How to Unlock Your Creative Potential on Stories
Explore Creative Strategies for Effective Stories Ads
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Stories have captured people’s imaginations and attention—500 million people use Instagram Stories and 300 million use Facebook Stories each day. This immersive, full-screen and ephemeral format has not only connected people to those closest to them, but also to the brands and products they love, with 2 million monthly active advertisers on stories as of January 2019.
And stories is the place for marketers to connect with their customers and communities in exciting and engaging ways. But connecting and driving business outcomes requires building creative that matches people's expectations of the format—while inspiring them to take action.
We know that mobile-first storytelling is essential to driving campaign effectiveness from our first study on stories creativity. As marketers lean into this format within their own media mix, some key advice from Kay Hsu, Global Instagram Lead of the Creative Shop at Facebook, is to “design for how people consume, and don’t be afraid to experiment.”
To help marketers further unlock their storytelling potential, we’ve conducted more studies to understand what strategies are driving effectiveness—and what creative areas we can continue to explore.
Creative considerations and explorations for stories ad creative
We're exploring the unique creative considerations for stories creative in three different categories:
- Look and feel: What creative strategies and elements are unique to driving effectiveness?
- Brand and product: How do brands and products most effectively show up?
- Format and execution: Which creative formats and styles are driving the most effective storytelling?
We've been conducting research to understand what creative strategies are driving effective stories performance. While we don't know everything yet, we're continuing to test and learn what effective stories creative looks like based on people's consumption and expectations of the format.
Keep attention with speed
Recommendation: Create ads that leverage speed as a creative element to capture and keep attention.
Enhance your story with sound
Recommendation:Use voice-over or music as creative tools to enhance the message and value proposition of your brand or product.
CONSIDER EXPERIMENTING
Avoid unnecessary stickers
Recommendation: No matter the format, when used well stickers can draw attention to the product, make the ad feel like it belongs in the environment and make it feel less like an ad and more relatable.
When used poorly, stickers take people’s attention away from the products(s), feel inconsistent with the ad’s vibe, or feel disingenuous - like they are present without a purpose.
CONSIDER EXPERIMENTING
Land takeaways with text overlays
Recommendation: Test what methods work best for your creative and consider using text to emphasize key messages while also maintaining a clear focal point.
Begin with your brand
Recommendation: Integrate branded elements (logos and brand elements) at the very start of your creative.
Design with your objective in mind
In our study, there is 73% chance of product-focused creative driving better lower-funnel metrics than people-focused creative. And there is a 75% chance of people-focused creative driving better brand performance than product-focused creative.5
Recommendation: Always design creative with your objective in mind. Stay focused on people for brand objectives and product for conversion objectives.
CONSIDER EXPERIMENTING
Call your audience to action strategically
Recommendation: Experiment with elements that emphasize the action you want viewers to take (for example, "Swipe Up").
Split your story into scenes
Recommendation: People consume stories content quickly—experiment with bite-sized and fast-paced narratives.
CONSIDER EXPERIMENTING
Mix and match motion and static
Recommendation: Consider adding two or more assets with different formats into one campaign with multiple ad sets.
What it means for marketers
Test and learn, experiment with creativity on stories.
These creative considerations are launching points for exploring what strategies work for your audiences and business objectives. Take an experimental approach to creative development by testing your own hypotheses and playing more with this exciting new format
Keep in mind the importance of creative within the planning process.
Creative is a key factor in driving campaign effectiveness, and even the best marketing plan won't succeed without the right kind. Our “How to strengthen your stories ads strategy” guide helps provide more context around the creative opportunity on stories in addition to planning, bidding and targeting strategies.
Build best-in-class creative with industry-leading partners.
Working with creative partners allows your marketing to take a faster, more agile approach to production and to build assets that drive business results. Creative Platform Partners are vetted by Facebook for their mobile marketing experience and innovative technology solutions, and are here to help you produce stellar creative at scale.
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