The Secrets of Human Behavior Applied to Social Ads

Struggling to create Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok ads that people remember long enough to buy from you? Wondering how consumer psychology can tell you why your winning ads work and how to repeat that success? In this article, you'll discover how to use behavioral science and consumer psychology to create social ads.

Why Social Ad Creative Needs to Build Recall, Not Just Conversions

Sarah Levinger says the biggest misconception about ads is that every ad is supposed to sell. Conversion matters, especially in e-commerce, but for most brands, the core job of advertising is to build recall. A customer who doesn't remember a brand exists has nowhere to convert to and ends up buying whatever shows up in their feed. Sarah recommends designing ads to target both recall and conversion simultaneously.

​Behavioral science makes that possible because it explains why a piece of creative works. When marketers can identify the psychological reason an ad or organic post resonated, they can replicate that success rather than guessing. Sarah sees the results reflected in lower-cost customers, longer-lasting ads, access to audiences a brand has never reached before, and less decision fatigue about what to create next.

​The way ads get distributed raises the stakes. TikTok built its feed on interest graphs, and the approach now extends across the major platforms. An interest graph serves content based on whether the platform predicts someone will be interested in it, rather than on whether they follow the creator or have searched for a term. The algorithm learns from behavior such as watching, liking, commenting, sharing, and saving, and it updates in real-time as moods shift. Sarah's own feed serves intense content during anxious weeks and cooking and sewing tutorials on relaxed Saturdays. Because marketers can't dictate who sees their content, every concept, organic or paid, has to be built for interest and taste rather than topics and keywords.

​Sarah's process for building that kind of creative follows three decisions in order: how the message is delivered, who it targets, and where it fits in the customer journey. All three start from a defined core message. If a brand like Nike has a core message of pushing through and doing it, the three steps determine how that message gets expressed in each ad.