 Renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously quipped that “the medium is the message.” That was ages before social media.
Sure, social media has its own quirks and requirements, but so do all media that you may employ for advertising. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of its unique features and challenges, and how to best leverage them for your next campaign. How to write ads for social media Step 1: Know your audience As we’d hinted above, there are certain tenets that apply to all media, and all advertising. And this one is inviolable: Know Thy Target Audience. The more you know about them—their personalities, their needs, their pain points, their alternatives to what you’re offering—the better you can address them effectively. Think in terms of a story (and we have another good article on that topic, entitled “Tag Your Characters”), in which your products or services solve the pressing problems in this prospect’s life. Again, the more you know, the better. (And the converse is true: The less you know, the worse off you are, since you’ll be missing the bull’s-eye consistently.) If you don’t know enough, learn more before you start. This may entail asking around the company or its sales force for customer insights; it might entail original market research in the form of online surveys or ad-hoc focus groups. This step is essential; we can’t stress its importance enough. A bonus: All of your customer-discovery work will pay rich dividends for you, far beyond a single social-media campaign. How to write ads for social media Step 2: Know your platform Once you know about your customers, you’ll know which social media they gravitate toward. There are, as you know, several. There’s LinkedIn (as of recently, the only desktop-first social platform), which is best for business. There’s YouTube, notable for, among other things, being the ideal platform for how-to videos. There’s Reddit for the deep-geek crowd. There’s Instagram. And of course there’s the 800-pound gorilla of the group: Facebook. You may not be in a position to choose; you may simply be handed a directive from your media team. How to write ads for social media Step 3: Know your medium Now that you know which platform(s) you’ll be employing, you can start to focus on the creative challenge at hand. We’ll often ghost-write blog articles for consultancies that are clients of ours, and then write a social-media teaser for each blog entry, often to be posted on LinkedIn. At the other end of the spectrum, we often write Facebook ads for fashion products, which are heavy on visuals and emphasize style. Still, these disparate types of social-media-ad assignments have more in common than you might think. Let’s examine them:
However, once you know these characteristics, you can tailor your creative to them accordingly. It’s a challenge, but it’s fun. Let’s explore each one in turn: How to write ads for social media Step 4: Play to the strengths Embrace brevity. Tiny little social ads have a lot in common with massive freeway billboards, a.k.a. “outdoor advertising.” Why? Each only has about a second or two to get read. Outdoors, your target is cruising by at 70 miles an hour. Online, they’re scrolling, at apparently the same speed! This can pose a huge challenge for advertisers that aren’t prepared to pare. You need to encapsulate your value proposition into just half a dozen words. Are you up to the challenge? Again, don’t think of this as “hard.” Think of this as “fun.” You can jot down the different messaging points you have, and then rank them, in terms of their suitability to your social-media ad. Be concise. Be surgical. Cut down to only what you need. You can get creative with it—in terms of verbiage, puns, and interplay with visuals—afterward. If they move, move with them. Again, this is a tremendously fun challenge. If you’re trying to write, say, a three-frame animated banner, you’ll need to structure it so that any frame can work when it’s the first one to be seen and read. So don’t think linear (as you usually do); think circular. The message should be able to go around and around, almost musically. Similarly, short videos—often on the order of about four seconds—will have a “set up” and a “pay off,” so play to those in your copy. You can help establish the tease—and often provide a fun and counterintuitive “punch line” to the video which is far better than simply describing what’s onscreen (what we deride as “Slide Show Creative,” described in detail in this article). Fight for attention. Please forgive us for using this word, because we hate to use it, but it’s so, well, useful when describing these types of challenges. That word is—heaven forbid--Clickbait. Oh no! We can safely assume you’ve seen more clickbait ads (“My jaw dropped when I saw her dress”) than you ever want to see in your life. If you’ve ever clicked on one (go ahead, admit it), you were probably disappointed by what you found—especially after you endured the inundation of ads and pop-ups in your way. But clickbait ads persist. For good reason. They play to our basest instincts, and they work. But they work in the same way that higher-brow media—such as Jeopardy! and crossword puzzles—do. They tease you with a challenge that plays to your ego (“Hey, I know that one!”) and rewards you with a mini endorphin-rush when you find out more, or get an answer correct. They’ll also engage your lizard brain, with such simple things as unfinished lines, like those above, which make you wonder “Where’s that going?” to the point where you can’t help but click. How to write ads for social media Step 5: Respect your audience For our purposes, social-media ads are not clickbait. Clickbait gets a deservedly bad rap because it wastes your time and insults you. A good social ad, by contrast, will do the opposite. It will tease, yes, but it will also inform, surprise, and delight. And ultimately—again, since you know what your target audience needs—it will help to solve a problem, making it a win/win for advertiser and viewer alike. Need help with that next social-media ad or campaign? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.
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