Creating digital marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses is all about learning how to craft ad creatives that drive your conversion rates and earn big profits for your business. So, what do you do when you’re continuously losing money on your ad creatives, no matter how hard you try to promote your business? And, more importantly, how can you guarantee that your ads are successful?
With our methodology, we guarantee success for our eCommerce clients by allowing them to produce a high volume of ad creatives cost-effectively, allowing their ads to perform more strongly in the algorithms of ad platforms like Facebook. This system helps keep your CPA (cost per acquisition) low and your profit margins high.
In this blog, we’ll be breaking down the five steps you can follow to create ads that convert, plus leaving you with more than 90 ad templates that you can use to start making better ad creatives fast.
Step 1: Create Your Brand Persona
Step 2: Perform Ad Concept Research
Step 3: Building A Structure For Ad Campaigns
Step 4: Running A/B Testing For Ad Creatives
Step 5: Choosing The Right Format
50+ Ad Formats For Your Next Campaign
How To Make 300+ Ads The Easy Way
Step 1: Create Your Brand Persona
Your brand persona sets the tone for all of your future ad creatives and helps you connect to your target audience in an authentic way. That’s why it’s crucial to do this before you even consider brainstorming new ad creatives. To make this simple, we recommend following this formula to narrow down the persona of your brand:
Voice of Customer + Job To Be Done + Their Circumstances = Brand Persona
First, let’s look at the voice of the customer. Regardless of your target demographics, your potential customers will likely share similar interests, concerns, and lifestyles. So, conducting thorough research on the needs of your audience is a great place to start.
Next, consider the “job to be done.” This part of the equation refers specifically to your product’s function for this, especially for eCommerce stores selling direct-to-consumer goods. For instance, let’s say you sell insulated travel mugs. Rather than thinking of your offer as simply selling them a nice mug, think of it as selling them a solution to their problem, which might be something like not being able to keep their coffee hot on the way to work.
Finally, you have their circumstances or the reason why they need to solve this problem in the first place. Continuing with our previous example of the insulated travel mug, their circumstances might be that they’re a busy working parent who doesn’t have time to sit around and drink their cup of coffee in the morning. If you can understand why they might be looking at your products, you can find ways to tailor your ad creatives to their perspective.
TIP: Use Interviews To Gather Data
When you’re ready to put this formula to work, you can start by collecting data from existing customers through email surveys and questionnaires. You can even solicit guest surveys directly from your landing pages. Once you’ve collected enough responses, you can start to see the common themes that all of your shoppers have in common, making it easy to build a brand persona that sells.
Step 2: Perform Ad Concept Research
Put simply, an ad concept refers to the angle and messaging you choose for your ad campaigns. However, instead of throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, we suggest using market research to determine the unique value propositions that your products, or products similar to yours, bring to the table.
Our top methods for research ad concepts are:
Interviews
Just like your brand persona, customer interviews are a great way to collect information that you can use to create winning ad concepts. Whether you choose to conduct these interviews via email or phone, be sure to focus on asking questions that highlight the value proposition, which is just a brief statement as to why the customer picked your product.
Reddit & Online Forums
For startups and eCommerce shops with no existing customer base, Reddit, Facebook groups, and Twitter are all great social media platforms for collecting insight from potential customers. Start by searching for hashtags or groups that are relevant to your target audience and do some digging to uncover the reasons they have for choosing certain products.
Testimonials
Again, if you’ve already sold some products and received customer reviews, you can pull your top value propositions directly from these testimonials. If you don’t have any reviews yet, try finding inspiration from products similar to yours that already have a strong collection of reviews.
Step 3: Building A Structure For Ad Campaigns
No matter what direction you take for your ads, having a set structure for all your campaigns will help you stay organized and make tracking your metrics quick and efficient. We use the same structure for all our ad creatives for our eCommerce clients, allowing us to change out different variables depending on the results.
This structure includes five main elements:
Agency Name
We put our agency name on all our ad structures for organizational purposes. You could also include your brand name here.
Value Proposition
As we mentioned earlier, your value proposition is what makes shoppers choose your product to fulfill their needs. For example, if you’re a brand that sells specialty teas, your value proposition might be something like increased energy.
Offer
Next, you’d come up with a unique offer for each ad campaign. Some of the most common offers include BOGO (buy one, get one), free product samples with purchase, and free shipping.
Angle/Ad Format
Your campaign’s angle or ad format is where the creative element comes into play. With so many ad formats to choose from, like video ads, user-generated content (UGC), and display ads, you might want to experiment with a few different formats before finding the one that works best for your product.
Date Launched
Finally, we suggest including the date that your campaign launched. This will make it easier to monitor metrics like your click-through rates (CTRs) over days, weeks, and even months.
Step 4: Running A/B Testing For Ad Creatives
Once your ad creatives are up and running, you can start running A/B testing on different ads to determine the option with the highest ROAS. Using your ad account for Facebook or Google ads, you can start by setting cost caps for your ads, limiting the amount of your money that advertising platforms like Facebook can use based on how ads perform. Since platforms like Facebook use automation and machine learning to streamline ads, using cost caps to take back control of your ad spending is crucial.
