’s not all just about having vivid images and eye-catching colors. It’s about making sure your creative execution aligns with your ad strategy and will resonate with your audience. These design trends and techniques should help you align closer to your creative execution and ad strategy:
Gradients: Gradients are a design trend that have been popular in all parts of web design and advertising. They assist in giving advertisements a pop in color and contrast.
Overlays: Overlays, specifically badges, help give value props and price points a clear way to stand out from other text and image elements in your advertisement.
Flatlays: This trend resonates with photographic imagery where the product displayed is photographed from above, which gives the viewer a holistic view of the product laid out.
Animated GIFs: These are images, or elements within an image, that change on a continuous loop.
Cinemagraphs: These allow you to select a portion of the image and set it in motion, while the rest of the image remains still.
Stop Motion: Think of these as static images within an object that are moving in incremental frames and strung together in a sequence to show slight, but noticeable movements.
Video Ads: As the name implies, these are video-based advertisements that highlight a product or service. They’re perfect for telling a story about your brand and distinguishing your approach to business.
Text Animations: These are ads where images may be static or dynamic, but the text is constantly changing to accentuate features and benefits or draw attention to your advertisement.
Micro-interactions: You’ve seen micro-interactions if you’ve ever seen a pulsating button flashing “SHOP NOW” or “LEARN MORE” within an advertisement. This trend has been popping up and catching the audience’s attention by focusing the eye on a single, all-important task or call to action.
Transition Animations: Transition animations can be text transitions, image transitions, or transition between video frames capping off one segment leading into another segment. Transition animation techniques help keep your audience engaged with your advertisement which in turn increases their chances of interacting with your advertisement.
Lastly…
Eliminating Ad Fatigue
Think about today’s tech-savvy audience and how often they’re inundated with advertisements through the various social channels. It’s hard to really stand out, and it’s too easy to tune it all out. The more your audience sees your advertisement and does not act, your bottom line KPIs will suffer as a result. Using creative trends to continue to make your advertisements even better is a way to eliminate the fear of ad fatigue. This will ultimately not only help serve your bottom line but set you apart from the competition.