It can be exciting to start designing ads for your Black Friday/Cyber Monday and holiday sales, but before you head to Canva or open up Photoshop, there are a few important decisions you need to make.
1/ Decide where you’ll be posting your sales graphics
The platform you post on will determine the dimensions and will influence the copy on your graphics. It’s important to write down a list of where you’ll be promoting your sale or offer before you start designing.
Some platforms we suggest for promoting your sale include:
-
Email Newsletter — size may depend on provider, but most likely square or vertical
-
Instagram Stories — 1080x1920px
-
Instagram Ad — 1080×1080
-
Facebook Post — 940×788
-
Facebook Ad — 1200×628
Because of the short duration of most holiday sales, it usually doesn’t make sense to create Pinterest graphics or blog post graphics specifically for your sale. Instead, you could write blog posts that educate your audience on the value of your product and service prior to or during your sale.
2/ Brainstorm your ad copy
We like to start a Google Doc and just start writing out ideas for sales copy. Don’t try to curate or narrow down your list at first, just write whatever comes to mind. Keep a running list in a document that you can add to any time. That way, you’ll always have it handy when an idea strikes, or when you need to create an ad.
When you’re ready to create your graphics, go through the list and pick out the top two or three ad slogans you’ve written down.
Keep in mind your copy should be short and punchy. It needs to be interesting and informative in as few words as possible.
You should also include an easy to see Call to Action in all of your sales and promotional graphics.
Examples of Calls to Action:
-
Shop Now
-
Click for Savings
-
Claim your Discount
-
Swipe up for Savings (if you’re posting on Instagram Stories and have the swipe up feature)
-
Buy Now
3 / Choose your background images
The images you use in your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales graphics (or any sales graphics for that matter) are super important.
Together with your copy they’re going to influence whether someone who is inundated with advertisements is going to pay attention and click your ad.
The image you choose should be clean, bold, and eye-catching.
For sales graphics we suggest choosing images that have ample negative space for adding text, or choosing simple images where you can add an overlay.
Your copy needs to take center stage, so make sure the image isn’t detracting from your text.
Some of our favorite Haute Stock collections for creating sales graphics include:
Download your favorite stock photos from the Haute Stock Library and put them into a separate folder just for your sales graphics, that way it will be easy to find them when you need them.
If you’re a Canva user, you can also create a separate folder in your account with just the images you intend on using for sales graphics.
We recommend downloading a few more than you think you need so that once you get into your design program, you can play around with a few options to see what works best.
Once you have your image chosen and your ad copy ready, it’s time to start designing!
Stay tuned this week because we’re going to be sharing our best tips for designing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales graphics, including how to create animated Instagram Stories Ads, our favorite Canva fonts for your sales graphics, and more!
