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3 Creative Ways to Promote Content With Carousel Ads

Time and again, carousel ads prove their bottom-of-the-funnel efficacy to generate direct conversions and sales. Indeed, this ad format is an all-time favorite for e-commerce managers who promote physical products, most often featuring one SKU per slide. It also is widely used to showcase multiple features of a product in a single campaign.

Content marketers too can leverage carousel ads to pursue brand awareness, reach, and traffic objectives. Explore these three creative ways to promote content with Facebook and Instagram carousel ads.

Get creative with your #content promotion and use carousel ads on Facebook & Instagram, says @ThibaudClement via @cmicontent. Click To Tweet

1. Offer a sneak peek into premium content

Traditionally, generating leads through inbound marketing involves a downloadable resource (e.g., research, white paper, survey), a landing page with a signup and download form, and promotional efforts to drive traffic to that page.

A reasonable and proven approach, its success more often relies on the quality of the marketing content – the title of the resource, the headline of the ad, and the highlights of the landing page — than on the quality of the downloadable resource.

Use carousel ad slides to showcase samples of your downloadable resource, says @ThibaudClement via @cmicontent. Click To Tweet

This is inherently tricky. A high-performing campaign promoting a disappointing piece of content is hurtful for the brand. Conversely, the best white paper in the world could be ignored in a poor campaign.

Here is where carousel ads make a difference. With 10 slides available in Facebook and Instagram carousel ads, you have room to showcase samples of the downloadable resource before you ask users to visit your website or share their email address. This game-changer both defuses the risks of branding damages and sheds light on the true cornerstone of the campaign: the content resource.

Example

In this Instagram carousel, Bill Rice promotes a slide deck from his digital agency Kaleidico, featuring eight web design tips to prompt conversions. This is brilliant, as it allows Bill to showcase his team expertise by giving users access to the presentation right from Instagram – and then those interested visitors can reach out with inquiries regarding design projects.

2. Wow your audience with horizontal infographics

As content marketers, we know infographics can be a powerful tool to drive engagement on social media, generate backlinks through outreach, and improve SEO.

Usually, infographics are designed in a tall, vertical format, which is easy to scroll on desktop and mobile, and stands out on visual platforms such as Pinterest. However, that portrait aspect ratio does not jibe well with visual requirements for news feed-based social networking sites.

But you can flip the table on social-posted infographics and use carousel ads to present infographics in a new way: horizontally. As a mouse/thumb-stopping content format, not only will the horizontal graphics bump up your engagement rate from users bored with and blind to things they have seen a thousand times, they also deliver a deeply satisfying native experience resulting from a perfect blend of your content with the platform’s user interface.

Example

This Instagram carousel ad visually promotes the key talking points of a long-form article we published on the Loomly blog:

No need to be extremely fancy. Swiping through the slides is not only fun and seamless, it is informational. Viewers can snack on content bites and are invited to click to read the full article.

Example

Alternatively, you can repurpose a vertical infographic to fit the carousel format. We did that with the 2018 edition of our If Facebook Were A Village of 100 People infographic:

3. Serialize related videos

In a small study from Facebook IQ research, videos retained users’ attention five times longer than static content. Feedback from agencies and brands, and our experience, corroborate this finding.

It can get better. Do you know what is even more efficient than a video? A series of videos.

Hollywood is shifting production budgets from single films to series. Many popular YouTubers are transitioning from one-off uploads to mini-series covering a single topic. And Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman’s ambitious venture, Quibi, has raised over a billion dollars on the promise of offering mobile-friendly shows split into chapters.

Your brand can be part of the serialized content revolution – and carousel ads make that easier, allowing you to group and broadcast together multiple videos around a common theme in a single ad.

A single carousel ad makes it easier to air multiple videos around a common theme, says @ThibaudClement via @cmicontent. Click To Tweet

Example

This Facebook carousel ad by Porsche is part of its #SportscarTogether campaign, featuring three short videos and leading to a Messenger chatbot through which viewers can get a ride or invite a friend to a ride in a Porsche:

Where to go from here

Carousel ads are the way to go to tell a broader brand story and have a bigger impact. Promoting your content is essential to maximizing your investment in creating the resources. That’s why, along with the usual suspects, Facebook and Instagram carousel ads may well be your new secret weapon. Give them a try and let us know in the comments how it goes.

Get the latest on tech to better your content marketing, from strategy to implementation and promotion, at ContentTECH Summit this August. Check out the agenda today.

 Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute