How to improve social media ads with mockups
How to improve social media ads with mockups
The ability to create mockups is a greatly underused tool in Meta’s advertising platform.
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Let’s dive into today’s topic:
How to improve social media ads with mockups
The success of an advertising campaign is largely determined by the quality of the advertisement itself. Meta’s Ad Mockup tool helps advertisers create the perfect ad.
Why it matters
Programmatic advertising platforms like Meta’s Ads Manager offer brilliant tools to target specific audiences. It’s tempting to spend a lot of time defining the perfect target audience and allocating large media budgets to acquire, engage and retain those audiences.
However, music promotion is more about branding than marketing, and thus more about the message than the numbers. Artists should invest most of their time and money in crafting the ad’s creative.
How it works
When setting up a campaign on Instagram and Facebook, start by creating a mockup of the advertisement(s) using Meta’s Ad Mockup tool. Mockups can be created at several places within the Meta Business Suite:
In Meta’s Creative Hub.
In Meta’s Media Library under Business Media.
The ability to create mockups is a greatly underused tool in Meta’s advertising platform. Meta’s manual on mockups is a good place to start.
My workflow is simple. First, I upload all creative assets (i.e. videos, photos, images) in all dimensions (i.e. timeline, stories) to a new folder in Meta’s Media Library. Next, I create a new mockup in the same folder.
The mockup shows how ads will look on all placements.
All placements can be adjusted: Vertical videos for stories, 4*5 videos for timelines, etc.
Adjust the thumbnail for each placement, add text, call-to-actions, and a landing page URL.
When mockups are ready, I share them with the artist team to get approval for content.
Finally, and obviously, I use the mockups as an ad in Meta’s Ad Manager.
Yes, but..
So what about those thousands of marketing blogs out there teaching artists to target specific audiences and so on? They’re not wrong, especially those artists with a healthy interest in digital marketing should dive into that knowledge. But for most artists setting up advertising campaigns, It’s highly recommended to spend most time and budget on a great video first and a perfect advertisement second.
Take action now
For all digital marketers working with artists: We’ve all been there, setting up a campaign for an artist with a terrible video. The solution is simple: Just be honest. Often, it’s better not to launch a campaign than to run ads with a creative that won’t get people to stop scrolling.
Further reading
Mockups Start Guide (Meta)
Get digital marketing inspiration from other artists in 30 minutes (Artist Lockdown Challenge)