How to Advertise on Instagram Effectively
Say you have a budding Instagram profile that you’ve created through engaging, regular posts, but want your profile to reach out to even more audiences. Your best bet? Instagram advertising.
This, however, isn’t the only situation in which Instagram advertising can be beneficial. In fact, thanks to their 800 million active users, the majority of which are under 30, this platform makes it easy for anyone to connect with audiences in order to build their brand. Therefore, if you haven’t yet invested in Instagram advertising, then you may want to rethink your decision, especially if you’d like to remain competitive. It may be a bit complex at first, but we can assure you that it’s nothing that you can’t figure out with a little help. Keep reading to learn how to advertise on Instagram as well as how we can help you.
Instagram advertising
Ads are actually integrated with Facebook Ad Manager, which is the solution that lets you run ads on Facebook and on Instagram. With it, companies are able to create custom audiences and track how their ads are doing, for instance. This may come as a surprise to some, but for those who know that Instagram is a part of Facebook may have seen this coming. You begin by connecting your Instagram account to a Facebook Business Page which, in turn, let’s you use Facebook Ad Manager.
When it comes to the creation of the ad, you can do it one of two ways. You can either do so through “guided creation” or you could do so through “quick creation”. Through “guided creation” you go through every step necessary in order to create an ad. Every step is accompanied by instruction. However, as soon as you’ve gained a bit of experience using the solution, you can use “quick creation”, which lets you establish your ad elements in the order of your liking without much of a guidance.
Advertising on Instagram is actually much like Facebook, considering they both use the same ads manager, however, for those of you who have never even advertised on Facebook, then the following information is for you.
You begin by selecting an ad campaign objective from their list. The objectives specific to Instagram include brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, conversions, app installs, and video views. Following the selection of your ad objective, you need to select the parameters that will make up your target audience. A huge advantage of using Facebook’s ad manager lies in their number of targeting options, which helps you make the narrowest selection possible. This is highly advantageous as you are able to only put your money into those that have a very high chance of converting. A few of the options include age, gender, location, interests, behaviors, and connections. Additionally, they provide you with an audience size gauge chart which lets you know whether your audience is too narrow or not narrow enough in order to yield the best results. As soon as you’ve found the best audience, be sure to save it that way you can use it again or make alterations to it in the future. Afterward, you can choose where you’d like to place your ad in the placements section. However, you could just select “automatic placements” that way your ads will be shown to your audience in a location where they have the biggest chance of performing at their best. Following the placement selection, it’s time to select both your budget and your schedule.
Advertising on both Facebook and Instagram is highly rewarding as you’re able to set your own budget. Therefore, you will never pay more than you set out. You can choose one of two budgeting options. The daily one offers the daily maximum spend while the lifetime one is the set amount during the lifetime of an ad. In addition, you have the luxury of setting when you’d like your ads to run. For instance, you can get your ads to run on a continuous basis or at certain times of the day.
The next stage is definitely the most creative stage. Therefore, let’s first begin by diving into the various formats that Instagram offers. Their five formats include photos, videos, carousels, canvas story ads, as well as story ads. The beauty of advertising on Instagram is the fact that the ads are placed seamlessly into the platform. Since they aren’t any different from the other stories or posts, they don’t end up being annoying. Be sure, though, that you are using the right image and video specifications as you don’t want to spend your money on distorted visuals. Now, every format supports various CTA buttons, but across all of them, you can find actions such as “apply now”, “contact us”, and “learn more”.
Finally, make sure that you track your performance and optimize that way you stay relevant and in the game! A few tips, however, that are useful specifically to Instagram include really understanding your audience as they are so much more than just a set of demographics or interests, keeping text to a minimum as you want to make it short and sweet, take advantage of hashtags as they are much more powerful than they seem, be consistent with your filters, for instance, in order to reinforce your brand image, as well as make sure that you are keeping it fresh that way your audience doesn’t get bored and leave you.
TEA
Although we did go through a lot, there are a number of subtleties that you won’t know how to handle unless you’ve garnered enough experience and you have the tools necessary to combat them. Therefore, on the contrary of investing both their time and money into learning and managing their Instagram ads, many companies choose to invest in a social media campaign management platform such as our own. Our solution, TEA, which stands for threat and engagement analytics, works to provide tools for factors that the name suggests; threat detection and elimination as well as user engagement analysis. To get an in-depth outline of our agency, watch our free webinar located on our website.