High-Quality Facebook Ads On a Budget: The Video Creation Toolkit & Other Free Programs

Strong ad creative is essential for top performance on Facebook. The social networking site states that 70% of campaign success is due to the creative that’s within it. We also understand making creative can be extremely expensive, time consuming, and a large undertaking. Many businesses struggle with the cost/benefit of hiring a creative team, and likely if you’re reading this article, it’s because you’re looking for easy ways to make top creative. Well, thankfully, there’s plenty of tools and best practices below to help make your Facebook ad creative stronger and less daunting.

First, lets chat basic best practices:

• Feed Images should always be 1080 x 1080 – rectangle ads are so two-thousand-late
• Customize your Instagram Stories formats – within the ‘Edit Ad’ section, you can customize placements to ensure you always have the correctly formatted size. Story placements are 1080 x 1920.
• Always have a healthy mix of ad types – Static, Gif, Video, Carousel – have all of them. They all have a purpose, and if you’re able, try to utilize all of them.

Now, the real question. How do you make high-quality creative content when you may not be an Adobe Photoshop pro?

Design / Idea Generation:

First, you need to know what you’re designing! Here are some resources for strong ads:

• Facebook’s Best in Class
  • This resource is great for finding the latest and greatest best practices. Updated frequently, I would recommend checking this resource out before all large creative planning meetings.
• Facebook’s Creative Hub > Get Inspired
  • Similar to the Best in Class link above, this resource is great for finding more “attainable” creative. For example, not best in class, but will get the job done. This resource also does a fantastic job at showing how to utilize the different ad types Facebook offers, to diversify your ad type mix.
• Facebook Ad Library
  • Stalk your competitors or favorite brands to see what they’re up to!

There’s plenty of more planning activities, prospecting versus retargeting messaging, etc., but that can be for a later post!

Now that you have an idea around what you want to create, there are plenty of free tools to go about this.

App Based:
InShot – Great for video! This is great for cutting videos shorter. For example, if you have a long brand video, find the valuable pieces and make it 15 secs or shorter. This app also can format video into the different aspect ratios needed for asset customization.

Mojo – This is a great app for converting static images into an aesthetically pleasing video. This app is very intuitive to use, and although limiting with it’s design, Facebook has invested heavily into this app, so anything designed will most likely already be close to Facebook best practices.

Facebook Tools:
Video Creation Kit – Similar to Mojo, Facebook created multiple different designs where you can easily put together a video with static images that will fit best practices.

The video creation tool kit is a self-serve platform where you can utilize still images and create video. Although it won’t be a nomination for the Clio awards or the next Super Bowl ad, the video creation kit is key for advertisers who lack video assets but are looking for the next best thing.

Video is important to include into your ad mix because they are almost always preferred by the algorithm. In Facebook’s eyes, videos provide a better user experience.

To use this tool, head over to the Creative Hub and select Mock Up > Create Video (not slideshow).

Here you will find a plethora of different curated templates for you to use. They are forever changing with the seasons and social climate of the world.

You can utilize up to 6 images, although most templates only require 2-3 images. You can customize the text, fonts, colors, and branding. All to ensure that you can create an ad that will produce results for you.

Once you create that video, you can add text, links, tracking, and share it with your colleagues for approval.

Facebook Programs:
Facebook has a few programs that you may qualify for called MobileWorks & MobileWorks Express, where you’ll partner with a creative agency and get creative designed for you. This is a great way to offload some creativity on people who do this as their career!

Those are some of the best free tools Facebook offers for starters. Metric Theory also has our own pros who have quarterly workshops with Facebook Creative Teams to ensure we’re always designing the best for you, if you don’t want to dive into your own creative wheelhouse.

Now that you have some tools to create, enjoy the creative process!

Lastly, to bring this back to data, remember to name your ads correctly so you can easily parse out data. For example, don’t name an ad ‘Video 1’, but instead build a strong taxonomy so when the time comes, you can easily find out what you want to iterate off of. For example, ‘Creative Name – Ad Type – Copy Theme – Promo Included’: this can easily be parsed in Excel so not only can you see what ad worked well, but also what ad type or copy theme also works.

Cheers!