Planning Facebook message strategy and creative appeal for effective ad engagement – an exploratory study

Purpose: Studying the effect of social media advertising on consumer engagement, this study analyzes the impact of shared-experience versus personal message strategies, informational versus transformational creative appeals and low-involvement products versus high-involvement products. It aims to determine how best to combine ad elements to affect consumer engagement on different levels. Design/methodology/approach: Using an online survey among 448 Facebook users, an experimental factorial design of 2 (message strategy conditions) X 2 (creative appeal conditions) X 2 (product types: TV vs. frozen pizza) was used. Each advertisement was evaluated on three facets of engagement: cognitive, psychological and behavioral. Findings: Results indicate that informational appeal is preferable for all conditions. The effectiveness of message strategy differs by product type, and interactions between message and appeal are significant only for the high-involvement product. Additionally, it indicates that message strategy is most significant in affecting behavioral engagement and not necessarily cognitive or psychological engagement. Practical implications: To develop effective Facebook ads, practitioners should use a personal/informational combination when working with high-involvement products and a shared-experience/informational combination when working with low-involvement products. Originality/value: An original grid for integrating message strategy and creative appeal is constructed in this paper. Besides behavioral engagement, it also evaluates cognitive and psychological engagement. By comparing products with a high and low involvement level, it provides marketers with actionable recommendations to increase social media campaign effectiveness.