Businesses already involved in PPC advertising or just starting, today's digital advertisers know the importance of social media advertising. With multiple social media platforms to run Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc., the social media buzz Instagram is also not behind in providing advertising features. Instagram has 1 billion+ monthly active users and more than 200 million business accounts that people visit every day. It allows online advertisers to scale their business revenue, have a higher return on investment (ROI), build brand awareness, etc.
Social media advertising is becoming popular, and Instagram Ads cannot be left out by businesses having their target audience on this platform. With white label social media marketing, companies ease off their advertising efforts and get the work done by the PPC experts to meet their marketing goals. Social media marketing attracts online advertisers, and Instagram Ads provides features like creative ads, broad audience reach, better conversion rate, etc. In this blog, we will discuss Instagram advertising, its various segments, and some proven strategies that help you in running a result-oriented ad campaign.
What is Instagram advertising?
Instagram is a social networking service launched on 6 October 2010 and acquired by Facebook (now Meta Inc) in the year 2012 on a deal amount of $1 billion. It offered its first ad in November 2013 after the merger with Facebook and now has a community of 2 million online advertisers.
Instagram advertising is one of the social media marketing options that mainly uses display ads, video ads, carousel ads, etc., to attract users’ attention with the help of Instagram posts. Instagram is known for creativity, and the ads get the attention of the users, drive traffic to the website, generate leads, boost conversions, and finally, high ROI. This advertising method can target the right audience at the right time with your brand's creative messages in the form of texts, animations, images, and videos.
Why should you run Instagram Ads?
Instagram business advertising is gaining immense popularity because it covers the user base that is targeted mainly by a large number of businesses. If you talk about numbers, 55% of the Instagram users are 18-29 years old while 28% are in the range of 30-49 years; adding these numbers, 83% of users are 18-49 years and almost all young population. Thus most businesses can fit into this age range, and hence Instagram Ads are so popular and beneficial. Apart from this, below are some more points that highlight the urgency to run ads on Instagram.
Get a higher return on investment - Many business owners claim that running an ad campaign on Instagram helps quickly meet their specified business goals, increasing conversion rate and business revenue.
Various tools to optimize campaigns - It provides various simple and flexible tools from which you can create Instagram Ads that best describe your brand. You can boost any of your posts to turn them into actionable ads, and with the help of the Instagram Ads manager, advanced campaigns can be created easily.
Use Instagram Ads manager to create multi-platform campaigns - As you already know, Meta Inc is the parent company of Instagram; thus, if you create Instagram Ads, they can be easily used as Facebook Ads or across other social media platforms.
Creative and engaging ad formats - To take maximum advantage, create Instagram Ads that attract users' attention and make them click on your ad with a compelling call to action to reach your goals quickly. For this, you can choose from different ad formats and edit them according to the demand of the business.
Flexible pricing and easy setup - Pricing is a crucial factor while running an ad campaign. The best part is Instagram advertising costs can be flexible depending on the audience, auction, competition, time of day, day of the week, etc. Also, campaign setup is very easy and convenient, especially in case you are already running Facebook Ads. Only you have to decide where to send users, who should see it, how much to spend, and you are ready to go.
Choose from different types of ads - Creativity is the thing that makes Instagram so popular. On this platform, you can choose from various ad types like image, display, video, carousel, story, etc.
Track your account performance - Instagram provides real-time data with the help of which you can track your performance in real-time and get to know what’s working well with the audience.
Along with the points mentioned above, Instagram is a complete platform where you can advertise, chat, post, and even sell on it. Yes, it is true, as 70% of shoppers look to it for their next purchase so you can sell directly on it. Besides this, wide visibility, brand awareness, freedom of choosing the placement of the ads, etc., are factors that cannot be ignored.
Until now, you have understood that investing in Instagram advertising is a worthy deal that would be very beneficial for your social media marketing campaign, but it is necessary to go through the Instagram business advertising strategies below to acquire maximum benefits.
Effective Instagram business advertising strategies
1. Target the right audience - One of the main benefits of digital marketing is you can target only those audiences with the potential chance to convert visitors into your business's regular customers. You need to specify your audience according to your business need & strategy and then target them based on the location of the users, any specific age range, gender, language, work, demographics, etc. This brings clarity about where and how much to invest depending on your Instagram advertising budget. It provides this feature while setting up an ad campaign to categorize & specify your audience.
2. Specify your budget - A budget is a certain amount that would be fixed by a business owner to spend on running advertisements or any other campaigns. According to SEO experts it is never a good practice to spend more than your specified advertising budget therefore Instagram Ads manager has many features using which you can reduce your Instagram advertising cost. Any advertising company or an expert never suggests investing a heavy amount of money that your specified budget, for the same reason Instagram Ads manager has many features that you can save your money while running ad campaigns. You can choose between a daily budget and a lifetime budget (which is for a fixed period of time) according to your Instagram business advertising needs.