After that, we always suggest splitting your budget between new ads and ad iterations. This is a cost-effective strategy because the pricing for producing brand-new ads is significantly higher than making an ad iteration, which is just changing out one element of an existing ad.
With ad iterations, you would start by testing the first element in your ad structure, the value proposition. From there, you would take the best-performing value proposition and move on to testing the offer, followed by the angle or format. This allows you to create an insane amount of ad creatives for relatively low costs.
Step 5: Choosing The Right Formats
Using the methodology from step four, you can easily test dozens of variations for value propositions, angles, and offers, giving you a massive volume of ads to work with. And in case it wasn’t clear already, the greater the volume of ads you can produce, the more money you can earn, and the faster your business can grow.
So, if you’re looking for inspiration to get started, we’ve compiled over 50 ad formats that you can use to start producing high-performing ads at scale.
50+ Ad Formats For Your Next Campaign
Before & After
This is a classic advertising angle that showcases results that your customers could have from using your products. Before and after ad formats are most commonly used for beauty products, dietary supplements, and anything that yields a visible result for their appearance.
Ad Comment Reply
Ad platforms like Facebook allow potential customers to leave comments on your ads, which you can use to create more content. Taking a comment from a customer and using it in your video ads is a great way to boost engagement and drive your conversion rates.
Recent Trends
Taking advantage of trends and other cultural moments helps keep your content fresh and relevant. For instance, incorporating popular TikTok dances into your ads is an easy way to stay on top of trends.
Animations
Using animated video ads as opposed to, or even alongside, live actors can be visually eye-catching, which is crucial for Facebook ad creatives. You can use animations to tell your brand’s story, visualize your value proposition, and more.
Screen-To-Order
This simple ad format shows a customer viewing your product online, then cuts directly to them holding it in their hands. It’s fast, effective, and extremely easy to produce, making it a great ad type for eCommerce brands.
Us Vs. Them
Don’t be afraid it call out your competitors directly in your ad campaigns. Us. vs. Them ads use images, text, or videos to showcase why your product is better at addressing your customer’s pain points than other alternatives.
Collection Ad
If you have multiple products that you want to promote at once, a collection is simply a series of images showcasing closely related products.
Carousel With Video
Similarly to a collection, carousel ads include multiple images in one sequence. Adding a video to your carousel is an easy way to make your ad more engaging.
Post-It Notes
Want to make the text in your video ads more visually interesting? Try using Post-it notes instead of text overlays. This gives your ad copy a more authentic feel that your customers may relate to.
Text Overlay
On the opposite end, you can also make your text the star of your ad. One way to do this is to keep your text static over the visuals of your products.
Product Variety
For product collections with multiple styles and colors, like apparel and accessories, you can showcase the variety of your collection with a simple video featuring all of the available colors in a “try-on” style video.
Lifestyle
Highlighting the lifestyle that your product can achieve for your customers is a great angle to take, which you can do easily by featuring the actors in your ad living their ideal lives with your product in hand.
Unboxing
Unboxing videos are among the most-watched content on social media platforms, and you can create your unboxing-style video ads to showcase what your products will look like straight out of the packaging.
Product Features
Product feature ads showcase all the benefits of using your product for the customer. You can achieve this either by using video or text.
AR-Style Ad
In this ad format, you can do a side-by-side comparison of your product against your competitors. This is especially useful for food-related products and can highlight your ingredients.
3D Video Ads
If you have an ad image that you want to “pop,” 3D video ads install 3D animation methods to make certain parts of your image, like the product itself, stand out from the rest of the visuals.
Hybrid Ad
With a hybrid ad, you can combine elements of other ad formats, like an image collection and a video ad, together in one carousel.
Question, Answer
Addressing the FAQs of your customers is a great way to build trust and engagement, and you can do this by directly featuring a question from a customer and then answering it within your ad creative.
User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content (UGC) is a cost-effective ad format that uses videos and images created by social media users to create the content of your ad, making it more appealing to skeptical buyers.
Testimonials
If you have customers who already love your products, you have ready-made ad content. You can feature your best testimonials in both image and video ads.
Product Reveals
When you’re ready to launch a new product, creating a reveal video is an easy way to get your customers excited and push them to pre-order it ahead of time in your CTA.
“Sneaky” Negative Angle
In this ad creative, you can take the selling points of your product and portray them as “negatives.” For example, a clean product that made the customer addicted to cleaning or has given them too much free time.
Reasons “Why”
Case studies have shown that audiences gravitate towards numbered content, so using this angle to list the number of reasons why they would love your product can use this fact to your advantage.
“So Satisfying”
The more you can make your product looks visually appealing, the easier it is to entice customers. This ad format focuses on visuals that make your product look aesthetically satisfying.
Pet-Centric Ads
Even if you don’t sell a pet-related product, keeping pets in the frame of your video ads often catches the eye of potential customers and makes your ad feel less salesy and more authentic.
