From time to time, we invite industry influencers to write a guest post on our blog. We turned to our friends from @AdobeSpark to share their advertising design tips to help you stand out from the competition this holiday season.

As a small business, standing out from the crowd is a big challenge, especially around the holidays when competition is especially fierce. When it comes to advertising on Twitter, where do you start? How can you be effective at both grabbing attention and inspiring action? And of course — when will you find the time? 

The first step to conquering the holiday rush is to work smarter. So we’ve come up with four essential design strategies for creating compelling graphics, and we’ve provided five ad templates to get you started. These designs were created with Adobe Spark Post, an intuitive, free program that allows you to create beautiful social graphics in minutes — on your computer or through the mobile app using remixable templates.

From design principles to customizable ad creative, here’s everything you need to make sure you’re ending the year with extra treats in your stocking.

 Four design strategies for creating attention-grabbing designs

• Hone in on your brand message and tie it into your promotion. Think about how this promotion supports your brand.
  
  
• Establish your primary goal for doing a holiday promotion: Is it to increase sales of a specific product? Generate leads? Increase your following? Or drive traffic to your site? Your creative should support your goal in specific ways.
  
  
• Create brand consistency. Make sure that that your visuals are aligned with your brand (colors/fonts/feel). Establish visual consistency to tie your campaign together.
  
  
• Measure Twitter Ad results to hone in on your best-performing creative. Save time on future campaigns by using Spark Post’s duplicate feature to modify your winning designs over and over.

Create compelling Twitter Ad templates  

With these four steps in place, you’re well on your way to designing success.

Now for the design itself… Formatting and creating graphics no longer has to be a daunting task, or one you outsource to expensive agencies. Adobe Spark allows anyone — regardless of design experience and budget — to create impactful graphics using the app’s themes, fonts, colors, animations, and shapes.

To get you started with design templates you can leverage this holiday season, Adobe Spark teamed up with Nicte Creative Design. Owner Nicte Cuevas has developed five holiday design templates, available below and in the Spark Post app.Choose the one that works for your business and make it uniquely yours by editing the text, adding your own images (or searching for free ones to use in Spark Post), and modifying the colors.

Template #1: Sales driven

If your main goal is to generate sales, this template is for you! Keep your headline and CTA short and sweet.

Template #2: Mission-driven

This template weaves meaning into the message. If you are a non-profit or a mission-driven organization, and you want to focus on end-of-the-year giving, use this template. You can replace the image with your ownthat conveys a positive result, such as making people feel like their involvement with your brand makes a profound impact. Use a color-blocked text area to make your copy stand out, and come up with a tagline that evokes emotion.

Template #3: Emotion-driven

Content that triggers emotion creates deeper connections that help boost engagement and sales . These ads show campaign consistency by using the same fonts and colors, while using different content to keep the message fresh.

You can also use photography to create variety. In these examples the image style is similar — two-thirds of the background is white, with an image on the left. This communicates consistency and brand identification, while infusing range into your creative. To accomplish something similar, change the copy and photography for each rendition but retain the color palette of your campaign. 

How it works

Select the template that most closely aligns with your campaign goal. If you’re on iOS, click on the design to edit it with Adobe Spark. If you don’t yet have Adobe Spark installed, the links will take you to the app store where you can download Spark Post. Spark is free and takes just a few minutes to get started.

Once you’ve made the template your own, the app automatically saves the image and syncs it across your devices. Edit, duplicate, or use your design over and over from wherever you are. 

Refine your ad campaign

Ad agencies typically develop at least three variations of creative so that marketers can learn which tactics work best for their audiences, and so they don’t risk fatiguing people with the same creative throughout a campaign. This level of testing and variety is easy with Spark Post. Edit your designs slightly with a few taps, and leverage Twitter’s analytics to monitor your engagement rates. 

When developing creative variations, you might change the call to action (CTA), the headline, or the background image. If you change the background image, be sure to use a similar image style across the designs for the continuity.

Why use design templates?

As a small business owner, you likely wear many hats so you want to maximize your ROI with everything you do. Using templates is efficient — you can easily test multiply variants and hone in on the design that works best for your audience. With Spark’s duplicate feature, you can edit the same design over and over for various purposes and campaigns, changing the creative slightly for variety while keeping the same winning template. Use the above professional designs or any of the templates in the Spark Post app and you'll be well on your way toward creating a recognizable visual brand for your business.

Try out these tips by creating Twitter Ads of your own. Create a campaign today.