One of the questions we get asked a lot is “What type of ads deliver the best performance on social media?” It’s a tricky question to answer because all ad formats will underperform if the advertising concept sucks. And by sucks I mean fails to reach enough prospects, fails to grab their attention, fails to make a memorable impression and fails to generate clicks to buy or learn more. By these standards, we estimate that over 90% of current advertising sucks – no matter what format they’re executed in.

That’s why you need to start with a high-impact positioning strategy for your brand brought to life through an integrated campaign of impossible to ignore and hard to forget creative ads. To find out how Immortology develops powerful communications strategies and audacious creative that maximize performance click here.

Now before we reveal the top performing ad type for social media, you need to know how Immortology assesses them. We don’t waste our time or your money developing complex audience segmentations, multiple layers of content to match each phase of the customer journey to achieve low impact business results. Here’s why. While there are exceptions, over 90% of all marketing clients have the same two goals:

  • “Grow demand for our product or service”

  • “Increase sales and revenue”

Everything we do is judged by its ability to achieve one or both of those goals. Everything else is secondary.

Turns out the best way to achieve both goals is to reach as many potential buyers in your category as your budget allows with an integrated campaign of ads designed and written to be impossible to ignore and hard to forget. The ads in your campaign should consist of:

  • Demand Growing Ads – Brand building ads that grow brand awareness and memorability to make those who aren’t ready to buy now more likely to choose and buy your product in the future. For most businesses, most of your budget should go towards producing and promoting these ads.

  • Demand Harvesting Ads – Direct response ads that harvest sales from those who are ready to buy right now.

 You must have both to maximize sales and revenue. No exceptions.

 Ok, let’s assume you’ve done all the above. What type of ad performs best on social media – still image or video? 

 The answer is video. (And no, video is not the underutilized tactic we use to boost social media performance. Keep reading, we’ll reveal that soon;)

 Here are a few stats why video performs better:

That’s all well and good but what if you don’t have the time or budget to produce live action and/or animated videos?

Here’s what we do. Convert your still images and headlines into simple motion graphics videos. While they don’t perform quite as well as live action and fully-animated videos, they outperform still images and text ads. In fact, our motion graphics ads have consistently delivered pretty much all the benefits of live and animated video listed above – without the high price tag and lead times to produce. What’s more, they’re a great way to multipurpose headline driven concepts.

We started testing motion graphics on social media years ago while trying to replicate the outstanding performance of some of our print ads and billboards. As you probably know, still images with headlines don’t perform well on most social media platforms. In a wrongheaded attempt to promote using images and videos, Facebook and Instagram algorithms would actually penalize ads by severely limiting impressions if the text comprised more than 20% of the ad’s main image.

The way we fooled the algorithm was to animate the type and in effect turn our still image ads into motion graphics. Given 90% of people view videos on social media with the sound off, there’s no need to add music or sound effects. Here’s a few examples of motion graphics we created for BMW Motorrad, Ballistol, WOOX and RPD Pro Series Rod Holders. All outperformed national advertising category KPIs by 3X – 10X.

We’d be delighted to create a high-performance integrated campaign for you. To get started, please send us an email with some days and times you’d like to talk. Just click here.