[Masterclass] 5 - Craft Compelling Ads: Copywriting and Design Best Practices

From those rectangles to square to vertical formats. Note that horizontal to square formats and height are shown on both mobile and desktop, while Vertical Creative is only shown on mobile. So typically square formats tend to perform best because they are shown on both platforms while taking up the most screen Real estate and taking up more real estate is good because it gives you a chance to deliver more information. It has a better chance of grabbing their attention and increasing your engagement rates, which will also increase your quality scores. And better quality scores get you lower costs on LinkedIn ads as of a few months ago, LinkedIn now supports GIFs in image ads. I still don't know if you say gif or gif. These are the motion graphics in an image file. This is great because you can add a short animation or motion to your images and this little extra bit can help draw more engagement to your ads. Additionally, sometimes you can convey a point better with a little bit of motion in a way that's not possible with a static image. So I usually recommend starting with static images and then take your winners and try to beat them by adding a little bit of animation to it. Then finally, our video ads. Video ads are good for the brand awareness ads because you can convey a lot more information in the video. But for conversion ads I find videos don't tend to perform as well for the reason that watching a video often distracts from clicking on the ad. Somebody might watch the video and then kind of forget to click through or then keep scrolling and then they don't complete your action. Also, people often click before they've watched the whole video, so you get a lot of unintentional clicks of people not really knowing what they're clicking on. Now videos in the feed they will autoplay but with the sound off. So I recommend putting a headline above the video to help grab attention and call somebody to watch that video and then adding captions below at the bottom so that somebody can watch and just read the text there and then get what the video is about. Again, people don't kill as much time on LinkedIn, so shorter videos tend to perform better. Save the longer videos for retargeting ads when somebody already knows a little bit about you and trusts you more and is more willing to sit through that longer video. Now in terms of editing, I feel like editing tools used to be very expensive back in the day, but these days there's a lot of great affordable tools out there. Now I'd say Canva's probably the most versatile and easily used tool for simple images. GIFs and videos. While Figma is still an affordable but much more powerful editor, video tools like VEED, IO or Kapwing are handy tools for editing social media videos and editing captions and headlines and effects like that. All right, so those are a lot of best practices to consider. Next, let's talk about what not to do and what I see a lot of advertisers get wrong most often. So common mistakes to avoid in your LinkedIn ad creative number one is using fancy serif fonts that are hard to read. I would save those for your website because these often kill readability and recall. Again, people are scrolling quickly in their feed, so if it takes a while to read the text, they're going to be less likely to sit there and actually try to figure it out. So it's best if your ad is immediately understandable. Number two are colors that blend into the background of LinkedIn. Try to avoid using the same blues and beiges that are already in use on LinkedIn. Instead, choose complementary colors that are going to stand out from the platform and accent colors like yellows and oranges to help your ad stand out. Also, keep in mind that many people use LinkedIn with dark mode on, so very dark backgrounds and white text can get lost too. Number three is when I see an image that's too busy with elements filling every corner of the image, your product or service means nothing to them. Similarly, talking about price or discounts doesn't mean anything in their mind because they have no anchor point for that cold. Audiences are also less willing to read long ads or watch long videos because you haven't earned their interest yet. The more aware and engaged they become, the more you can talk about your company or product or service, and the longer they'll be willing to read or watch. The second piece of strategy is content Type Awareness Ads versus Conversion Ads. Awareness ads are meant to deliver a message and those we're usually bidding on on a CPM basis. A conversion ad is meant to draw an action like a click to a website or a submission of a form, and for those we're often bidding on a CPC basis. These we'll keep in mind because this will guide the way that we craft the ad. Research shows that that is the typical flow that a user's eye will go through. The best ads are designed to facilitate that and deliver information in that order. The image packs a punch that makes them stop in their newsfeed, a headline puts a label on the ad and then the body copy goes into more detail and convinces them to take that next Step I think about it like one continuous string of thought. The other elements that will come into play in your ad are the CTA button on the ad, the company or person that the ad is on behalf of with that person or company's profile picture and name. And under that profile picture and name the viewer will either see the number of followers for a company page or the headline that a person has. These are small elements, but they all do come into play. Now the pros start with copy first, so let's start our deep dive there. And they start with copy because they know that words do the selling and then they choose or design a visual which brings to life those words by supporting and furthering the message. So the first is your headline. For conversion ads, the headlines act like a label or action oriented headed lines with verbs tend to work best to lead the reader into completing the action into completing the desired action. A couple examples of headlines I could use for this podcast are number one, listen to this new podcast to master LinkedIn ads or number two, the new masterclass about LinkedIn ads. Headlines that are questions don't usually work well for conversion ads because they're hard for somebody to conceptualize what that ad is going to be about. Second for copy is the body copy, also called intro text on the ad. Now there's a lot of different things that can work well here, and first is that if your body copy is over a certain amount of characters, it will be shown truncated and a See More button will be added. Usually that's after 150 characters of text on LinkedIn. So keep in mind if your ads are over 150 characters, that see More button will be added and then somebody will have to click that button to see the rest of your ad. If your ad is under 150 characters, there'll be no See More button and everything will be displayed on the screen instantly. Keep in mind that most viewers do not click the See More button. So the first couple lines there are key and these should be able to stand alone. For the people that don't click the CMR button but do click through your ad, you want to make sure that the core message is conveyed. Now in the body copy, this is where I like to call out the audience saying something like marketers, you think you know LinkedIn, but have you learned the 2023 updates? Then for the rest of the body copy, be mindful of your formatting. Spacing between paragraphs can help somebody scan your ad, and also so can using a list format. In the body copy, you Want to reiterate your call to action if applicable. And finally, putting a link in the body copy is shown to increase ctr. Now, copywriting is an infinitely deep subject, so I'm not going to go into all the different techniques like social proof and scarcity in this