Creative tactics to try in your campaigns - Facebook Tutorial

- It can be difficult to develop new creative ideas. Let's review a few best practice examples of creative tactics to inspire you. These tactics are often campaigns that I've run for clients and they're among the best performers. On Facebook and Instagram, people are always just browsing through to see pictures of their friends. Using a more casual picture helps you fit in better. Although it can help to put a filter over the image so it stands out a little bit from normal social posts. Advertising works best when it speaks to our emotions. If you can show the user what life is like with and without your product, that can create an emotional dilemma that can work really well. However, you do have to be careful because before and after ads are technically banned on Facebook, especially in the fitness domain. So make sure it's a dilemma and not a transformation. Product story is one of the ads that I try first, particularly with new tech startups. If your product is innovative, you can use your product to tell the story of a day in the life of your users. By looking through the lens of your product, they'll see how the product can be used and how it will fit into their lives. You can figure out good ideas for this just by doing some user research. Interview users and find out moments they used the product that were impactful and memorable. This one always works in advertising, shock value. We're hardwired to notice danger. So an ad with shock value can be great to get you noticed. However, it is easy to overdo it with this technique, and these ads tend to have limited shelf life. Social proof is one of the most important concepts in advertising. Most people decide what to buy based on what other people are doing. So it takes some risk out of the equation if they can see that thousands of people have already gone before them. Spend some time thinking about what is the most impressive sounding metric. So in this case, it's 1.1 billion servings sold, but it could potentially be how many users you have, or in the case of YouTube, they actually use how many minutes of video watched every single day. Lifestyle layout can work really well because it shows your product in an environment that the right target audience would quickly recognize. It can really help to fade out and shade the background and highlight or contrast the colors of your product so that stands out amongst the background. Facebook is always releasing new ad formats and they're testing new features all the time. So if you can think outside the box and innovate on the format and try and use something like we've got here where the image stretches across the full carousel, then these new ad formats can be up weighted by Facebook. So they tend to do extremely well, much better than you would expect. Finally, the personal touch. People buy from other people and nowhere is that more true than on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. These ads tend to stand out because it shows the people behind the business. And you can decide whether you want to work with them or not. But decide carefully who you want to turn into a celebrity. I had lots of people recognize me for months after I ran this ad, just because it's very easy to show the ad to millions of people for not much money. Whatever tactics you decide to test, the best process is always to observe, test, and learn. The best creative tactics are yet to be discovered. So pay attention to what you're seeing in your feed, listen to your customers, and then test and learn to see what works in your campaigns. After reviewing these advanced tactics, hopefully you've been inspired to come up with your own ideas to test.