3 Reasons Why You Need To Focus On Ad Creative

In my very first podcast episode, I get into a recent history of ad creative for digital advertising, as well as how the iOS14 tracking restrictions have impacted advertising. I share why creative is so important, especially now more than ever, and 3 reasons why it should be your number 1 focus for your paid social advertising in 2022. You'll learn how much has changed in advertising over the years, but also how much really hasn't. Learn how the algorithm works to your advantage to improve your targeting and why creative is crucial to helping you scale.

Listen in the player or read the episode in blog format below!

Welcome to my first ever episode of my new podcast!

My focus for this podcast is going to be all about teaching you everything I know about how to make amazing ads. I'm going to be focusing primarily on the creative side of paid social advertising.

What is ad creative?

The ad creative refers to the actual ad itself or the media in the ad, like the images, videos, as well as the copy or the text and the headlines in the ads.

It also refers to the messaging that you choose in your ads or the angles, or the way that you position the product. All of this is encompassed by the term ad creative.

I really believe that this is the most important part to focus on with your paid social campaigns. I sometimes feel a bit silly saying that the most important part of having success with advertising is to actually make good ads because it sounds so obvious. But I feel like we've been actually led to believe the contrary in the past five to 10 years.

In that time, digital advertising has brought some incredible advancements to the advertising field. We were suddenly able to access advanced tracking to be able to see how our ads perform. As well as algorithms and AI that improved our performance and allowed us to get a lot more advanced and strategic with our advertising.

Lots of so-called advertising experts and gurus popped up promising that they could teach you how to game the system or teach you the latest hack to get around the algorithm. And it sounds like a really amazing promise.

It's really tempting to want to believe that if we just use this expert system, or if we just get our targeting exact right to the precise audience, then our campaigns are going to perform and we're going to make a ton of money with our advertising.

These technical components of digital advertising are a lot more concrete as opposed to the ad creative, which is more of a softer skill, and a bit more abstract and harder to truly master.

So it was easy to get caught up, believing that if you just master the technical side of Facebook advertising, you'd be able to see huge success with it or that you're only one funnel away from making millions of dollars.

But I do see that shifting now in the industry and especially this past year with everything that happened with iOS14 (this is written December 2021).

What happened in 2021?

If you're not familiar with what happened earlier this year, Apple released an update to their operating system that restricted the amount of tracking that Facebook and other digital advertising platforms were able to do. Suddenly we were a lot more restricted in our ability to optimize and in the algorithms ability to optimize our campaigns.

A lot of Facebook advertisers are now going a bit more back to basics and thinking more about the creative and how to make great ads that appeal to their audience.

So that's what my podcast and blog are all about: how to make amazing ad creative that stops the scroll on social platforms. That helps you attract the right people and the right audience to your ads, and also communicates your message in a clear and effective, but also interesting or entertaining way for your audience.

If you needed more convincing on why creative is the most important piece of your advertising, in this post, read on for three reasons why creative is the area that you should focus on with your advertising:

1. Digital advertising is complicated and always changing

Digital advertising is complicated and it's always changing, but the creative part is one part that will remain relatively constant for years and decades to come. Some of the best advertising books were written over 50 years ago. Despite how quickly digital advertising is evolving, books on copywriting, on consumer psychology, and marketing from the 20th century are still very relevant and useful today.

Although our technology is changing at a faster pace than ever before, humans stay the same as we always have. And our needs, desires and behaviours have remained constant. This means that the messaging that we use to reach people will remain the same well into the future.

(And yes, of course there are different trends with content, for example, right now, TikTok style videos and reels are super popular. There are going to be trends that we cycle through and there are often certain marketing tactics that become really effective, but then they get overused and people wise up to them and we shift through them.)

But overall the basic understanding of humans, our desires, and the way that you speak to people, the messaging that you use, is quite predictable.  Human nature is something that hasn't changed. So, if you can learn how to appeal to people's desires with your advertising messaging, that skill is going to be relevant for you.

Whether you're doing digital advertising, whether you're running billboards or whether in 30 years from now you're using whatever new type of advertising technology has been invented.

So reason number one on why you should focus on your ad creative is that understanding this and learning this is a skill that is timeless and is going to help you be a better marketer overall in your business.

Learning how to understand the psychology of humans, of why they engage with your ads, the way that they do and how to communicate with them, how to write good copy, how to craft a message that attracts attention and creates desire in your audience will be extremely valuable for your advertising for the rest of your life.

