This lesson, I'm going to show you how to make a very attractive looking visual that you can use in your Facebook ad. And best of all, I will show you how to do it for free. So for this, we're going to be looking at something called Canva. And Canva is fantastic not just for building Facebook ads, but you could build your social media posts through Canva. And it allows you to do a whole bunch of other types of things as well. So let's have a look at Canva.

And across the top, it says Create your design and it gives you some samples and if you want more samples, you just hit that little plus sign and it brings a whole bunch more answers you see if you're doing social media posts specific to Twitter or social media in general, and it shows you the sizes underneath. So that way you can always get your post the exact size based on where you are Posting. And I mean, as you can see, if you keep scrolling the different types of documents you can do, if you're doing ebook covers, whatever this is all free and then give you a different template. Isn't that like absolutely fantastic. But because we're doing a Facebook ad, we're just gonna scroll down to the very bottom here and see this option Facebook add in automatically has the correct dimensions. Now the other thing you could always do is if you know the dimensions of what you want, or let's say you're building a banner for your website, and you need it to be specific dimension, you go up here on the right, and you click on use custom dimensions, and it'll allow you to put in the dimensions that you need.

But I'm just going to be amazed we'll use something that's already created. So 1200 by 628 sure that my Facebook ad dimension needs to be and it'll create it at the perfect size that I need to upload to Facebook, which would be great. So What it does here on the right, it'll bring up a blank canvas on the left, it'll bring up samples of what you can do. So, for example, if I chose the first one, I would just click on it. And if I had a really nice looking visual, I would just replace what they put on here. With the visual I had add in, whatever I want my text to me, and boom, it's going to be ready to go.

Just like that. Now you can scroll through. If it comes up with a little dollar sign, it means that you need to pay for that for that template, so if I clicked on this one, and I used it, when I'm done designing it, it would ask me to pay for it in order to download it. Okay, so I like to stick to free ones. I mean, there's so many different types of options. As you can see, that one's free.

That looks really good, right? Okay. Now, as you can see, most of them no are single pictures with words for mine. Example. And depending on what yours is, it might, it might be good to just try to create your own. But it depends what you want to do with it.

Now for my example, as we were going through building what I wanted, I did write myself a note that said that I would prefer to use at least for pictures, because based on it being a cookbook, and based on me wanting to get that visual image out, and based on me trying to appeal to different types of people and different type of taste buds, I want to show I don't want to go overboard and shoot too many pictures, but I don't want to show just a single picture as well because people might look at one picture and go, No, that's not for me, and then you've already lost them. Okay, so if you're doing something pretty simple, like selling office equipment, or you know, you could put a desk and a chair and sample pictures, something like that and behind it, but for my example, I kind of want to create it.

So what I'm going to do is keep scrolling here on the left. And if you keep scrolling through all the images that give you, they're going to eventually give you something called Canva layouts. And you have to use your imagination a little bit. But you could see that it gives you a grid. So what it will do, like if I chose this one here, it would allow me to put some kind of image words on the left side and on the right side. So if I wanted to use two images, that would be a good template to work with.

Remember, I'm using this just to make my life easy, and to make things faster for me. So I said, ideally, I want to use I want to try a four image. So here perfect 12344 photo grid. Excellent. Okay, so there we go. And what I'm going to do then is come over to my uploads, and I've already uploaded some of the wonderful pictures of food that she has.

So what I'm going to do remember on my notes, I wrote down that there were some categories that were really awful popular one was chicken feet, which I don't think she has a visual love. Another one that was really popular was the dumplings. So what I did is I clicked on the picture that I had uploaded in automatically it's on my screen. So I'm just going to take it and add it to one of these sections. See, boom, it automatically adjust the size for me. Isn't that just super wonderful?

Oh, let's see if any pictures of buttons? I don't think so. Okay, so I'll just have to work with what I do have. So what I'm going to do is look at something. I like things for thoughts of color and things that are visually attractive like this one. For example.

I think this one's nice and visually attractive. So let me add that on there. Let me try like this one with the chopsticks so it looks like it's ready to been making me hungry. Okay, which other visual makes me hungry? This is kind of neat. I don't know what it is, but that could be for the you know, an image That's good for people who are curious about what they might potentially be able to make.

This one looks very attractive. Visually try something like that. See what that looks like, Ooh, that looks good. And then it's a different variety. So now I'm showing people different variety of food, which is really good. That's, there we go.

