Paid social creative is arguably the most important variable within the auction place and can have over a 50% impact on the user’s estimated action. If you want to scale your social media advertising efforts then you need to produce content that’s empathetic for the audience’s consumption habits. Here is the 4 step scorecard we use to build and evaluate paid social videos.
Visualize benefit - 4 points
If anyone’s going to get click on your ad it’s because the benefit of your product is good enough for someone to stop what they were doing and actually click on an ad. The better your creative helps the audience conceptualize how your product can solve their pain the more compelled they’ll become to click through and engage with your brand. The most effective way you can achieve this clarity is visual storytelling to give a stickier narrative and more depth to the audience’s ‘why’ did I just click on an ad. Visualizing your benefit is not adding audio captions, talk is cheap and your viewing audience needs to see how you can fix their pain if they’re going to care about your product.
Captivate - 3 points
With social media advertising, you’re paying for every delivered impression whether your audience engages with your ad or not. You can have the best offer in the world and be like Oprah giving away free cars to anyone who wants one. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the audience isn’t going to get their car because they’re more likely to scroll past your ad and see what their Uncle Charlie is up to than consume your ad. By having a more captivating creative you can stop more thumbs from scrolling to increase exposure to your benefit. This doesn’t mean every intro should have puppies and babies with fireworks in the background, your audience is more intelligent than that and will be their confidence in your brand will be negatively impacted if you use cheap tricks. Instead the creative should capture the audience’s imagination by leading with value that’s relevant to the narrative and your benefit.
Pace - 2 points
Advertising on social media can more like the Blues than EDM. Instead of building up the audience’s confidence and dropping your benefit at the end of the video you want to start the video with the benefit. While this may seem offbeat when compared to traditional media advertising, pulling these strings increases the number of people consuming your benefit. You want the length of the video to be under 30 seconds, preferably under 15, with fluid momentum to avoid the audience’s eye fatigue. This improves your audience’s consumption rates so they can digest more of your messaging. You also want the momentum of the video to be quick and engaging to avoid eye fatigue. This improves your audience’s consumption rates so they can digest more of your messaging. Increasing the likelihood that your ad strikes a chord and gets them thumb to click.
Intuition
The undertones of the creative can give you additional insights into how the ad will perform. This could be a unique video concept, positioning of the offer, using an influencer, or getting a good laugh. Whatever the reason our intuition gives us additional insights that we rely on to determine how well an ad will perform within the marketplace. Add everything up and you get a total of 10. With the platform operating with a free market environment and creative having such a high impact on performance, you can use this scorecard to gain additional insights into how well your ads will perform within the market place.
