How to Increase Conversion Through Better Ad Creative

Hey I’m Joseph Hill, Director of Digital Strategy here at Metadata.

Once you’ve identified your target audience the battle isn’t over. You still need to hit them with a powerful ad that grabs their attention.

We need to ask ourselves the tough questions. Does my image stand out enough? Is it clear what problem my product is solving? Does my ad come across boring? Are my ads hard to digest?

If you’re having trouble with high CPLs and low CTRs, bad creative could be the problem. Running this playbook can help get performance where it needs to be.

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How It Works

1. Master psychological principles to create ads that resonate with your target audience.
2. Implement proven best practices to write ad copy that peaks interest.
3. Build your swipe file with various examples of top-performing ad creative. 
4. Explore these additional resources for creating powerful ads. 

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The Playbook

Master psychological principles to create ads that resonate with your target audience. 

• Your offer has to be a pain pill, not a multivitamin 

You could have the best ads ever created but if your prospect doesn’t want what you’re offering, it’s game over. 

Everything starts with your offer and you must satisfy the following criteria:

• Importance = how impactful will this offer be for your prospect?
  • 1 = not impactful
  • 2 = moderately impactful
  • 3 = extremely impactful 
• Problem = is solving this problem business critical?
  • 1 = not a significant problem
  • 2 = important to solve but not urgent enough
  • 3 = important and urgent 
• Desire = how motivated are your prospects to solve this problem?
  • 1 = no desire to solve this
  • 2 = motivated but not critical
  • 3 = motivated and business critical
• Pricing = how much would your prospects pay for this?
  • 1 = $0
  • 2 = $1-$1,000
  • 3 = $1,000+ 
• Urgency = how soon do they need to solve this?
  • 1 = can wait more than a year
  • 2 = can wait 3-12 months
  • 3 = must solve in less than 3 months

Here’s how a prospect would view a pain killer vs multivitamin with this criteria:

Before moving forward to step 2 make sure your offer is a need to have.

Rank your offer ideas across the 6 criteria listed above and choose the best offer with this decision matrix template. 

Offer Decision Matrix (FILE -> MAKE A COPY)

Once you have an offer selected move on to the next step.

Implement proven best practices to write ad copy that peaks interest.

Here’s 7 best practices to follow to write copy that actually gets read:

1. Address the User with You, Your etc
2. Highlight Any Pain Points User May Have
3. Make Your Asset/Service the Solution to a Problem
4. Avoid Repeating Yourself with the Same Text in the Image
5. Add Statistics, Numbers Attract Eyes
6. Ask Questions to Engage the User
7. Keep It Short and Concise (60-120 characters)

Try to incorporate as many of these best practices possible when writing your ad copy. 

Remember your ad copy must include your key messaging to create demand effectively.

Failing to connect the prospect’s pain point to your USP/benefit is one of the biggest reasons B2B marketers fail to draw attention with their ads. 

You can and should try different ad formats but never forget to stay focused on the same problems/benefits.

Here’s 9 psychological approaches to consider when writing copy to make it easier for prospects to understand your value:

You don’t have to use each approach for every ad, but stacking as many as you can will absolutely give you a greater chance of creating ads that get read. 

Build your swipe file with various examples of top performing ad creative. 

There’s no shortage of creative approaches you can take with your ads.

It’s important to study what great ads look like and save this inspiration in a swipe file. 

A swipe file is nothing more than a collection of screenshots/videos in a folder you can reference when building your ads. 

There’s nothing worse than creating ads from scratch with ZERO inspiration. 

To help get you started on your swipe file I’m going to show you different ad examples by format/offer you can draw inspiration from.

Demo Ads

Video Ads:

Carousel Ads:

Gated Content

Leverage these examples to help you get started building your swipe file.

Explore these additional resources for creating powerful ads. 

Hope you’ve tremendous value from this playbook!

Now as you can imagine building powerful ads is a heavy topic.

Here’s some additional resources I recommend you explore:

• How to Build the Highest Performing Ad Creative
• Crafting Landing Pages and Social Ads That Actually Convert
• Creativity Class: 9 Ways to Have Good Copywriting Ideas
• Punchy Messaging: How to Write Messaging That Hits the Mark
• What the Top 1% of B2B Storytellers Do Differently
• 9 Best Practices to Get the Most Out of Your Image Ads

Wishing you success with your ads! Let us know what you thought of this playbook.