What I'm going to do, what I want to do is adjust the sizes of these things. So I'm going to double click and not select your picture. And what I want to do is maybe delete this picture for a second. I don't I'm not really loving it. Let me let me just get out of that. Like that one image.

I hope it's like to just the one image to meet image Yes. Okay. not totally in love with the way that picture blended with the other pictures. This one might go a little bit better. Let's try that. Yeah, I think that looks a little bit better.

I could play around with it for a little bit. To see what is going to appeal to you, but see how all the pictures, it automatically The good thing about it is it automatically will pop your pictures into these spaces. And this entire space again is the perfect Facebook size. But it's not really centering the pictures perfectly. So I'm going to do now is double click the picture. And when you double click the pictures, see how you can move it.

And you could see those gridlines on where it needs to be between. So I'm going to center this picture a little bit better in there and then click on this check mark. And let me just this picture a little bit better. I think it's probably as good as it can be. But let me see if I can get that orange perfectly in the middle. And then I'm going to click that now I am not a designer at all, which some of you designers might have already noticed.

However, can't imagine how long would it take me to figure out how to do this using like, I don't like Word or something like that. This is all I mean, it's pretty much giving me a tool that even if I'm not a designer, I could still make something look pretty darn decent with it. Okay, so I'm just going to adjust that. And actually, I think I'm going to center the bowl like that. There we go. And okay, I'll just hit that checkmark and one more adjustment.

I want to move that down a little bit. There. That's beautiful. There we go. What do you think? Okay, I think we need some color.

The one thing about Facebook ads. Remember this is the Facebook ads will go into Facebook streams. So when you're on Facebook, you know what your streams look like. And you know that you will just go through a whole lot of stuff until something catches your eye, right. So when you're doing a Facebook ad, you want to add some color. So some of these vibrant type of colors can really capture people's attention and if you're trying to sell something Or even shows us something on sale, you can't really go wrong with the color red.

So what I'm going to do is come over here to the left and see I've got all these other options. I want to change the background from white. And here looking at all my different color options and light grade. And then I could click on here and choose more options or they've even got these like little funky patterns. Now because I've got this is pretty heavily image like four to six images is pretty much a lot to Facebook yet. But um, so I probably wouldn't choose a pattern background just because of that just, it's gonna be a little too much.

But I love red because again, you can't go wrong with red. So let me pick red. See how that automatically changes that doesn't look beautiful. All right. Okay, let's see what else should we add in it? We should probably tell people we love the 50% off right?

Which is technically whatever we figure 63% off, however, we're going to go with 50% off I'm going to tell people what they're getting. Because, again, as you're looking through Facebook and just even test it on your own, do you look at the copy first? Or do you look at the picture first, most people will look at the picture first we may as well have the picture say something, a little bit of something. Now there's a dozen Facebook more than dozen. There's a lot of Facebook ads that are Facebook ads, Facebook advisements that say that you should be very careful about the amount of words you use on an image and Facebook. highly recommends doing images with no words are very limited amount of words.

And there is actually some tools you can use to measure the amount of visuals you have compared to the amount of words you have, but just be safe and don't use a lot of words. So do not make it text heavy. But what we're going to do is not something that still looks good. I just want to show the 50% off. So let me go In two elements, and you have all these different options, and I'm going to pick a shape. And I think, oh, like the circle, the circle would look like this.

I don't want it that big. Now it's a little too fancy. Again, I want to keep it simple as better. Let's just do a plain old circle. And I'm going to add that in the middle. And then I'm going to want to add some text.

So I'm going to come over to text and I'm going to add a heading. Oh, there we go. So I could do it this way. The other thing I could do is if you scroll down under texts, it see how they have some text already in embedded in the circle. So I'm going to see what mine looks like and then maybe just pick one of theirs. So for the heading, I'm going to add 50% off and of course we can't see that because it's a one Whoops, I'm gonna highlight that and up here.

Let's see, pick some colors. I think I'm gonna do the circle in red. Let me let me do that first here, up here on the left, you can faintly see it. But that's my color palette for the object I have selected. So I'm going to make that credit swell. And now I could see my text 50% off.

But people if they look at the visual, they might somewhat know what they're getting 50% off. So 50 50% off dinner, some cookbook. And again, it's kind of really tech heavy. So 50% off cookbook, and people could tell by the visual that it's obviously ethnic cuisine. That should be okay. Just kind of center that a bit.

Again, I'm not a designer, so please don't judge me on that. But oops. We need to do my best. Maybe we need an exclamation mark. There. And that's a little too big with the exclamation mark saying to come over here, it's 42 point size right now.

