What is your goal on Instagram right now? Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, grow your followers, improve sales or retarget customers? Whatever the case maybe, Instagram ads are a good fit for your promotional efforts, these ads are effective for businesses to generate sales and build engagement!
Instagram ads are posts or stories that a business or brand pays to promote to Instagram feeds of users who may and may not be following you. They look just like a normal posts but carry the “sponsored” label. They also include a call-to-action button that can be used depending on the goal and objective of the ad campaign.
When starting out your brand on Instagram, getting engagements and followers can be tough especially if it is a new brand that hasn’t gotten a lot of awareness outside of Instagram. Although, with the right hashtag strategy you’re well on your way, but then, running ads might just be the necessary step you need to kick start your page.
Instagram ads and promotions give you the opportunity to create well targeted ad campaigns for users at all stages of the sales funnel, to build awareness and drive conversion at the same time. More so as the engagement rate on Instagram is higher than any other platform out there. Instagram is integrated with Facebook which makes it easier to target your audience based on their Facebook data.
Instagram advertising works well for all kinds of businesses from all walks of life, from multinational businesses to small sized businesses and it does not require some sort of marketing expertise to run an Instagram ad campaign. Now, with Facebook pixel, retargeting has been made super easy. Relevant ads can be shown to users who have in the past visited your website. With this, you get a higher chance to increase sale and conversion.
Furthermore, generating organic reach gets tougher by the day considering the amount of increasing competition and the Instagram algorithm which can be difficult to crack. Organic content can only get you so far.
During the creation of your Instagram account, the default profile you create is the personal account. This type of account does not give you access to promotions and insights which all forms of businesses and brands on the platform needs. To start putting together an Instagram Ad campaign, you’re going to have to switch your account type from a personal account to either a business account or a creator account.
Now this depends on the kind of business or brand you run. But nevertheless, they both give you options to run ads and promote your content as well as access to its analytics. But just for clearer understanding, I’m going to be explaining in details the two different accounts so you can make an informed decision when switching to one of them.
This was specifically made for businesses like we already know. These accounts are made with features and tools that are there to specifically to help businesses grow as they are meant for accounts that represent companies that are selling products or rendering services. If you fall in this category, this might just be the ideal account for you.
Below I have listed some key features of the business account;
This account type was created in mid-2019 to meet the needs of content creators and influencers. This suits influencers who do not have a business yet but are actively trying to build their fan base, gain brand partnerships and share within a specific niche.
The creator account is more or less like an upgrade of the business account. This account has all or most of the features and tools a business account offers you with just a few additional tools that work to make a better experience for influencers and content creators.
Below I have listed just the few extra features in addition to the features listed above in the business account;
After switching to a professional account, the next step would be to create the visuals of the content you want to promote. By visuals, I mean, is it a photo you want to promote, a video or an infographics? All these things need to be in order. Whatever visuals you choose to use should fall under one of the different types of Instagram ads.
There are different types of Instagram ads relating to their visuals;
There are two ways you can create ad campaigns for your Instagram page. You can either simply promote a post on your profile feed. This could be a picture or video you have already posted on your feed or your story.
In this case, you simply just have to hit the promote button on whatever post or story you are looking to promote. Or, you can create ads using Facebook ads manager, this allows you create more complex ad. This tool allows you create and manage ads for all your Instagram and Facebook pages all in one place.
Install and open up the Ads Manager, tap the menu icon and tap to create a new ad campaign. For this article, I’ll be using the Ads Manager.
After tapping that, you would see a list of marketing objectives to pick out from.
Before setting out to run an ad campaign, you should have an evaluation of what it is you wish to achieve with ad campaigns. These are your goals and objectives for your ads.
Instagram offers the following objectives which your goals must fall into for an ad;
Now you’re all caught up, the idea is to find which of these objectives your goal fits into and select it.
Instagram allows you to target the ideal audience to show you your ads to using their demographics. You target by location, age, gender, languages, interests and behaviors (actions they have taken in the past such as online purchases), users connected to your page, app or event.
For custom audience, you are allowed to upload your own list of contacts making it easy to target leads that you are looking to convert.
By selecting to show your ads to look alike audience, you allow Instagram to target users who show similar traits to your custom audience.
Almost getting done, now you need to select where your ads will appear. Since Facebook and Instagram are integrated, your ads can be shown on both platforms. You can choose to place your ads on only Instagram or on both platforms.
These options are given to you as manual and automatic placements. Automatic placements show your ads to audience wherever it is they are likely to perform best. As for manual placements, you choose where your ads appear for example, you can restrict your ads to show only on Instagram stories.
One good thing about running ads on social media is that they are very affordable. Instagram gives you a choice to show the ads daily or for a lifetime. You pick the amount you’d pay a day and for how long you’d want this ad to be up and running.
I already listed the formats and their requirements above when I talked about creating visuals for your ad campaign. But I didn’t mention that each ad format has its set of call to action buttons. These call-to-action buttons tell prospects what to do after viewing an ad. A common example of such is “Apply Now”.
Supported objectives
Call-to-action buttons
Supported objectives:
Call-to-action buttons
Supported objectives:
Call-to-action buttons
Supported objectives:
Call-to-action buttons
Supported objectives:
Call-to-action buttons
Supported objectives:
Call-to-action buttons
All this being in place, you can now begin to run your ads. Fill in your payment information and you’re set to go.