Paid Social Creative: Where To Start

Social media is one of the most effective advertising tools for brands.

Considering that currently, ‘there are 4.95 billion social media users around the world’, the opportunity presented by social media and paid social creative has never been more apparent. 

Paid social creative remains one of the best ways to compete and ensure your ads stand out on heavily saturated social platforms used by ‘77% of businesses to reach customers’.

If you’re interested in paid social creative, you might wonder where to get started.

In this guide, we’ll cover all paid social creative, from where to get started to the best practices to follow.

Let’s break it down. 

When it comes to creating paid social creative for social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and X (previously Twitter) to name a few, it can be tricky to know where to start.

Your ad creative can often be a prospective customer’s first impression of your brand and is directly responsible for whether they engage with your ad or scroll right past it. This can be an overwhelming reality for many people just starting.

The main thing to remember is that your social creative should be targeted towards your audience in order to capture their attention, build a connection with them, and ensure they complete the desired action. 

That said, there are numerous best practices to follow to ensure you’re making the most of your paid social creative.

Paid Social Creative Best Practices 

There are multiple paid social creative best practices to follow that can make getting started a much easier process.

Paid social creative best practices include, but are not limited to:

1. Consider your audience
2. Make your creative eye-catching and engaging
3. Set measurable goals for each of your ads
4. Prioritise creative for mobile
5. Continuously test your social creative 

1. Consider Your Audience 

The first best practice for paid social creative is to consider your audience. 

Your creative campaigns on social media will fall flat if you fail to prioritise your target audience, so get to know them, their interests, and their pain points.

Once you have established which social media platforms to target, getting to know your audience is crucial to ensure your paid social creative specifically targets them.

Your audience should always inform your paid social creative. 

2. Make Your Creative Eye-Catching & Engaging

A best practice for paid social creative is to make your creative eye-catching and engaging. 

Anyone who uses social media knows just how saturated social platforms are with advertisements, so you need to prioritise eye-catching creative to stand out. 

There are many strategies to achieve this, from shocking or unusual visuals that grab people’s attention instantly or an engaging stat that evokes emotion and encourages people to discover more.

At Aura Ads, we prioritise world-class creative strategy and ideation that are sure to grab people’s attention, evidenced by our successful case studies with brands such as Huel and Wild Deodorant. 

To learn more about how to better your ad creative, check out our blog here.

3. Set Measurable Goals For Each Of Your Ads

You will also need to set measurable goals for each of your ads.

Setting goals and measuring your ad performance is the only way to truly understand the success of each ad.

Strong goals are built on performance marketing metrics, including click-through rates and conversions that are driven by a specific ad. 

You will also need to ensure your social creative includes clear call-to-actions that direct customers to take the desired action. 

By setting measurable goals, you’ll be able to gain a comprehensive understanding of how your paid social creative has performed and how you can better your ad creative in the future to ensure your goals are met. 

4. Prioritise Creative For Mobile

The next best practice for paid social creative is to prioritise creative for mobile.

Considering that ‘91% of all social media users access social channels via mobile devices’, the importance of optimising your creative is evident in order to meet this demand. 

Your paid social creative needs to prioritise mobile users as they make up the majority, without excluding desktop users. This will maximise your reach as a business.

What works well on mobile will also work well on desktop, but the opposite couldn’t be further from the truth. As such, when choosing text and images as part of your creative, be sure to take a mobile-first approach. 

Failure to optimise your creative for mobile will inevitably lead to missed opportunities and your paid social creative falling flat. 

5. Continuously Test Your Social Creative 

Last, but not least, you should continuously test your paid social creative. 

Paid social creative is an ongoing process that requires time and energy to be a success.

By testing your social creative, you can determine what works to cut through the noise and what attracts and engages your customers.

Testing your social creative is essential for measuring the success of an ad campaign and improving your paid social creative performance. 

That said, you don’t have to take on this overwhelming task alone. To help you get started, why not hire a performance creative agency to do the heavy lifting?

How We Can Help

Aura Ads has years of experience in creating high quality paid social creative. 

Our creative strategists will build scroll-stopping ad concepts, built to convert on paid social. 

We track & analyse the performance of our creative in your ad account, benchmarking against key AIDA metrics in order to drive results.

Schedule a call today to find out how we can help you get started with paid social creative.

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We are Aura Ads, a unique performance creative agency designed for D2C eCommerce brands. We help clients sell more online and grow at scale with our bespoke video and static creative delivered on a monthly basis.

For more top tips from our experts, check out our social media marketing blog. 

Written by Jemima, for Aura Ads. 

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