2. Your ad creative is the best form of targeting

Reason number two for why you should focus on your ad creative is that your ad creative is actually the best form of targeting. Having the right messaging in your ads is one of the best ways to make sure that your ads are being seen by the right people.

The Facebook algorithm has come a long way and I really believe that targeting in terms of on-platform targeting that you set up as an advertiser is not as important as it used to be.

The algorithm can take care of most of the targeting for you if you give them good ads that attract the right people. Think of Facebook's lookalike technology. You can give them an audience, say your website visitors, and upload it to Facebook and what they'll do is analyze that audience and find out what things they have in common and what factors connect all of those people. Then they can find more people who also have those similar traits or people that look like your initial audience. Facebook also does this on all of your campaigns.  

When you first launch new ads, as soon as people start interacting with your ads, people start clicking on them. Facebook begins taking note of who those people are, who is taking an extra second to stop and look at the ad, who's clicking on it, who's liking it or watching a lot of the video. They're paying attention to those people, and then they do the same thing that they do with lookalike audiences. They'll try to figure out what factors those people have in common or what traits those people have that are engaging with your ad and they try to find more people like that.

So as people are attracted to your ad, Facebook learns who they are, and will try to find more people like that.

As long as your ad creative is speaking to the exact right person that you want to attract, and begins to attract the right person, Facebook is going to find more people like those people.

Facebook has more data on its users than we will ever have access to as an advertiser. This is why making really good ad creative and giving it to the algorithm to find the right people for you, is the most effective way to target on Facebook. In fact, I usually recommend removing most of the restrictions on your targeting and allowing the algorithm to have more control.

This is called liquidity on Facebook, and when your campaigns have higher liquidity, you're giving the algorithm more control to find the people that they feel are best for you.

Facebook's machine learning is amazing at taking care of the technical stuff and finding those people for you. But what it can't do is create engaging ads that resonate with humans.

It's up to you as the advertiser to know your product, know your audience, understand their buyer psychology and be creative with how to present and communicate the benefits of your product to your audience in your advertising.

So reason number two on why you should focus on ad creative is that good ads are the best form of targeting and will give the algorithm the best chance at success in finding the right people for you.

3. Creative is important when you want to scale

Reason number three that you should focus on creative is that creative is really important for when you're ready to scale.  Once you've got your ads working and profitable, you're probably going to want to increase your budget significantly and start reaching a lot more people and getting a lot more customers.

But ad campaigns almost never scale linearly.  What I mean by that is that if you're spending a hundred dollars a day and you're getting a CPA or a cost per acquisition of $10, if you suddenly increase your budget to $500 a day, that $10 CPA is probably going to increase maybe to $15 or $20.

Just because you're able to get good costs on a low budget doesn't mean that those costs will continue as you increase your budget. The reason for that is because of the economics of supply and demand. It's easy for Facebook to find maybe five customers a day for you, but when they suddenly need to find 30, they're going to have to work a lot harder to find all those potential customers for you. So it's probably going to cost you a bit more because it's more difficult to find those people and the ad auctions might be more competitive.

The best way to keep your ad costs down as you're scaling is to find new audiences to reach, and new messages to reach them with or a new creative variation. Different people resonate differently with different messages, so adding a new creative variation is the best way to try to sell your product to new people.

As your market gets saturated, giving them fresh, new creative is the best way to keep them engaged and responding to your ads. It's very unlikely that you'll be able to scale with a  limited amount of creative. Not being able to know how to make new creative and come up with new angles, new hooks, or new messaging ideas for your advertising will hold you back from growth.

So reason number three, why you should learn and focus on ad creative is because it's going to make it a lot easier for you to scale your campaigns and keep your ad costs down.

To recap, the three reasons that your ad creative should be your primary focus when you're planning your advertising strategy are:

1. Digital advertising platforms are complicated and always changing. If you can master the skill of understanding buyer psychology and how to write copy and messaging and all of the things that are important for good ad creative, those are skills that will stay with you for years and years to come and will help you no matter what platform you're using for marketing.
2. Your ad creative actually helps your targeting. If you have good creative, that speaks to the right audience. You'll attract the right people to your ads and also help the algorithm find more people that are in your target audience.
3. It's going to make it easier for you to scale and keep your costs down as you grow your business.

I hope that this post has given you a lot to think about and has inspired you to put more time and effort into your ad creative if you're not already!