Instagram is considered by many to be the fastest growing social media platform. There are now over 1 billion monthly Instagram users globally which makes Instagram an attractive place for many social media marketers, with plenty of opportunities for success.
If you want to increase brand awareness, reach a wider audience or scale your business, then Instagram advertising could be worth exploring. In this article, we’ll look at some tips for how to create successful Instagram ads that will support the goals of your social media strategy.
What are Instagram ads?
Instagram ads are paid promotions via posts or Stories where you can share your product information with a wider audience using photos and videos. One key benefit of Instagram ads are they blend in very well with organic posts so they can get higher interaction rates.
How much does Instagram advertising cost?
It can be difficult to determine how much an Instagram advertising campaign will cost to be successful, but you are in control of your budget. You can choose from a daily limit where you set your maximum spend each day the campaign is running, or you can choose a lifetime budget, where you decide the total ad spend for the entire campaign.
When it comes to getting the most from your advertising budget, a good strategy is to study your insights to see which organic posts do well, and then focus on similar content. You can create the best value for your budget if you use advanced targeting to create your promotion posts on Instagram.
Types of Instagram ads and how to choose the right one
Let’s quickly look at the different types of Instagram ad available:
- Boosted Instagram posts are just your regular posts that you pay to show to a wider audience within the app.
- Photo ads are the most basic type of Instagram advert, with a photo, a caption and a call-to-action button for viewers to click.
- Carousel ads are several photo or video ads put together in a slideshow, giving you the opportunity to show more to your target Instagram audience within the one advert.
- Collection ads initially just look like regular posts, but include a shopping bag icon over the photo, and when you click on this it will take you to other photos in the collection.
- Story ads show up in users’ Stories rather than in their feed and can include either images or video.
- Shopping ads link the photo to where a viewer can purchase the product displayed.
- Explore ads appear within the Explore section of Instagram when a user is exploring a certain topic.
- Video ads are a great way to stand out on an app, focused on sharing imagery.
Which type of Instagram ad to create will depend on what you are trying to achieve with the campaign, and what type of call-to-action you wish viewers to click. Carousel and Collection ads are a great choice to showcase several products. Explore ads are a great choice to create brand awareness. Story ads are good for one-off promotions. To determine which ad type is best suited to your goals, consider which call-to-action is the best fit to make views click your CTA button.
How to advertise on Instagram
If you are wondering how to advertise on Instagram, you can either create a promotion post from within the app itself or you can create ads using Facebook Ads Manager. Instagram is a subsidiary of Facebook, so it has the same features found in the Ads Manager, allowing marketers to create different types of campaigns for carefully-selected audiences. If you need help setting up your campaign, there is support available through the Business Help Center.
To create the content material for your ad, you may wish to use a graphic design and video editing tool that comes with a number of useful free templates.
Tips for creating profitable Instagram advertising campaigns
Organic posting
To be successful with Instagram ads, it’s important to have consistent organic posting to generate brand awareness and engagement with your followers. If you spend your budget to create paid advertising without brand awareness then it’s unlikely to be effective.
Identify your goal
When you’re looking at how to promote on Instagram, you need a clear, measurable objective for your campaign. This should fit with your overall social media strategy and might include driving website traffic, increasing followers, increasing brand awareness, boosting engagement, lead generation or growing revenue. Part of your decision around how to advertise on Instagram will include selecting your objective from the options provided in Facebook Ads Manager.
Targeting your audience
Knowing your target audience is essential for any marketing strategy, and Instagram targeting is no different. If you don’t know who your ideal customer is, it can be useful to analyze your competitors’ Instagram audience, looking at who engages with their posts. You should look at your own insights which show your follower demographics such as age range, location and gender.
Strong calls-to-action
A strong call-to-action will direct your target audience to where you want them to go or what you want them to do. The call-to-action you choose will depend upon the objective of your ad campaign and can be accomplished by adding a button to your ad, or you can create a CTA to click within your text.
Benefits of hashtags
If you research the hashtags most relevant to your industry and audience, then you can use these to extend the reach of your Instagram advertising. Using the right hashtags will allow your ideal customers to discover your post or story more easily.
Making the most of your insights
You can use Instagram’s Insights to discover what type of content followers engage with the most, what time of day you get the most interaction, and the general demographics of your audience. You can use insights to support your Instagram marketing strategy and more accurately target your preferred users with your campaigns.
Instagram is a growing social media channel with huge potential for your business to reach a new customer base. It’s a dynamic platform that continually provides new opportunities to keep your ideal customers engaged, so you may wish to consider these tips for your Instagram advertising campaigns.