I'm going to go like that and switch it to 40. Now, let me stretch it a little bit. There we go. So if you're scrolling, and as somebody who's thinking, Oh my gosh, that is so ugly looking, or it's so bright, it's like too bright. Yeah, that's the point. This will make people stop.

So imagine you're reading your Facebook feed. And a lot of colors that people are using are the black of the grays and the whites and all of a sudden these great big red things shoving out saying 50% off that, hopefully will grab people's attention. So not such a bad thing that it's a little bit loud, right. So and again, this is one of the things you might want to split test. You might want to split test with using you know, green or blue or yellow and just see what is going to stand out. And when we do our Facebook ad, what we'll do is we'll view it in the feed because you always want to view your Facebook ad in an actual feed, so you could see if it stands out or if it drowns out.

So I like this because the pictures themselves that we chose to put up are very bright. They've got lots of different colors, there's lots of like the oranges and the yellows and the greens accents, and now it's got the red, and so this ad will be very visually attractive. And because I put the sale right in the middle, I think this could potentially work very, very well. So I'm just going to touch more, so it's not touching the edge of what Okay, and then I'm going to do is come up here to download and once it downloads, it's going to let me choose where on my desktop I want to save it so I hit download it recommends PNG file, which is very, very safe. And if you click on it, you've got PDF or JPEG option, as well. So I'm going to download this as a PNG file.

And there we go, just click Save. And there we go. And it says my design is ready. So if I want to share it with other people, let's say on Facebook and say, hey, look at the image, I just created everybody for my new ad that's coming out. What do you think I mean, your opinion, whatever, you can go ahead and just share it right on here, up to you. So that's kind of what I'm going to do.

I'm just, I think what I'm going to do for this class, this is already designed I think I'm going to do is make one more, but I want to try something a little different here. So let me see. Let me go back to my Facebook ad. I just want to show you just see have an idea of the of the possibilities. You can you can do using So again, the good thing about me picking Facebook ads automatically if you look at this outline, it's automatic. To set at the exact dimension, you need to upload into Facebook, which is super nice.

So I'm going to scroll down again to the bottom because I want to create my own design. Because you know, what I'm thinking might be very nice for visual is something where I could actually put the cover of her cookbook and pictures of what's inside. I think, because I'm actually selling cookbook, people might want to know what the actual cookbook looks like, this one's got eight images. So that might work or this is kind of neat. I could put the I could put the book cover in the middle and put all these images on either side. Hmm.

I wonder what that would look like. Try that. So and then you have to use your imagination. So here what the desert picture is, that's where I would put her book. And you know, and then I would just kind of play around where the pictures are because this picture here for example, I think it's a little too dark. All the other pictures are nice and bright.

And so maybe What I'll do is I'll take this desert picture and put it here, and then put her book cover in the middle. I think that'll look better. And this is hard to kind of tell what it is. So I might replace this picture. Because even if I'm adjusted, it might not be perfect. Yeah, so can't tell what it is.

So I'm going to replace that picture as well. But the other thing I just want to quickly remind you, and what you wanted to be careful of See, here's the outline grid, see how I accidentally move the whole thing. So just to move it back? Oops, until it clicks. Okay, so now it's in where it's supposed to be. And I just want to remind you again, at the other thing you do is change the background color.

So let's see what that looks like. The Right. Ooh, that completely changed. I like that. I really like this one. I'm going to play around this a bit more and get it exactly the way I want it.

But I think this one's a winner. I really like this visual for Facebook. So people get a whole bunch of you're appealing people who like the dumplings. You're appealing to people who like pottstown You think those are pot stickers, you're appealing to people that like the different types of desserts you can do with the buns? Whatever. So I think it's visually attractive, I think it's giving people more of a sense of what they'll be getting.

So this one, I might actually use over the one with the four that we did. So what I'm going to do is save both of them. And then when we're creating yet, we will upload both and see which one looks better. And then we'll go with that when to start. And again, if people aren't responding to that one, we'll get rid of it and we have a backup option. Now, that might work better.

And whichever one I end up not using, I think there are so visually attractive that I at least could use it for a really nice Facebook post. Alright, so that's how you do that. And you can tell it's still not within your needs to be. So I'm going to just adjust that. See those little handles at the side that'll let you adjust size or the entire thing. There.

That's better. That's better. There we go. Beautiful. And then when I'm done playing around with this again, I would just hit download, I would save it as a PNG file, and then I'm ready to upload it into Facebook. Okay, so now that you've created or learned how to use Canva, in order to create your visual, there's something very important, I just want to let you know.

