Key elements to keep in mind when designing high-quality ads and graphics for your social media accounts.

Social media marketing and advertising has become one of the most important, accessible and strategic ways to engage with your audience. For many of our clients, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have become a hub for marketing strategy, audience engagement, and content circulation. 

As popular as social media platforms are, they are also highly competitive and can require expertise and strategy. A successful social media strategy will result in higher engagement with your target audience, develop an appropriate budget, and create realistic marketing goals. 

When it comes to designing graphics, there are some user-friendly platforms for all skill levels. For the beginner designer, Canva is always a great option. However, for a more sophisticated and branded approach, hiring an expert designer to create customized graphics using advanced programs such as Adobe can make a difference in your overall brand messaging!

However, before designing graphics, you’ll need to craft your strategy. Strategic planning will helps to refine the goals of your social media marketing efforts, whether it be generating leads on Instagram, creating engaging content on Facebook, and so much more . Some goals you should have for social media marketing include:

• Increasing brand awareness 
• Sales/Lead generation 
• Increasing community engagement 
• Growing your brand’s audience 
• Increasing website traffic 

Once your strategy is developed, you can focus on designing your content. Understanding how to design advertisements for social media marketing is critical to both the success of your strategy and audience engagement. There are some key elements to keep in mind when jumping into advertising and content design.

1. Consistent Brand Standards

If you have a solid and defined strategy, setting up consistent brand standards will be an easier process. Consistency is key for social media marketing. This is especially important to keep in mind as you market your brand across different social media platforms. Keeping your brand consistent and present throughout all social media designs will help your audience resonate with your brand.

Brand guidelines should include specific font choices, a color palette, logo placement, how and when to use specific logos, and so much more!

2. Less Is More

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make nowadays is creating overwhelming content for social media platforms. In the age of information overload, we all know how unlikely we are to engage with unclear content.

Keeping your designs simple, clean, and consistent will result in increased audience engagement and will allow for your branding to shine. Overcomplicated designs will hinder the success of your messaging and push consumers away from engaging with your business.

On Facebook, the success of your content actually relies on this principle. Facebook maintains the 20% rule: only 20% of your advertisement can contain text. Content that doesn’t follow this rule is proven to have less circulation and less success, so make sure to keep this rule in mind if Facebook advertising is part of your social media strategy. 

3. Attention-Grabbing Text

Including attention-grabbing text in your social media designs helps to ensure your graphics pack a punch. Following the “less is more” rule, ample amount of text on graphics is easier on the eyes and can help create clarity in your brand.

For example, if you’re promoting a brand new menu for your restaurant, you wouldn’t necessarily list every menu item on your social media graphic. However, a simple line of text saying “Introducing our new menu!” would most likely grab your audience’s attention.

4. Original & Engaging Imagery

Remember, social media users engage with content at an incredibly fast pace. If you want consumers to spend time looking at your content, it needs to be original, intriguing and engaging. This may sound like an easy feat, but it can actually be quite tricky. 

Keeping your brand standards in mind is a great place to start. Consistent colors, fonts, and designs will ensure that the base of your designed content looks cohesive. Next, make sure you’re creating imagery that is relevant to your business and engaging to your target audience. Developing your strategy will really come in handy here. Keeping your strategy and branding in mind as you develop your content will enable you to create original and intriguing content that your audience will want to engage with. 

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of elements involved in the process of developing and creating social media marketing content. Keeping these four elements in mind will allow you to develop the best content for your strategy and business.
If you want to refine or develop a better marketing strategy or need assistance with designing content, give Simply Clear Marketing a call at (805) 543-6397 or visit our website.