Problem, Solution
Appealing to the pain points of your customers is essential. So, try using an ad format that clearly states the problem they’re having, followed by the solution, aka your product.
Number Of Ways To…
Most of the time, consumer products have multiple benefits. This ad format shows the number of ways a customer can use your product, which is a great choice for things like cleaning products and home goods.
Customer Journey
The customer journey should always be at the center of your storytelling. In this ad, we follow the journey of one customer using the product, making it easy for the target audience to see themselves in the ad.
In-Image Copywriting
This ad format combines imagery and ad copy to create one compelling visual simply by placing the text within the image rather than separate from it.
Over-exaggeration
Exaggeration in advertising doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In this instance, using extreme exaggeration illustrates the product’s benefits in a light-hearted, humorous way.
Tik Tok Famous Finds
There’s no denying the power of Tik Tok for engaging with consumers. So, if you have a product used on Tik Tok, you can use that content to create ads for other platforms.
What I Ordered Vs. What I Got
This format illustrates what your customers can expect when they order from you by showing the journey of customers who ordered your product in contrast to them using the product themselves.
Founder Features
Want to create a more personal relationship with your audience? Video ads featuring the founder of your brand can help share your story and build a stronger connection with potential buyers.
How-To Videos
In this step-by-step ad format, you can show exactly how to use your product in either a video or image, removing any concerns or questions shoppers might have before purchasing.
Instagram Story
Instagram stories are often where users share first impressions of products they love, and you can use this content in ads on other platforms by creating videos that either look like or are taken from Instagram.
Product Demos
Product demos are video ads showing your product in action or being used in different scenarios.
Urgency
To create urgency in your ad creative, remind buyers that this is a limited-time offer or that an item is in low stock, giving them a feeling of FOMO.
Educational Content
In this ad format, instead of just highlighting your product’s benefits, you would provide insight as to why the things are important. This is a great choice for health and wellness products.
Grid Swap
This simplistic animation style shows multiple products in each frame of a grid, then switches them every few seconds.
Reviews
Just like testimonials, sharing customer reviews taken from your eCommerce shop or another social media platform like Facebook and LinkedIn is a good way to build customer trust.
Product Ingredient Reveal
Similar to traditional product reveals, this ad format goes a step further to reveal the ingredients behind your products, which is a strong angle for audiences concerned with things like wellness.
Public Interview
To create more credibility in your ads, use a mock version of a public interview as your video ad, or you can even use real interview footage if you have it.
3D Rendering
3D renderings of your products use computer graphics to add layers to your images, making them more visually engaging.
PR
The more positive press you have for your product, the better. You can highlight any PR in your ad’s texts, images, and videos.
Boomerang
Boomerangs are short-form video clips that play on a loop, which you can use to create quick, catchy videos of your product in action.
Cinemagraph
Cinamegraphs combine motion elements with still images, which overlay to make a more dynamic visual ad.
Flat Lay
For showcasing the details of a product, a flat lay is a type of ad format that looks like a stop motion but is shown from above, allowing the product to lay evenly in the visual.
GIF
GIFs have become one of the go-to methods of communication for online users, featuring short, low-quality video clips that are played in a loop. This type of ad keeps your brand looking fresh and relevant to consumers.
Illustration
There are many ways to use illustrations to create a sense of playfulness in your ads, including adding doodles over your images and creating animated product illustrations.
Mashable
This dynamic style uses video ads and other moving images with text placed over top of them, making it more likely that customers will actually read your ad copy.
Slideshow
To make your still images more engaging, try running them in a slideshow, which should always end with a clear CTA for your shoppers.
Specs
Specs, or specific features of your products, can be highlighted in this ad format, which uses videos and still images to point out these features.
Stop Motion
This is a unique style of animation that uses a series of still images to create the appearance of a moving image, making your ads appealing to the eye.
Video Inlays
Instead of putting images of text over your video, you can also add video inlays to your ad creative. This creates a window-style appearance that draws attention to your creative.
Vignette
On the other hand, the opposite of a video inlay is a vignette, which shows a still image over a video, making the product stand out visually.
Profiles
Think of profiles as testimonials featuring a well-known figure, like an influencer, athlete, or artist, talking about their experience using your product. These endorsements can be very powerful for online audiences.
Reactions
Reaction videos are often low-resolution, giving them the appearance of being filmed in a more authentic way than an over-produced ad, which is typically more relatable to potential customers.
High-Concept
This ad format involves positioning your ad campaign around a greater philosophical or social issue that relates to your brand’s persona. These ads are usually a large-scale production and are best used around big shopping events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Memes
Internet memes are the pinnacle of online culture, and you can easily recreate this vibe in your ad creatives by creating videos and images with the same look as popular memes.
How To Make 300+ Ads The Easy Way
Now that you have plenty of inspiration to work with, you can apply these concepts to our system for making more than 300 ad creatives fast. Here’s how it works:
Need help producing your ad creatives at scale? Connect with our team of eCommerce marketing experts today.
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