How to Create an Animated Ad in VistaCreate

If you are new to the world of animated ads, you might want a little help figuring out how to make one and where to find ideas. Look through our quick guide on using VistaCreate Animation Maker as well as read through some of the tips to make your animated ads fun and engaging!

We’ll start with some of the key tips to come up with an ad idea, and in the second part of this post we’ll explain in detail how to use VistaCreate Animation Maker to put your idea to life.

Before you start creating your ad

Putting together an effective ad can feel like a lot of pressure, but a bit of research and market analysis as well as exploring inspiring ideas will help you come up with a cool end result in no time. Let’s get started.

Research your audience

The very nature of an ad makes it intrusive content – that means the ad needs to go that extra mile to justify the amount of time it occupies in its audience’s lives. Spend time researching your target audience and coming up with ad ideas that showcase exactly how their lives can be made better with the help of your product or service.

Here are the most popular ways to discover what your target audience likes and needs:

• conducting surveys and one-on-one interviews,
• scouting the web to find discussions about your brand,
• researching your followers on social media to see what they are like, how they talk, what their interests are, who they follow, what they share, etc.,
• studying analytics for your blog, website and social media to determine how people find your content, what keywords they are using and what pages they visit most.

Analyze the competition

Go to your competitors’ social media pages to see what type of content they are putting out there and see if there’s any animation involved. Go to Facebook’s Info and Ads tab on their business page to see what ads the companies are currently running. This will help you understand how your competition is conversing with similar target audience and develop your own strategy respectively.

Now, since we are talking about animation specifically, don’t stop at researching just your competition – go to social media pages of your favorite businesses and top brands to see who is using animated ads and how, what content receives the most engagement and if you can take some pointers from it.

Come up with specific message

Now that you have an idea about your audience’s needs and wants, as well as the content they regularly encounter, it’s time to come up with specific messages you want to include in your ad. A popular mistake at this stage of the creative process is focusing on how witty or entertaining your text is on its own, while neglecting the most important aspect of developing your animated ad – ensuring it’s easily comprehensible within seconds of exposure.

“People spend on average 1.7 seconds with any given piece of content on mobile, compared to 2.5 seconds on desktop,” says Facebook report Why Creativity Matters More in the Age of Mobile. This means users looking at your advertisement are not going to be spending their time (or mental energy) figuring out what your ad is trying to say. Make your message crystal clear from the get-go and specific enough to comprehend in seconds.

Pick complementary visuals

If a picture says a thousand words, video or animated content that’s just a few seconds can say even more. For example, you can inject some humor in your ad just by adding the right visual. Your text or animation might not be funny on their own, but combining them together may add a whole new, witty meaning to your message.

Visual aid is the term you want to keep in mind when it comes to developing your ad’s look – the images and video supplementing your ad will deliver information in seconds and help digest the verbal message of your animated ad. Your video and text shouldn’t duplicate but complement each other by adding something new to your ad’s message.

For more advice, check out our Instagram Ads: 7 Cost-Effective Tips and How to Get Started.

Making your animated ad in VistaCreate

Now, on to the making of the actual ad – use our guide to VistaCreate Animation Maker to familiarize yourself with the editing options, template use and additional features!

Understanding the formats

In order to create an animated ad, go to Create a New Design in VistaCreate, open All Formats page and select the Full HD Video format:

Full HD format is set at 1920×1080 px. You can also choose to design in an Animated Post format (1080 by 1080 pixels) or Facebook Video Cover (851 by 315 pixels). Animated designs can be converted from one format to another using VistaCreate’s Resize tool:

You can also resize regular VistaCreate templates to an animated format:

Here’s what the Resize menu looks like:

Convert the template into an animated format, add an animated background or object to animate your design.

Using the templates

Back to the actual ready-made animated templates – browse our gallery and pick one that works with your message:

Adjust elements of the design. In this template I’ve decided to switch up the frame to an animated one from the Objects menu in the Animations tab:

Let’s adjust the frame to fit the size of our text and central animated element of the template:

Now, let’s include the text for our ad:

How about we try changing the background our our ad to an animated one? Let’s go to Animations > Background and browse the selection of available backgrounds. For a backdrop to work in this design, we need to remove our central animated item to avoid the background clashing with the animated item of the template:

I’ve changed the text color from blue to white to fit the new background and added an animated frame:

Now, let’s change the text of our animated ad:

And add our logo by uploading the file through the Photos menu:

Download your final design:

Here’s our end result:

Upload your .mp4 file to Facebook or Instagram ad manager and start your campaign!

In Conclusion

Creating an animated ad using VistaCreate is as simple as choosing the right format, picking suitable template and customizing it using VistaCreate’s graphic editing tools. Get creative if you feel like it – resize design elements, change text and background color, add animated objects and use animated backgrounds. To learn even more about VistaCreate Animation Maker read our introductory blog here.

Upgrade to PRO to use all VistaCreate animations and use our tips to develop fun, inspiring animated ads and attract more customers with your cool advertisements.