One of your main priorities as an advertiser is to prevent people from scrolling past whatever you want to show them. There is obviously no chance that individuals will engage with your marketing materials through likes, comments, shares, and so on, unless people actually stop to take a look at what it is you have to tell them. Your creative material, your copywriting, and your purpose is here key to ensure make a relevant audience stop op and engage.
Consider it for a moment. People are undoubtedly browsing Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., while they walk down the street or while engaging in other activities. Out attention span has become worse than that of a goldfish.. So, how can we as marketers grab people’s’ attention when their attention spans have become so extremely limited?
Here are 8 strategies that have worked well for me in order to make your advertising perform.
1. Using a Variety of Colours
On every feed, a wide range of colors will stand out. Although your brand might be minimalist by nature, or very limited in general when it comes to colours and the overall visual expression, there’s most often a way to fit a range of colours into the advertising without making it off-brand. Having standard, medium quality marketing material with no edge will most likely not make your audience stop nowadays.
2. High Contrast Photos
You may boost the contrast of any photo by 20-30% to instantly attract more attention to your ads. This strategy goes hand in hand with the more extreme colour selection in the content you create. The main point is really to make your material stand out compared to the average content out there.
3. Strong product focus
If you are differentiating your brand by having a selection of products that truly stand out, then make sure to showcase those products very clearly in your advertising. Combine it with some interesting colour varieties that fit into your brand, and make sure it’s of high contrast, then you will most likely make more people stop and actually engage with the content. Think of Apple. They tresure their design position more than anything, which is why the small nitty gritty details of all their products are shows very clearly in all their advertising material. When they promote their Apple Watch as an example, they might use some lifestyle images where they showcase it on people doing sports, etc., but their main content that they advertise will always be very high quality, close-up product shots – often composed through renderings, and showcased through video content.
4. Use of Spacing
If you want your items to be noticed, make sure there is adequate spacing around them, almost putting your products on a “pedestal”. Apple are once again world-class when it comes to portraying products in this way, and so are brands like Bang & Olufsen and Nike. If you think about it, the content they usually push – especially the product focused content – is never busy in its nature.
5. Power in The First 2 Seconds
When using video material in once advertising, it is of utmost important that the first 2-3 seconds (and even the first second) are super captivating and eye catching. Again, peoples attention span is very limited, so the more intriguing the first second of your video is, the larger the chance that you will make a user stop in his / her feed. If you have a master ad, or a couple of videos that you know are of good quality, then it is very worthwhile to make various versions of those videos, where you simply change the first 1-3 seconds from video to video, allowing you to make a proper A/B split test on which beginnings work the best.
6. Thumbnail
This point goes hand in hand with the aforementioned point. The thumbnail of a video is essentially what you see before the first second of the video is activated. Facebook videos are powerful, but some argue that the thumbnail is even more important. So make sure that you together with the first seconds of your video material also test out different thumbnails to evaluate if some perform better than others.
7. Symmetry
We humans are accustomed to viewing things in a vertical and horizontal perspective. Playing with the angles of photographs and aspects of your advertising may pique people’s interest in your material. Make sure that whatever you portray is aesthetically pleasing to look at – and this does also go very much hand in hand with point 4.
8. Happy Individuals
According to several studies, smiling individuals boost the appeal of your products / services considerably. We are naturally drawn to people who are happy, so take advantage of this fact in your marketing campaigns. I’ve personally not tested this at a great extent, but it’s indeed worthwhile to give it a shot.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the like are highly visual platforms! With the aforementioned ideas, you can with a higher likelihood promote your products or services successfully. These suggestion can for many seem basic, but they should ensure that people will stop scrolling on their feed and click on your ads. You need to make your brand stick out in the abundance of content which is available on all social platforms nowadays, and the aforementioned 8 points can help you realise that.
