Planning is a vitally important stage of creating an advertisement. To launch a successful ad campaign, you need to know who your target audience is. The ad you produce needs to be tailored towards the needs and motivations of this select group of individuals.

You need to ask yourself about your business objectives: What do you want to achieve with your ad? Maybe you want to raise brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales. Then, how are you going to use advertising to get this result?

Try and identify the biggest problems your business is currently facing and how these problems impact your long-term business goals. If you don’t invest the time to think about these things, you risk creating an ad that misses the mark or doesn’t drive the results you’re looking for.

Learn From Historical Ad Campaigns

If you already have existing ads, you should be using metrics and analytics that social media platforms like Facebook provide to understand what is and isn’t working.

For instance, do your current ads have a low engagement rate? If so, your story might not be getting to the point quickly enough. Or perhaps your messaging is confusing, without an explicit call to action. Are you being let down by the content? Are the images or videos in your ads failing to inspire people to invest in your product or service?

Always strive to make it easy for customers to understand exactly what you are offering them. You need to let them know why they should choose you over thousands of other brands, products and services.

Show, Don’t Tell

You should determine what your appeal is to customers and decide how your audience can benefit from your business. Then, show images of people benefiting from or using your product or service — not just a picture or video clip of the product itself. Connect the benefits of your business to your audience’s needs and challenges.

Create an Ad That Is Optimised for Mobile

Mobile-friendly video ad creative has a 27% higher likelihood of driving brand lift and 23% higher likelihood of driving message association than non mobile-optimised videos.

Introduce Your Brand Early

The sooner you introduce your brand in the video and the clearer you make the message, the better. Many mobile videos don’t do well because the message isn’t clear, the branding isn’t distinct enough, or there’s no “call to action” instructing the viewer what to do next. Lead with a single focused message around what you’re offering, and visually hone-in on your product or promotion.

Set the Scene Quickly

Traditional TV advertisements can spend a long time setting up the context of their product or service. On mobile, it’s important to capture attention quickly and get people invested in your product from the word go. Part of this follows on naturally from introducing your brand early on, but it’s important to exercise brevity anywhere that doesn’t detract from your key message.

Kill Your Darlings

Although you might have a longer video concept which you love and worked really well on a different platform such as TV, it might not work so well and you will need to select key video frames to bring together the key messages in a shorter timespan. Doing this means being ruthless and being prepared to kill your darlings.

Consistency is Key

Remember branding is more than just having a logo. Whilst logos are undoubtedly an important aspect of branding, it can also be useful to have a colour palette or video style that you use across all of your messaging. This helps create a sense of cohesion and brand identity.

The Less Text the Better

People spend on average 1.7 seconds with a piece of content on a phone, compared to 2.5 seconds on a computer. They aren’t going to spend a lot of time reading text, so make sure you’re communicating your message with as few words as possible. Instead, use graphics, motions, and explanatory visuals to convey your message.

The words that you do use have to matter; drive urgency with words like today and right now, and consider using a call to action to motivate the audience to act on what they’ve just seen.

Don’t Rely on Sound

Don’t rely on sound to tell your story as most viewers will likely be watching the video with the sound off. Try and create a standalone narrative that works without sound, but then use it to create a bonus experience for any listeners who are listening with the sound on.

Optimise Your Ratios for Mobile

Square and vertical videos (4:3, 1:1) often perform better on mobile as people don’t have to turn their phones sideways to get the full effect. A mobile screen is small but there’s still so much you can do with it, like splitting the screen to show two or more parallel storylines at once.