episode, but I'm sure we'll have another episode that dives even further into more of those techniques specifically so that's copy. The next is design principles for eye catching LinkedIn ads. After you write the copy, choose a visual that will support and further the message of your ad. Make sure that visual aligns with your message. If you're talking about software, show illustrations of the software or screenshots of the software. If you're talking about an outcome, maybe you show people that represent the reader achieving that outcome. The visual and any overlaid text should be the most pointed for the text on the image. Think about the billboard rule. If someone is speeding down the highway, which in this case is the newsfeed, they can really only comprehend about five to seven words at high speeds. So more than that and you'll likely have low engagement rates because people haven't had a chance to comprehend the whole ad. Keep in mind that some people click without reading the rest of the ad. So design your visual and overlay text so that it can stand alone if needed if the rest of the ad is not right. The best images have a linear path for your eye to follow. For example, when everything is left justified and your eye can quickly scan down it, that's usually maximum readability. Now study shows that images of people, especially when when they're looking at you, at the camera, draw the most attention. There's something about being watched that stops us in our tracks. Logos are generally recommended to include in the image when it makes sense to, because logos in that image convey a sense of authority and ownership of that message. And it starts to create the connection between the reader and the company. Sometimes you'll see images and they if they don't have a logo, you question is this Was this image just pulled in from the post on that page? Is this image from somebody else? But putting the logo there creates that connection. Next is talking about image format. Years ago, LinkedIn only used to support the horizontal rectangle images. And to this day I still see a lot of ads using this. But today LinkedIn does support a variety of image dimensions and background textures. Consider laying out your image for one leaner skin to the eye to maximize readability and recall. Number four is just like cramming images with too much content is cramming your copy with multiple angles or pinpoints or benefits into the same ad copy. You'll send your readers minds into too many directions. So instead choose a single angle to focus on and instead of mixing in other angles with your additional sentences, use those later sentences to expand upon your point and then pack the biggest punch. Number five is Boring ads, and I'll just leave it at that. All right, onto final points here. So the first thing I'll mention is the new thought leader ads that were recently released on LinkedIn. These thought leader ads now allow advertising on behalf of a person instead of just a company by enabling you to boost posts from people. Previously we were limited to ads that would only appear from a company page with the company logo and name there, but now we can boost posts from people instead of just companies. At the moment, these thought leader ads only support text and image posts and you can include a link in the post body. They do not support video or document ads at this time. I'm super excited about these because people will always get more engagement than companies, so I think there's a lot of opportunity to use these. Consider working with leaders and subject matter experts in your company to craft posts that can be boosted. And if you ever see any posts of theirs stand out or go viral, those are great posts to boost into ads. Keep in front of your target audience. Consider using founders to tell their origin story and share your company's vision and mission. Consider boosting posts from salespeople who will be reaching out to those prospects as as a way to warm up those introductions. It'll be super interesting to see the creative ways that people find to use these as a starter. I think a lot of awareness and educational content can perform better coming from a leader at the company. The next tip is doing creative research so you can go view the active ads and recently active ads of any company page on LinkedIn. So if a company has run ads in the last 90 days, those ads will show up under their company page. To do this you must be on desktop. Go to that company page and first click on posts and then once you're under posts, click on ads. Then you can see all the sponsored content ads that that company has run in the last 90 days. This is a great place to do creative research. See the imagery and copy and messaging that your competitors or similar companies are discussing out there. You might notice trends in different tactics or imagery or offers that they use and maybe use that to inform your strategy. So that's one of the best places to start for when you're doing your creative research and planning. Also, we can't have an episode on Creative without talking about AI tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney are your friend. My first way of using ChatGPT is to do research for me. Here's the prompt that I like to use. Here it is. Tell me the biggest problems that the target audience has that this company can help with and what happens if this target audience does not solve their problems. Also, tell me what are the biggest goals of this target audience that this company can help with and how achieving these goals will help somebody in the target audience in their job or company. Explain in detail why each of these are important and include specific examples. That's it. I'll swap in Personas and company names for each and having ChatGPT tell you the reasons behind these is what's really useful to uncover motivations and find information that would take a lot of time and googling and cross referencing for me to really know. I love to use these AI tools for ideation. You can ask ChatGPT to write an ad or a headline for you 20 different ways and then you can scan down those and pick and choose the best ones and you'll get a lot of ideas just from that process. All right, so let's lock in these takeaways. Today we talked about ad copy and design. First, we talked about the key elements of your ad are your image, your headline, and your intro text, and that viewers usually read them in that order. Second, we talked about copywriting best practices. Remember that the See More button is included after 150 characters and when you're writing your copy, keep your sentences short and your paragraph short so your copy can be scanned quickly. Next was design. It's helpful to overlay your images with text because some people will click without reading the rest of your ad with those text overlays. Remember the billboard rule and to limit it to five to seven words if possible. Avoid overcomplicating those images with too many elements. If an image is too busy, people will just scroll by. Next were common mistakes to avoid. Number one is avoid fancy serif fonts that are hard to read. Number two is avoid colors that blend into the background of LinkedIn, including dark mode colors. Number three was avoid images that are too busy. Number four avoid mixing too many angles into one ad and number five avoid boring ads. Edginess and entertainment can go a long way for ad recall. Finally, some resources that I mentioned are Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. Probably one of the best copywriting books of all time. Next was David Ogilvy and his books Confessions of an Advertising man and Ogilvy on Advertising. Others that I like are the Copywriter's Handbook by Adweek and the Non Designers Design Book by Robin Williams. Alright, that's it for this episode. I can't wait to dive into this next topic with you soon.

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