Speaker 1: In this video, you're going to learn how to create great Facebook and Instagram ad graphics that actually work. The job of your ad graphic is to get people to pay attention, to stop scrolling, and to actually read your ad. But the vast majority of ad graphics actually just get ignored. This is due to a phenomenon known as banner blindness. Now our brains can only take in and process so much information at a time. So in order to manage all of the different things coming in at us at once, our brains filter out what's not important and focus on what actually matters to us. And that means that we train our brains to actually subconsciously detect what an ad looks like and then automatically ignore it. What's interesting in the Facebook and Instagram news feeds are generally updates from friends and posts on what friends and family and acquaintances are doing. Possibly even news articles. But what isn't interesting is the ad. And that's why we've trained ourselves to filter them out. So as an advertiser, how do you overcome banner blindness and create graphics that actually grab attention? Well, that's exactly what we're going to talk about now. First of all, we need to understand how our brains actually do this filtering. So on the web, this is where banner blindness or that term came from. We automatically filter out based on placement. So we kind of learned that banners normally appear at the top of websites or in the right rail on websites. And so we tend to ignore those places. Studies have been done that show that our eyes naturally track to the center of the webpage and ignore what's at the top and on the side of websites. Simply because we've learned over time that the ads generally live in those places. On the Google search results page, studies have also showed that we tend to naturally just ignore the first couple of results because we know that those results are generally ads. And so we skip down a little bit and go straight to the organic search results. But with Facebook and Instagram ads, we can't really do that. The ads live directly in the newsfeed. So there must be another way, something else that our brains are doing in order to identify and filter out those ads. One of the ways we do this is by identifying patterns within designs. As advertisers, we're all guilty of this. We look at our own newsfeed and we look at the ads that are there, or we go and look at our competitors and see what they're doing. And we tend to use a similar design style and design patterns to them. And now logically that makes sense because we see what our competitors are doing and we try to do something similar, except go one better. But what that does is that creates a situation where if everybody's doing that, then everybody's ads end up essentially looking the same. And that rapidly accelerates the onset of banner blindness within our target audience. Because it's very easy for them to learn what an ad looks like in your industry and then start to filter that out. Maybe you've noticed ads that have a person with a smiling face, they might even be pointing with some nice text next to them on the ad. That's a very common design style, but because it's used so heavily now, often it's not as effective. This same principle applies to stock images and stock photos. Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with using stock photos, but it's very important to select ones that don't naturally get ignored and filtered out. If you think about the Facebook newsfeed, it's full of organic native photos that people have often taken on iPhones and just posted up on Facebook and Instagram. Now these aren't polished or professional looking. However, if you contrast that to a lot of the stock images that you see, which are extremely polished, extremely professional looking, they've got posed actors and actresses in those photos, it's very easy to identify a lot of stock images because of the general style they use. And because of that, if you choose a stereotypical stock image or photo, it's very easy for users to identify that and filter it out. The other common way that people can identify an ad in the feed is the format. If you look at Instagram, for example, all of the photos are pretty much square or they're in a portrait type format, slightly taller. Now the default for ads for a very long time was a landscape type image. And so when Instagram ads rolled around, a lot of Facebook advertisers simply kept using their landscape images. Now that meant it was very easy to identify an ad in the Instagram newsfeed because they were the ones that were rectangular. Every other image in the feed was square or portrait. The same thing happens today still. If you scroll through your newsfeed and look at the organic photos that you see, you will notice that most of them are square or maybe a portrait type. There are a few that are landscape, but if you look at the ones that are used for ads, they are very specific dimensions. And so it's still very easy to identify an ad that uses the old landscape format for their ad graphics. And finally, something else that people often get wrong with their ads that make it very easy to identify them as an ad is they use these overly bright, loud graphics. And the reason for that is they think they're doing the right thing and trying to make something that stands out. And it does. However, it stands out in the wrong way. It stands out and screams, hey, I'm an ad, ignore me. And the reason for that is because it doesn't look anything like what somebody would post organically. So the key is to stand out, but doing it in the right way and not standing out as an ad, but standing out as something that grabs attention and doesn't instantly flag itself as an ad. And now we're going to get into the nitty gritty details of how to do that. The key to standing out in a good way is to create graphics that contain elements that are uniquely interesting and specific to your target audience. So you want things in there that don't just stand out for the sake of standing out because they're bright or because they're loud or because they're unusual, but you wanna put things in your graphics that are something that are particularly interesting to your target audience. For example, and this is a really simple one to start with. If you teach people how to become public speakers, putting a photo of you or somebody else on stage speaking in public is a great way to do this. Most people are going to skip over it if they're not in your target audience, which is fine. But for somebody who's actively looking to become a better public speaker or to learn how to get on stages, if they see a photo in their feed of somebody speaking on stage, it's going to grab their attention. Now have a quick look at this example. This is somebody speaking on stage and it doesn't look like a professional or a stock photo. It's literally taken on an iPhone and that's what