Bidding is another essential aspect that should be chosen carefully to maintain your ad budget. Instagram Ads manager asks you to select between manual and automatic bidding, in which manual bidding allows you to choose your own bid while automatic bidding is chosen by the ads manager that best suits your business needs. You can also schedule ads to appear at the fixed time of the day when your audiences are most active, saving from unnecessary billing and extra burden on the ad budget.
3. Ad campaign setup - One of the reasons for the popularity of Instagram advertising is the easy and quick campaign setup. If you are already running ads across Facebook, then you are almost done; with just a few more settings, you are ready to advertise. Also, having no advertising experience across social media platforms is no difficult task. With the help of the ads manager and following steps, you can easily setup your campaign:
• Only you have to set up your Instagram account, or you can use a Facebook account/page also.
• Specify choices like the objective that supports Instagram as ad placement, ad creation & setup,
• Then you have to choose between manual placement (ads appear across Instagram) or automatic placement (ads will run across various Facebook placements, including Instagram, to give you the best value for your ads).
• Now add further details of the ad and preview it before finally submitting it for review.
• Once your ad is approved, it will appear on Instagram.
4. Clear with business objective - Nearly all businesses run advertisements, it can be offline advertisements, online ads, social media marketing, SEO campaigns, PPC campaigns, etc. according to their strategy but their goals are entirely different from business to business. Thus in the same way you should also have clarity that what you want to achieve by running Instagram Ads driving traffic to the website, app installation, boosting your posts, video views, link click, form fillup, lead generation, etc.
5. Regularly monitor your performance - The white label social media marketing is not only focused on running effective ad campaigns but; on analyzing the insights generated from it and many others. It also focuses on many other points essential to improve the performance of Instagram Ads. Analyzing all the ad KPIs, such as the number of likes, comments, shares, and follows, determines the visibility of your ad post. Apart from these, you also have to track post engagement rate, reach, conversion rate, the number of traffic it sends to websites, etc. are used to determine how far you have achieved your advertising goals. This is not a very tough task as the Instagram Ads manager provides all these insights in one place so that you can quickly analyze and take the necessary steps in case it is not performing well.
6. Make creative ad posts - Text ads may not yield the desired results on Instagram, as it is supposed to be a creative platform that provides various features or options to modify and edit your posts. Thus, Instagram posts used for marketing purposes should be creative and relevant to attract the users' attention and call them to click on them.
7. Use suitable branded hashtags - With the increase in the popularity of social media, there is rapid growth in the use of hashtags. It is a combination of keywords or phrases without spaces prefixes with a hash (#) sign that categorizes the contents across social media platforms so that any specific term, news, product, services, technology, etc., can be found easily. Hashtags are so popular nowadays that it has become necessary for online advertisers to use them to create Instagram Ads. Popularity is not the only reason you should use hashtags in your ad posts; it maximizes your visibility as per the used hashtags and helps in audience targeting.
Using hashtags can increase users' convenience in searching any specific term across social media platforms; thus, it should be included in all your social media marketing campaigns strategy. But overloading posts with hashtags in the expectation that they should get more visibility and traffic is definitely not a good practice as it can result in a bad user experience and affects the ad performance. So, ideally, 9 hashtags work better in boosting the performance of your Instagram posts. Also, long hashtags perform better in comparison to others. Thus it is better to do some audience research and specify some beneficial and relevant branded hashtags that you can use in your Instagram posts.
8. Run online contests - What could a better business advertising strategy be than running tempting contests across social media platforms? Only you have to plan and create an effective online contest that should be powerful enough to attract social media users to participate in it, and Instagram is the best platform to run such competitions. It has various features that help in increasing users’ engagement with your profile. You can create polls that include features like asking questions, quizzes, etc., in your story or feed and ask users to participate in it. Caption contests are very popular now, brand mentions, adding location features, and many more. Instagram has limitless opportunities for advertisers.
Conclusion
The popularity of Instagram is no more secret, and thus it has become an ocean of opportunities for online advertisers. Advertising companies claim that many brands are following a separate special strategy for advertising it. About 81% of people use Instagram to research products or services. As it has many users and serves as a multi-purpose platform, running Instagram Ads becomes essential. White label social media marketing companies also predict that engagement and advertising on this platform will increase at an unprecedented rate and prove to be highly beneficial for businesses. Thus if you also want to create a successful advertising campaign, we are here to help you with various services under one roof, including SEO services, PPC services, white label social media marketing services, competition analysis, digital analytics, online reputation management service, etc.
References
• The complete guide to advertising on Instagram
• A step-by-step guide to advertising on Instagram