Customizing Your Brand’s Creative for Ad Placements

[Originally published on the Dash Hudson blog]

Marketers always strive to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. That’s why Facebook is a major player in nearly every brand’s digital marketing strategy. The channel boasts a multitude of ad placements, audience targeting, and optimization options, leading to more effective ad spends and richer user experiences with your brand’s advertising-no matter where consumers are in their purchasing journey.

• Not all ad placements will be equally valuable to all brands. Test and learn which channels and placements will deliver the best results for your target audience.
• Creative designed with each channel and placement in mind will put your brand’s best foot forward.
• Improve overall performance and get more for your money by manually excluding placements that don’t convert or drive higher costs per result.

Facebook provides the tools to help all businesses-from the smallest of SMBs to the largest corporations-run a campaign with automated placements that will perform based on their objectives. Using Automated Placements can be a critical part of the test-and-learn process to better understand where your message resonates with your target audience. The delivery system for the Facebook family of apps and services will try to make the most of your campaign budget and show the ad across all placements to reach a wide audience and achieve your goals.

The savviest marketers know that social advertising shouldn’t be a “set it and forget it” process and shouldn’t solely rely on the machine doing all the work-especially if certain placements drive higher costs per result or higher site bounce rates. Manually choosing ad placements in the campaign creation process, based on historical platform performance, avoids wasted budget by only displaying ads where your target audience will really convert.

When the “Where” Decides the What

Once you’ve done ample testing and know what placements are the most efficient to achieve your business goals, choose creative that resonates based on where users will see it. In a “social-first” mindset, the campaign objective works in tandem with the ad placement to determine what type of creative your team should produce. Using Facebook’s Asset Customization tool during ad creation allows you to run creative tailored for each individual ad placement. This practice ensures ads look more native to the user experience and more relevant, which in turn improves the ad performance.

For example, users viewing Instagram Stories are used to seeing in-the-moment, unfiltered, and authentic content. Creative shown here should provide a full-screen format that showcases your brand front and center. Conversely, the Instagram Feed is where users go to discover something new, whether it be information, a brand or a product, or connect with friends and family. The audience in the Instagram Feed tends to have a slightly longer attention span when viewing content in-feed than they do in Stories. Preparing creative with these key differences in mind can empower your brand to deliver a holistic and effective ad campaign.

The Asset Customization tool currently works across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger.

In determining where to advertise, performance data is leveraged to decide which placement will likely return the most desired results for your ad spend-and choosing the creative for those placements should be no different. Dash Hudson’s proprietary AI technology, Vision, can serve as your creative ‘gut check’ in the planning process. Vision learns with your brand in real-time so you always have a pulse on what types of photos and videos are resonating with your audience’s unique tastes and preferences. Vision provides data-backed visual predictions across all of your brand’s creative, in all aspect ratios, to help you select top-performing assets before setting a campaign live-saving you time and budget for creative testing.

Header image: @labomba_flora

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Originally published at https://blog.dashhudson.com on August 20, 2020.