The Best Facebook Ads for Moisturizers

THIS WEEK’S FODDER
☀️ Good Morning

You’re reading Marketing Fodder, a newsletter dedicated to helping you improve your Facebook and Instagram ads. Here’s what we’re serving up today:

1. The Ordinary

2. Kiehl’s

3. True Botanicals

4. Origins

What do these companies have in common? They all sell skincare products. We’ll examine how these companies market their moisturizers and toners to an audience that cares about their skincare routine.

STARTER
Quick Bites:

• Google rolls out AI Overviews in the US. AI Overviews is powered by Google Gemini and provides answers to more complex questions where Google thinks it can add value beyond the search results (Read more)

• How to remove your content and links from Google’s AI Overviews (Read more)

• OpenAI announces ChatGPT4o — the “o” stands for “omni.” It accepts any combination of text, audio, image, and video as inputs and generates any combination of text, audio, and image as outputs. (Read more)

• How to build your own custom GPT to refine your keyword research (Read more)

• How a personal website helps grow your SEO career (Read more)

MAIN
Skincare

What’s so interesting about the skincare market?

According to Fortune Business Insights, the global market for skincare was valued at 109.71 billion (USD) in 2023 and is projected to grow to 194.05 billion (USD) by 2032. That’s a projected compound annual growth rate of 6.68%.

The market share by product looks like this:

How I Analyze Facebook Ads

A great Facebook ad communicates the benefits of the product or service, not solely the features. Features are cool, but customers really care about what those features do for them (the benefit). So, ideally, a Facebook ad communicates how the features of a product or service create a result or transformation for the customer (the benefit).

Alright, let’s see how these companies market their moisturizers:

#1: The Ordinary

The Good:

• What does this ad do well? It leads with a benefit.

  • The Primary text doesn’t waste words and immediately tells the potential buyer that this product provides a triple benefit: “it exfoliates, hydrates, and boosts radiance in one step.”

  • The actual benefit (to be precise) is the time savings of those product features being combined into one step. Time savings is an effective way to market a product because almost everyone is looking for more minutes in the day.

• The image looks interesting and leans into the “Milky” quality of the product by having a splash of milky liquid near the bottle.

The Bad:

• The background of the image doesn’t help the product stand out.

• The words “Saccharomyces Ferment” are prominent at the top of the image (I had to Google what that is) and may be better positioned elsewhere in the image, if it’s not the main selling point. Using obscure ingredient names may scare away potential customers.

The Recommendation:

• Test having a quote in the Primary text.

• Test different backgrounds for the image and test more text formats on the image, such as adding bullet points or boxes with check marks.

#2: Kiehl’s

The Good:

• What this ad does well is provide a distraction-free image of the product.

• Because Kiehl’s is a well-known brand for skincare, they don’t need to oversell the benefits of their products. So, they are able to create a “remember us this summer” type of ad while a smaller brand would likely struggle with this ad format.

• This ad has multiple versions for different products. If you have an ad style that is working for you, creating versions for different products is smart.

• This ad uses the description section under the image to provide extra details about the product, like what it contains, how many ounces it contains, and its price. This gives the customer more confidence about clicking the ad.

The Bad:

• The image is not exciting. This may work for Kiehl’s, which has a medical-coat vibe, but a background or having the products on a table may help the product look more enticing.

The Recommendation:

• Test a longer version of the Primary text that spells out the benefit of the product (going from dry to hydrated skin etc.).

• Test different background colors for the image. The Kiehl’s stores display their products nicely, and aligning these ads with that aesthetic may help CTR.

#3: True Botanicals

The Good:

• This ad does a great job of stating the benefit, “a radiant glow,” and positioning this cream as the way to get this benefit.

• The image effectively shows what the product looks like in use and also provides a helpful breakdown of the features of the product.

• The format and design of the textual elements (especially the yellow boxes) on the image is eye-catching without taking away from the underlying image.

The Bad:

• This ad misses out on using the description section below the image to further reenforce why this product will produce a “radiant glow” for the buyer.

The Recommendation:

• Test a version of the Primary text with a quote from a happy customer related to achieving a radiant glow.

• Utilize the description section and add details about the product (like ounces and price).

#4: Origins

The Good:

• What this ad does well is speak to a specific type of customer: those looking for vegan skincare products.

• The phrase “today, tomorrow & always” is a nice way signal how serious the brand is about not having animal-derived ingredients in their products.

The Bad:

• The image of the product looks nice, but doesn’t reenforce the message of only using vegan ingredients. A different background or including plants in the image would help.

The Recommendation:

• Test different backgrounds for the image, including cute animals and/or plants to align the image with the Primary text.

• Talk about the benefit of this product beyond being plant-based.

Meme of the Week: