The most critical part of your paid social strategy

If done right, paid social is one of the most impactful and scalable demand drivers for consumer businesses. As Meta has consolidated ad inventory across Facebook and Instagram, streamlined their ads platform, and refined their algorithm over time, you can be on your way to reaching millions of people in just a few clicks.

But wasting a bunch of money can be just as easy as reaching those people if your strategy isn’t dialed in.

There’s a key strategic element your paid social will all but fail without — and it’s not your audience targeting or campaign structure. Both matter, but nothing makes or breaks paid social performance like your creative.

How did we get to this point?

Savvy growth marketers know this, but LOTS has changed in the last 5 or so years in the world of paid social. Gone are the days of meticulous audience segmentation, and I’m always shocked when folks think more targeting parameters are going to meaningfully move the needle.

I’ll do a whole deep dive on this another time*, but the TL;DR is Meta has significantly reduced their available targeting options over time, and because of strengthened privacy solutions that Apple released in early 2021, Meta has gotten much worse at matching to the user profiles you include (or exclude) in your custom audiences.

Advertisers have fewer controls than ever when running their Facebook and Instagram ads — with creative being the big exception.

*EDIT March 2024: Deep dive here!

So what’s the lever?

While businesses with highly niche audiences may very well struggle with acquisition in this post-iOS 14 world, it’s really not that scary for most advertisers. Meta’s algorithm has gotten almost frighteningly good at figuring out who to serve ads to without many parameters at all, based on the action you tell it to optimize for.

Further, “broad” targeting is a big misnomer. If you run fairly open targeting, Meta is only going to show your ads “broadly” until it gathers enough signals to figure out who is engaging.

Depending on your spend, this narrowing down can happen almost instantly. So when you run “broad” targeting, you basically just let Meta decide on your targeting parameters for you on the back end — you’re NOT reaching every single person in your loosely defined audience.

But this doesn’t mean your job is done. You still have to help Meta gather those signals — so treat your creative AS your targeting.

It’s impossible for you to be better than the Meta algo at determining which creative to show to which subset of people, so give it the autonomy to do this.

When you generate a bunch of creative assets that speak to a variety of your user subsets, not only through different messaging, but also through format and design (are you someone who’s more likely to appreciate a beautifully-designed piece of ad creative, or is a UGC video going to hook you in?), you can speak to all your users, without trying to do so in one ad — a big no-no.

Building a creative strategy

Before blasting your message out to the world, there are a couple components you need in place as a baseline. It’s ok if these change over time, and in fact, they should, as you test and learn: