It is wrong to think that a good photo is all you need for a perfect social media ad copy because it takes two to make something good enough. Creating an ad copy that is informative and interesting can be a difficult task. In writing a social media ad copy, people tend to throw words and phrases needed to create a social media ad that converts which doesn’t always work. It takes a special and professional combination of time, practice, effort, and inspiration to deliver a good copy that will drive conversions to your website.
Below are a few handy tips and tricks that you can use in creating effective social media ad copy that will not only capture attention, but will also provoke engagement, convert into sales, and delight shoppers.
1. Prove That You Care
If you are able to convince your target audience that you care for them, then this will help in building credibility and trust. Take time to think about the issues that your target audience might be facing and how you can relate to them.
Communicating the fact that you know and relate to how they feel will highly pay off. We were trained to trust people who understand us and are open to us. So, don’t be afraid to be vulnerable in your social media ad copy.
However, you should not overdo this because you never want to tell your customers how it feels to be in their situation if you really don’t. In such a situation, simply explain why you care. It doesn’t matter how you do it because the important thing is that you find a way to relate to your audience’s issue and let them know that you care.
There are two main benefits of proving that you care which include:
- It helps your target audience to relate to you.
- It helps them picture that future moment of their success which is a good feeling and the best feeling that they associate your product with.
2. Understand Your Brand
Whenever users scroll their feed, they should be able to recognize and understand your brand immediately. The words in your ad copy should mimic your other posts and should also be the language your demographic or target audience uses. If you’re a business that uses professional and business language when you write, then you should use the same style in your ad copy.
3. Communicate
Your social media ads copy should not only have a call to action button but should also have words to answer the questions of who, what, when, where, and why. Communicating such details in your ad ensures that the users have all of the details they need to know and therefore when they engage with the ad, they create a warm engagement and not just someone who likes everything they scroll through their feed.
If you’re experiencing difficulties in trying to answer all of the questions above, you should think about your target audience’s demographics. To make a great ad copy, you need to know and understand what your target audience likes and what they need.
4. Test Your Ad Copy
An ad should be informative and provide an incentive for users to act. Copywriting is a creative and data-driven exercise. What matters is your website’s conversion rate and the only way you can determine the effectiveness of your ad copy is to test it. There are a lot of different testing options, which vary in price. Therefore, you can choose a method depending on how much you are willing to invest in the process.
For a quick test, you can choose to test the headline variations on your social profiles. You need to choose around 2-4 of your favorite headlines and run them as social media updates where the updates should link back to your page. Post the updates every day for a few days, at the same time, and observe which one gets the most clicks.
You can use the most clicked update on your ad, but if you need to make further improvements, ensure you enter it into another. This is because this process is not accurate as days can vary and your social media audience is not an accurate mirror of your website visits. If you want more results, consider testing using the A/B testing protocol.
Once you get the data, it’s time to put a majority of your budget on the ad copy ideas. The rest should be set aside and taken back to testing even more. Testing never ends because people’s preferences change as fast as technology changes.
5. Personalize Your Ad Copy
The more personal your ad feels, the more it will relate to your target market. Building the buyer personas involves thinking about 3-4 personalities of your target market for example the age range, the tone, location, demographic, etc.
This is important when you’re developing your ad copy where you should try to keep the personalities to match your copy. You are likely to get much more attention once you write a personalized copy that matches your target audience.
6. Provide an Immediate Call to Action
Most marketers make one of the biggest mistakes where they expect the audience to take action themselves. You have to prompt them to take into it by providing immediate calls to action (CTAs. Here are some of the qualities of a good call to action:
- Brief – Calls to action that have five or fewer words are the best but if you have to go over the limit, ensure that every added word is essential.
- Use action words – Your call to action means inviting others to take a certain action. Your CTA should begin with an action-oriented verb, for example, “Register” or “Download.”
- Clear – The readers should clearly understand the call to action for example what they might get when they follow your CTA. Ensure that your statement is crystal clear.
- Design – If possible, you can incorporate different designs such as contrasting colors or different font sizes.
Bear in mind that what you think is easy or sounds clear, might be difficult for your readers.
7. Use the Correct Words
Every word you include is important and plays a valuable role in taking the readers to the state that you want. Using phrases like “added bonus” slows down readers and gives you an easy opportunity to improve the efficiency of your ad copy.
Most people are bad at reading and therefore don’t waste time with an excessively wordy copy. Ensure that your copy conveys its main points in a few words. Reduce it down to the smallest number of words that can use to get your point across.
It is important to know that some of the words we use daily have a huge amount of power. Some of the most powerful words may include you, free, instant, new, etc. Use such powerful words although do not only pay attention to them but also check the phrases or sentences that lack excitement. You can add excitement by including at least one power word.
8. Understand Your Channel
Once you identify your target market and the messages they’re likely to respond to, go ahead and identify the best social media channel to which you will deliver your ad copy. A channel is the type of environment that is best for your audience to receive your message for example the different social media networks and websites. It’s important to know the channel you will be using before beginning to write the copy because different channels might require different designs or languages.
9. Use Attractive Headlines
If your copy requires the use of a headline, then you should understand that a headline that is about 5-20 words, is the most important thing you will write. Most people tend to read only the headline of your copy.
The better the headlines, the better your chances are of attracting more people or even getting more people to stay. If you need to write your headline faster writing, you can base your headline on the headline templates which have performed in the past.
Sometimes it might sound extremely difficult to write a perfect headline, but it’s good to try it yourself. Here are some steps you can take;
- Start with identifying the worst possible headline you can come up with.
- Let your mind wander around until you come up with 25 different alternatives.
- Choose your favorite headlines and test them out by running the different alternatives in your social media.
- You’ll find it much easier with time and more practice, to get one out of the 25 options that will attract your audience, and then you should go ahead to use the headline in your ad copy.
Conclusion
As mentioned above, an effective social media ad isn’t just a high-resolution image or a good video. Although this type of ad copy itself can increase engagement rates, it’s time to get past the idea that people are only looking for entertainment.
Your ad copies should entertain but also inform or educate your social media users which will help grab their attention in their news feed. If you’re planning to interrupt them while they are scrolling in their feed, then you need to give them something worthwhile.
