As one of the social media giants in today’s generation, Instagram offers a massive opportunity for marketers and brands to advertise. They can extend their social reach, increase their digital presence and grow their business.
Marketers can post sponsored content to reach a more significant and target-specific audience. Since Instagram is mainly a visual platform, text ads won’t sell as fast as photo and video ads do. In this realm, it’s all about the visual appeal and aesthetics if you want your ads to make an impact.
Before you can start advertising on Instagram, it’s crucial that you already know and understand your target audience. Ask yourself – Who is on Instagram? If you’re targeting a more youthful group, this social app may be one of your better options since over half of its users are aged between 18-29. But if you’re targeting an older group, fear not since they are slowly increasing their use. Because of how Instagram provides you with tools to target specific genders, age, location, and general behaviour, it’s easier for marketers to streamline how much they’d need to spend on ads.
Why Should I Get Into Advertising On Instagram?
The question is – why shouldn’t you? If you think about it, promoting your posts on Instagram is extremely simple and has the capacity to work around your budget. Another thing apart from promoting your posts is that you can easily create ads for your business that also works around your budget. Advertising on Instagram will give you access to Facebook’s Advanced targeting tools as the social app utilises Facebook’s advertising platform – this platform alone already provides a lot of targeting options that allow you to reach distinct people.
Promoting Posts On Instagram
Promoting your post on Instagram is straightforward. Click on the image you want to promote and click Promote. You will then direct to a page where you can fill in details about your promotion. You can choose where you’ll be redirecting people who respond to your post, your audience, daily budget and duration. Once you’re ready, Instagram will then review your request and ensure that it meets with their respective terms and conditions.
Creating Instagram Ads
The fantastic thing about ads on Instagram is it looks and feels like organic content. Before you can create Instagram ads, your profile must be changed into a business account.
Creating an ad is like promoting your post. On your profile, you can tap on Promotions > Create promotion then choose a post you’d like to promote. You will then be redirected to a page where you fill in details for your ad like where you’ll redirect your audience, daily budget, and duration. Once complete, Instagram will once again check your request and ensure that it meets their terms and conditions.
What Ads Should I Be Running On Instagram?
Your digital presence is vital for your business. You can’t create random ads and hope for the best. It will help if you conduct extensive research so you can fully maximise your ad campaign. You need to make sure that your ad assets, including photos, videos and ad copy, is on point. There is no room for low-quality photos and mediocre content in the world of digital advertising.
Here are some suggestions on what kind of ads work best:
Ads with images centred around the goal of the promotion
Nobody likes an ad that makes no sense because then, what would be the point? You can’t create an ad for cat food and feature a dog as that’ll create confusion on what your business is trying to sell.
Proper advertising on Instagram heavily relies on a single image to catch your audience’s attention. If you want the user to follow your call to action, you need to capture their attention.
Consumer Product Ads
If your business specialises in creating products, it would be a great idea to advertise your products on Instagram. You can run your ad as an exclusive preview for the first 50 who subscribe or give them a voucher should they engage with your ad.
Flatlays or photos with influencers are just some of the recommended ideas when you’re posting product ads. Again, it’s all about the aesthetics and general appeal of your photos or videos. Remember that in the world of social media, the first impression is super important.
Heart capturing or humorous ads
Effective advertising on Instagram requires your ads to tell a story. Regardless of whether your advertisement contains a series of photos or video snippets of behind the scenes work, Instagram users would enjoy and engage with that kind of content. After all, who doesn’t love a good story, especially when it involves them on a personal and emotional level?
Another thing you can try is humour. However, this might prove to be tricky at times, especially since you’ll need to adjust it in such a way that no one gets offended.
The great thing about Instagram is that you can generally run any ad, but whether it works for your business or brand, that’s something you’ll need to find out. One way to do that is through split testing. Generally, split testing will allow you to test out variations of different elements on your ad assets, which will then narrow down what will best work for your audience.
Testing can include the following:
Text
Test out how your post length, style (content), use of emoji (or lack thereof), tone, and punctuation can affect engagement and conversion of your ad campaigns. Another part worthy would be the headline and description of your link preview – does the “less is more” principle apply? Or full information would generate better results?
CTA (Call to Action)
When you’re advertising on Instagram, your call to action plays a crucial role because this is the element where you compel your audience to engage. Using the right image, and wording (even on the button itself) will cause a degree of change in the results of your overall ad.
Image vs Video
Although a combination of both performs best overall, it’s effectiveness would still depend on your overall brand and nature of business. There’s no harm in doing a couple of tests to see whether an image post would be better suited for this campaign, or would video encourage more engagement. Another thing you can look at is whether your viewers prefer a standard image, GIF, photos of real-life people, or infographics.
When you conduct advertising on Instagram, research is essential, so you’ll know what type of ads work best. Although social media has provided cost-effective tools for you to run your brand’s marketing campaigns, these platforms won’t run your campaigns for you. It still requires a ton of human input and knowledge to drive successful and effective advertising on Instagram.