And basically, Facebook used to have a rule and the rule stated that you could not have text cover more than 20% of the visual that you used on your ad. And the reason Facebook did that is because it basically did studies that showed that its followers preferred images that had no text or little text overtop of the image. Now since then, Facebook has removed that rule. However, we want to do what Facebook recommends because if Facebook sees our ad and believes its followers are going to want to see Add and knows that though, you know, interact with the ad and respond to the ad, chances are it's going to show it to more people for us at less cost. So we definitely want to always keep in within Facebook's guidelines as much as possible. Luckily, Facebook created a tool for us called this Facebook overlay tool.

So if you go to Google and do a Google search and just type in Facebook overlay tool and click your search key, okay, you'll get it probably as the first result. And what you want to ensure is that it actually comes from facebook.com. Okay, you're going to click on that and give it a second and you're simply going to upload your image with your text copy on it, and Facebook will let you know and give you a score on whether it passes or not. So very easy to use. So let's go ahead and create something that we can test. So over here in Canva, all I did was I brought one of the canvas image selections that it has already nicely made, which I think Looks really sharp.

And let's say for example, that I had a men's shop and it was Black Friday, and I was having a Black Friday sale. Okay, so you can just tell by the visual how beautiful that black friday 50% off suits stands out. Since I'm having a Black Friday sale. And my copy, of course, around the ad is going to say, you know, Black Friday sale, men suits, whatever is going to describe it, like maybe different sizes that are available or whatever. So that would be fabulous, the set all of that, but most people's eyes are gonna be drawn to the visual first. So as you can tell, if people look at the visual, they'll automatically see that I have a Black Friday sale and the losses automatically see that it's 50% off.

Right. So this is how it could work very well. Now, look at the difference, right if I didn't have any text on there at all, and you're scrolling through Facebook and you just see the spends tie, right and then somewhere in the copywriting It'll talk about the suit sale. But this is what you see, maybe you're not interested in buying a tie. So you might just keep scrolling through your feet. Because remember people when they're scrolling through feeds, unless something really catches them visually, they're not going to likely stop in order to read the copy that goes around it.

So this is, this is where again, you're like, look how much better that looks right. Now, again, this is just our opinion, what you're going to want to do and what you'll learn a bit later is something called split testing. So you want to split test. If you're having a promo sale, especially a big one, you're going to want to do a split test on something like a visual with text over it, and a visual without text over it and then quickly decide which one is performing better and getting more of your audience on it. And then decide from there what you want to do. Okay, so let's have a look this text overlay tool with that image.

So I'm just going to click on Upload. I'm going to find the image. I'm going to click open and Within a few seconds, there we go, it gave me a green checkmark. And it's like the Texas Okay, my ad will run normally. Fabulous. So let's look at the other image.

See up here it says image text ratings. Let's look at the other ones you could get. So see, it'll actually tell you if you've got too much text. Or if it's, you know, your ad reach may be slightly lower. If you ran something like this, we do not want our ad reach ever to be lower. We want to please Facebook, and we want our ad reach to be as maximized as possible.

Okay, so just keep that in mind whenever you're creating your ad. The other thing that I just want to point out just so you could think about it is, as you know, we're in an age where people love videos. So images still work really well on Facebook ads, but videos work extremely well because anything that'll get somebody to stop and watch is what you're aiming for. For, right, so what I often do when I'm creating a video is I will still use Canva. So I'll come in. So let's say again that I'm not men's, I'm a men's suit shop, and all command and create an ad that looks like this, it talks about the Black Friday sale 50% off, and I will make this my first slide on my video.

And then I'll maybe add in an image, you know of the different suits and different men wearing different colors of suits and different sizes or whatever, right to give people an idea of what they get. And I would upload all those images into Facebook, and then later we'll learn about how Facebook can take those images and turn them into a video for you. Or I'll just create my own video and use this for slide. But again, Canva is a great way and a great tool to come in and create you know an image a standalone image or an image for inside your video or your first image on a Jeff like whatever camera is a fabulous tool to make it look professional and make it look nice and highly visual. All right. So in this lesson, we learned all about creating visuals for your ad, give you some tips showed you what the text overlay tool is, which I hope you try out until you can kind of get the hang of what a good amount of text is to put over your image if you choose to do that.

And, yeah, so basically now we've got the visual, we've already created copy, and in the next lessons, we'll be putting it all together.