With 4.57 billion people now using social media, social media ads are an essential way to sell to your audience. The competition is tough however, so here are a few ideas that could give you a slight edge.

Carousel Ads

Sometimes social media ads can be quite limiting in terms of the space you have to work with, combine that with a lot of information to get across and the short attention spans of users and it can cause quite the pickle.

Facebooks & Instagram carousel ads offer a solid solution, if you play your cards right.

The ads allow up to 10 images or videos one after the other for users to scroll through on their smartphones, offering a tonne of screen real estate. Each image or video can also be accompanied by its own link, making it easy to send users to different products or more relevant landing pages.

There is a high chance that users won’t be scrolling through all ten images if they have no interest in the first one or two they see. However, a genius tactic that’s becoming popular is to make ‘one’ bigger continuous image, spanning across multiple images in the ads, or at least a continuous theme. A user is far more likely to keep scrolling across in order to unveil the bigger picture. This element of curiosity helps draw in people who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in a single boring picture, and might just help you sell your service to even more people.

Retargeting

When you’re interested in buying a product or a service, do you just buy the first thing you see? Or do you do your research and shop around a bit?

Fun fact alert! According to a study, 92% of first-time visitors on a website aren’t looking to make a purchase. These 92% are usually researching products and comparing prices.

So how do you persuade them to pick you? Retargeting!

Retargeting lets you aim your ads at any users that have already been on your site, meaning you can effectively start to draw in some of that 92%. If people are in that research stage its important to keep reminding them that you’re there, giving you an edge in the decision-making process. A popular tactic is to throw in something to sweeten the deal, like a discount or voucher code, to help wrap up a sale even sooner.

Videos & Animations

Nothing seems to catch the human eye quite like movement. How often have your eyes locked on to a random, insignificant object, seemingly automatically, just because it moved.

Then surely that applies to ads too, right? Another fun fact incoming; lucky you! According to research, 60% of marketers said video ads perform better than images.

Not only do videos actually help catch someone’s eye, they also let you fit in a lot more information which can be hard to communicate in a single image. As well as attracting attention in the first place, videos are more effective and holding on to that attention for longer. Most people will digest an image in a matter of seconds whereas videos can keep them hooked and feed even more information.

Videos don’t always have to be Oscar worthy productions either, even a simple animated image can prove to be very effective and is often quite easy to put together. Don’t overthink it!