1. Make dynamic advertising more playful
Visually, there are little things that separate your dynamic carousel ads from the competitors.
Why do we say that?
When both your and competitors’ dynamic carousel ads use generic white backgrounds and share many of the same brands, the differences between you become minimal.
If you don't have a large overlap of the same brand, but the product backgrounds are completely identical, you can also say that there is not much that separates you from each other.
The visuals are becoming increasingly important for potential customers to take time to look at your products in their feet.
White generic backgrounds work in many cases, but the more competition the more difficult it is to stand out in the case.
We've been working on this problem for a few years. Many customers work very well to facilitate feed-stop design. Below you will see a little bit more about how we have attacked the issue with third party tools.
Here you can see an example of a normal dynamic ad
This is what's built into Meta already. You submit a product feed, and it will fetch products as they are from the website. If this white backgrounds are white, it will also be reflected in the dynamic carousel ad.
Here you see suggestions for 2 types of ads with a 3. Party tool where we can apply custom design
If you use a third party tool, you can add custom wallpapers/frames with product feed items (as f. e.g. price and similar). With such tools they scan the product feed and remove background, so we can put on a custom design behind
- Design 1: here we have added logo, price (picked from product feed) and payment solutions.
- Design 2: Here you see a full-fledged custom design in the colours of the brand.
Why are we testing this? The attention span of users is still decreasing, and more is required to stand out in the face. Look at the illustration of how this has changed over time.
Therefore, it is also appropriate to adapt everything possible to capture attention.
Custom design adjustments have produced results for our customers, including:
- 20-30% lower CPA
- 20-30% higher ROAS
- General session CTR
2. Content (not surprising)
There is no error working with static content as f. ex image banners. In many cases, this works well.
But -- a social media strategy is more than just static and dull image banners.
Then we're not thinking about a dull animation or video with the corporate bullshit filter that explains why your product is the world's best in a 2 minute video.
We think about content, like micro-influences, that don't necessarily have many people to know about, or content from the usual person in the street.
We see that you get more back to content made of less famous content creators, and there doesn't have to be people with tens of thousands of followers.
And that's what we're not disqualifying about, we're not disqualifying the content of known influences, on the contrary. These also work well, but there will be a question of diet benefit.
Should you spend $60 000 - $80 000 on a small sample of content from large influences, or should you spend $20,000 - 30,000 on a large sample of content from less known?
And then the last one gives a larger amount of new creatives, which also gives more space to test even more. And with the inception of more AI-driven campaigns, it's good to have a good deal of ads.
Examples of content that we see work well are:
- User generated content (UGC)
- Unboxing
- Get ready with me
- Product demonstrations
- Product-specific hoox ads: Hooks is what's going to catch the customer in the first seconds of the video. Example of this is "I wish I knew about this product before now". The more product-focused, the easier you can explain why your product solves a problem for the customer.
- Social proof images / videos: short videos with why customers love your products. Do it as genuine as possible.
Three. TickTok First
Many have probably heard of “mobile first”.
This means that you design and create after your mobile phone first, then desktop.
The same way of thinking you can have to TikTok when it comes to your social media strategy.
Create video content according to what works well on TikTok. A lot of what we see is that the majority of the content you make on TikTok fits the best on Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram.
Below you will see an example of a campaign idea we were going to help Ragn-Sells with.
We wanted to see if we could make more use of the channel mix than we already used. The idea was to produce according to the TikTok format. Short video, the text, and a hook at the beginning that clearly shows a problem that many people can recognize in.
The goal was to make people aware of the typical situations in which it is better to order containers than to make it harder for themselves.
And then after TickTok first.
If we can break the code of the TikTok segment, we might as well run the concept on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Youtube as well.
The same thinking is something we recommend to do with the social media strategy where possible.
Create creative campaign ideas and ads according to the TikTok format, and then drag it out in other channels.
4. Probability control
Profit control comes into the list of things we have great faith in (which we have been testing for years for this purpose).
Instead of optimising for ROAS (return), we have used POAS (profit) to ensure a better bottom line for advertising.
Not because ROAS is wrong to use.
Just because ROAS doesn't say anything about how much you're left with.
ROAS does not take into account costs such as margins, transaction fees, agency costs and similar.
There is no phased measure of what to measure (ROAS or POAS), but for all those who are trading online profit management is advisable to test.
Before we jump in there; ROAS is intimate optimization, POAS is profit optimism.
Below you will see a little bit more why POAS is useful. The examples below are from Hannah's blog post on profit optimism:
A product can at first sight look very good in the reports, precisely because it has a high ROAS compared to another product that has the same amount of advertising cost.
In many cases, it had definitely been chosen to push harder on product B.
But-- what happens if you add margins, which ROAS doesn't take into account?
Now the margins are added, and in this case it all turns around. Given that product A has a higher margin than product B, it is more profitable to push product B if the focus is a better bottom line in total.
Examples of things you can add: product costs, shipping, wrapping, transaction fees and similar.
This is just one of the reasons why we believe it is good to include profit optimisation into 2024.
In the picture below you can see a little bit more what it's going to look like in Facebook reporting. The picture is taken from Profithmetrics.io.
And if you were to fool -- you make money on everything over 1 in POAS!
5. Use the AI tools different platforms provide
Frida has written an article on how the ai tool of Meta, Advantage+, will change the way you work with the platform in the future.
This is because the algorithm uses signals to match ads against people who most likely will buy.
Meta already knows who your target group is.
Therefore, there is no need to spend a lot of time measuring small gold grains.
Exceptions are, of course, that you are a very small niche that sells a service to a very small selection of people.
Other tools we recommend testing in Meta are:
- Image expansion: Image expansion in Meta's advertising allows us to adjust images to different formats so that in cases where you can save time when setting up ads.
- Background generation: Ref. point one of the article, it gives enrichment for dynamic advertising. That is, AI puts on the backgrounds of products to convert the user.
- Text variations: this function means that advertisers can now use artificial intelligence to generate up to six different text variants based on their original ad text.
These are three functions we think are going to streamline large parts of the advertising on Meta.
If you have a strong creative strategy with both user generated content, dynamic advertising, and a little bit AI, 2024 is most likely to look a little better for your social media strategy.
Summary
To differentiate your online shop's social media from its competitors, it is recommended to use dynamic ads with unique and creative design that violate the standard white backgrounds.
This measure is to cap the attention of an increasingly visually driven and more disturbed feed.
By exploiting content from micro-influences and adapting campaigns specifically for platforms such as TikTok, the strategy can increase and improve results on multiple platforms.
The introduction of profit management and AI tools for the optimisation of advertising are certainly something that can give both new insight and take the strategy to new heights.
How can INEVO assist?
In INEVO we work strategically and operationally with paid advertising, content and care for the specific nature of the channels.
Our SOME team has a lot of experience with what kind of content works. We work operationally with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
We can provide training in the tool, hold workshops, set up, operate and optimize campaigns for you and act as an advisor, either physical or digital presence. You can read more about what we can help with here.