Social media has become the poster child of the internet, with over 4.6 billion people worldwide using some form of social media daily. For marketers, its turned into the most lucrative opportunity in human history. Even in the earlier days of the internet, these opportunities didn’t exist. Most users were scattered across various websites that catered to sub-cultures and niches rather than an overarching theme of connecting, like Facebook or Instagram.
Many social media users are looking for entertainment and will easily spot advertisements that break the norm of their social media feeds. Creating advertisements for these websites has become a challenge in itself due to the unique way information is displayed to users and how they can interact with it. Users passively consume content while scrolling through their feed, and it’s your job as a copywriter to break this mindless scrolling.
In this blog, you will learn a three-step process designed to pull users away from their social media feeds and into your sales pages through a call-to-action.
The Goal of Social Media Advertising
The goal of advertising on social media is to get users away from their feeds and onto your landing page. You can’t sell effectively through a social media post. Word limits and formatting make even the most skilled copywriters lose their heads whilst trying to construct a compelling post.
This is achieved by building intrigue around your product or service without giving too many details away. When done effectively, users will stop scrolling to check out what you have to say. Humans are naturally curious; it’s one of the reasons we’ve become the dominant species on earth. When advertising on social media, we’re simply leveraging this curiosity to encourage users to follow the breadcrumbs to where we want them to go.
Disrupting a Users Scrolling
As we’ve already noted, most users passively consume content, scrolling from one post to the next and occasionally engaging for a brief moment to like or retweet a post.
Before writing a post, the number one goal is to build a header that instantly disrupts users’ scrolling and makes them read further.
Our recent blog, “Five effective bullets that will make your ads IMPOSSIBLE to ignore”, is a great place to start when writing headers. With that said, there are three things to keep in mind when constructing a header that makes your followers stop and read your post:
- Word limits/formatting – many websites have a limited number of words that can be displayed in a header. Keep this in mind, as you don’t want your carefully crafted header being cut off by a character limit.
- Don’t clickbait – advertising has some of the strictest regulations, particularly on sites like Facebook or Google. Misleading titles can easily get you banned.
- Don’t reveal everything – this point has been made a few times and with good reason. Your focus when constructing a header is to disrupt readers’ scrolling with a vague but intriguing title.
Once you’ve got your reader’s attention, you can begin to build intrigue and start piquing their curiosity to make them follow your call to action.
Building Intrigue
This is where the body of your post comes into play. Here you begin to showcase the unique problem that your product or service solves or the unique way it does it. It’s important to remember that you’re not selling the product here. You’re building intrigue and increasing your reader’s interest by hinting at the benefits of your product or service without being too blatant or obvious.
Little by little, you can begin to reveal more about your actual product without painting a complete picture. The emotion you’re trying to trigger in your reader should amount to low-grade anxiety; you want them to feel a strong urge to figure out what your product is and how they can get their hands on it.
Once you’ve generated enough intrigue, you can create your call to action.
The CTA
A call to action can be anything from signing up to a mailing list, watching a YouTube video, or simply purchasing from your landing page. In the case of advertisements, your CTA should focus entirely on getting the reader from their social network feed and onto your landing or sales page (which is where you begin to actually sell your product or service).
The CTA needs to be simple, enticing and fast to carry out. If you’ve got the user’s attention and built enough intrigue, you’ve already won half the battle when asking readers to carry out a particular action. However, you can encourage them further by using time-limited sales or other value increasing sales techniques. Urgency is created when you give readers a time limit to complete the CTA, and it’s the easiest way to ensure you drive traffic to your landing page.
Adapting Your Copy
Social networks are constantly evolving with how they allow users to post and interact with each other’s content. Platform updates, policy changes and algorithms are just some of the indicators that you need to watch for when writing your copy.
Whilst you can use the tips above on every platform, keep in mind that header/hook placement will change depending on content. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram will need headers within the images themselves, whilst Twitter will work best with a header at the start of your post/thread.
Building intrigue can also come in many different forms of content, including video or audio clips. Depending on the platform, you’ll be able to embed or upload video content directly to your post. The benefit of using video is building intrigue with a great script whilst adding infographics to further entice your audience.
Regardless of how you post your content, the end goal remains the same: to get them onto your website.
