Keys to Black Friday (part 3): Be Creative

Increased competition on platforms like Facebook means advertisers need to be more creative to gain cut-through. Especially around tiles of high competition, like Black Friday, advertisers need to think outside the box to break through the ‘noise’.

The best performing ads have things in common

At Paragone, we have noticed that the best performing seasonal campaigns have the following attributes in common:

• High quality visuals and branding: A strong image which clearly represents your offering.
• A personalized message: People connect well to adverts that evoke emotion, so play to it.
• A variety of ad creatives to avoid ad fatigue.

When it comes to the ads themselves, there are 4 components for success:

VISUAL

Visual content is treated more favorably in the Facebook algorithm and it’s also more likely to be shared and remembered than written content. Your image needs to be visually appealing, no matter what type of ad you create.

RELEVANT

In social media advertising, being relevant is crucial. Remember, you are spending money when someone views or clicks on your ad (depending on the settings you choose). If you’re showing ads that aren’t relevant to your target audience, you’re wasting your time and money and will likely not see success.

INCLUDES AN ENTICING VALUE PROPOSITION

A value proposition tells the reader why they should click on your ad to learn more about your product.

How is your product or service different from any other? Why should the viewer click on your ad to see your website?

During Black Friday and the holiday period, it’s a good idea to:

• Display the product price and/or discount: Listing a price will filter out people who aren’t willing to pay that amount for the product
• Create urgency: customers like to procrastinate on taking action. Even if presented with a great offer, they’ll still wait in hope of coming across an even better deal. Push a user to action with words. Here are some of the most popular ones: “limited time, only, hurry, act now, last chance, today only, clearance, don’t miss out, offer expires, prices going up”.
• Offer a limited-time promotion: Everyone loves a good deal. But more people will act on one with an expiry date.

HAS A CLEAR CALL-TO-ACTION

A beautiful and relevant ad is great, but without a call-to-action (CTA), your viewer might not know what to do next. Add a CTA like “Buy now and save X%,” or “Offer ends soon” and compel the viewer to act now.

The best ad formats for retailers

FACEBOOK INSTANT EXPERIENCE

Previously known as Facebook Canvas ads, Instant Experience is an interactive, full-screen mobile ad. These ads can include a combination of elements like images, text, carousels, header and footer buttons, store locators or videos.

The format offers an enticing, immersive mobile experience, ideal for advertising your Black Friday deals. This format allows you to show off your promotion and tell your brand story in a single ad.

And the growing selection of templates designed by Facebook for different business objectives makes creating Instant Experiences quick and easy.

• Tabs for Instant Experience:

Print catalogs have historically delighted shoppers, but since digital channels took off there hasn’t really been an effective way of recreating this popular format online. That is, until now!

With tabs for Facebook Instant Experience, shoppers are first shown a collection ad in their News Feed. Once they click on it, the classic full-screen Instant Experience format opens up – but with one difference: they will see pages, or ‘tabs’, as part of the full screen experience, organized according to their interests.

The powerful machine learning within Facebook enables advertisers to show users the parts of the catalog that most interest them, based on analysis of their interests and previous shopping behaviour. This solution has been built with the same product engine as Facebook dynamic ads, meaning it is able to present highly relevant offerings.

Our Black Friday eBook

Download our Black Friday eBook to read on about more recommended ad formats for your Black Friday campaigns, including Facebook Canvas, Instagram Video ads and Stories ads, & many more!

The eBook also provides insights and statistics on why the holiday sales season is so important, as well as tips on targeting, budgets, bidding, optimization & more!