makes it so effective. It's a combination of something that's particularly of interest to your target audience and it blends in as an organic looking photo. It's not something that looks like an ad when you immediately see it. Now let's look at another example. Now this image actually shows a screenshot of the Upwork platform and only people who have actually been on there and tried to find work on Upwork will recognise this image. So for anybody who's outside of this person's target audience, means nothing. But for people within the target audience, this is not something they see every day on Facebook. So when they see this, because it's so recognisable to them, it's going to grab their attention. And this really simple use of highlighting and text on here, it then takes them that next step further and grabs a little bit more interest. So they stop because they see this screen and they think, hey, I recognise that, what is that? And then they see this little bit of text on the photo and then they think, ah, okay, this is something that I'm definitely interested in and they keep reading. So that's a great example of how you can use these type of visual elements in your ads that are very specific to only your target audience. And one more example that we've got here is this chart. So somebody who uses Shopify is going to recognise this backend screenshot of a sales chart inside Shopify and they're going to stop and probably have a read. And now they've actually put some text at the top of the graphic as well to sort of continue that journey to get them to stop with the image, read the text at the top and then hopefully read the ad copy. So again, only people who are in this target audience are going to stop and pay attention to this image and that's exactly what you want. All right, next up, you can use visuals to represent a particular challenge or struggle that your audience experiences and do it in an exaggerated way. Have a look at this example from scalable.co. They're using a really exaggerated visual, which is quite interesting. And then they're putting the text at the top to filter out and make sure that it appeals only to their specific audience. The text also gives that context as to why that visual is relevant to what they're talking about. So this is something that is attention grabbing because it's unusual and then they use the text on the image as well to make it contextual and relevant to that specific audience. So think about how you could do something like this for your own ad graphics. All right, next up, a great way to create really effective ad graphics is to catch on to current trends. So have a look at what's happening organically inside the Facebook and Instagram newsfeeds and also outside on other platforms and try to figure out what's trending now in terms of visuals and use that in your ads. A great example of this is memes. So memes have taken off in popularity and by recognizing that and bringing that to ads, a lot of people have done really well in recent times. So they caught on to the fact that memes were trending on platforms like Reddit that were starting to pop up everywhere on Facebook as well. And then people thought, hey, I'll bring this to my ads. And if you can find memes that are even more specific to your industry as well and catch trends that are happening in your industry and attach memes to them, it's a very good way to create highly effective ads. And another way to think about this is catching on to trends within a trend. So memes are a broad trend, but you'll see certain memes that then trend as well. So how can you take those popular memes, turn it into one for yourself, your product, your service, and then create an ad based around that. So it's surfing that trend within the trend. Another great way to come up with really effective Facebook and Instagram ad graphics is to look at what's happening and what's working on other platforms. One of my favorite ones at the moment is actually YouTube. So YouTube thumbnails are a great way to get inspiration for your ad graphics because YouTube creators rely so heavily on thumbnails that they have become very, very good at creating thumbnails that people actually pay attention to and click. So have a look at what your competitors are doing on YouTube, what others in your industry are doing with their YouTube thumbnails, for example, and see if you can bring that across to your Facebook and Instagram ad graphics. Think about other platforms as well. Have a look at places like Instagram Organic, okay? Instagram is very, very visual. Have a look at what people are doing organically on Instagram and see if you can bring that across. Think about other platforms, maybe Reddit, maybe others, where visuals are used heavily. See trends that are emerging there and see if you can bring them across to Facebook. Another thing I'll say here is don't limit yourself to images. I look at TikTok and Instagram and there's a trend at the moment where people will sort of look one way and they'll do something visual and suddenly, boom, there's a big transformation, okay? That's a video trend. But I think, how can I apply that to my images? Well, I could do a carousel with two different images where the first one is the before state and then you swipe across and the second image shows the after state. Here's a quick example for you. Let's think about if you're somebody who teaches how to get organized. You could show a before state image of a messy office, things everywhere. And then they swipe left and look at the second image in the carousel and the office is tidy and perfectly organized. That is how you could take that video trend, adapt it to images and then use it on Facebook and Instagram. So the key here is to spend time on other platforms, find trends, see what's working and see if you can bring that across to your Facebook and Instagram ads. Now, the next one, we touched on this earlier, is to use native formats. For Facebook and Instagram, I recommend using square images or the portrait type, which is, I think it's 1080 by 1350 on Instagram because that tends to be what people are starting to use organically now. So make sure when you're creating ads, follow these tips that I gave you earlier. And when you do it, use these organic native looking formats so that you don't instantly get filtered out no matter what you do as being an ad simply because of the format that you used. Now, if you've enjoyed this video, make sure you give it a thumbs up. If you want to hear more from me, hit subscribe and hit that little bell. You'll get notified whenever I release a new video and I'm putting a video up here now that'll teach you how to create better headlines so that once you use these tips to create better ad images, then you can go and create better headlines to get them to keep reading your ad and hopefully click and take action. Until next time, thanks for watching. Talk to you soon.