Why you should be using Instagram Advertising

Fully 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business. And it’s not just consumer products that benefit. Instagram marketing has grown substantially this year—increasing by 76 million people in just the last quarter.

Why you should be using Instagram Advertising

In this world of boundless information, there are no limits in marketing and advertising. All you have to do is to choose the right platform, the right way you want to communicate with your audience.

Social media platforms are super effective for companies with eye-catching visual content. Paid advertising on Instagram is one of the most functional and massive ways for your business to connect with your potential customers and achieve objectives such as:

sending traffic to your website,
increasing your website conversions and
boosting amount of app installs and app engagement.

5 Key Strategy

1. Instagram Advertising Objective

Before you get started, it’s important to give careful deliberation to the goals of your Instagram marketing and ad campaign efforts. Maybe you’d like to grow your audience or raise brand awareness. Perhaps you want to drive traffic to your site or online store. Or, maybe you’d like to promote specific products, increase sales, or encourage mobile app downloads. Determining the purpose of your ad—no matter the preferred outcome—will help you decide on your message, audience, and call to action. There are many different choices, broken down into three categories – Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.

2. Choosing the perfect Instagram ad format

Now that you’ve chosen the ideal marketing objective for your Instagram ads, you should consider which format is best for telling your story visually.

The basic Instagram ad formats are:

Photo ads: These include a single image, and tell your story visually. Photo ads are best for building brand awareness and engagement.

Carousel ads: These allow users to scroll through multiple images or videos on their mobile device.

Collection ads: These give users the ability to purchase products directly from the ad.

Video ads: These are video clips that can be from 3 seconds to 60 seconds long.

Stories ads: These can be photos or videos up to 15 seconds that run in between user Stories as people tap through the Stories they follow.

3. Targeting your dream Audience

If you want to see results from your Instagram ad campaigns, you need to target audiences that are suitable to your brand and your campaign objectives. Instagram’s rapid growth and plenty of targeting options mean that you have a great opportunity to test different ads on different audiences. Decide what the dream audience for your Instagram ad campaign would be first, then use precise testing methods to refine your genuine audience to look that way.

Instagram ads are controlled through Facebook Ads Manager and share the same three main audience types that Facebook uses for targeting:

1. Core Audiences – the default ad targeting option for Instagram users.

2. Custom Audiences – a group of users who have a prior relationship with your brand and are imported to Ads Manager from your email lists, CRM software, or other data sources.

3. Lookalike Audiences – a group of users who have similar characteristics to your existing customers.

4. Define your ad budget and schedule

Instagram ads are kind of like modern art. They can be visually stunning, interesting, or just confusing, and they have no set value because they’re sold through auctions. When it comes to setting your Instagram ads budget and schedule, you have full reign over when your ads run and how much will be spent on them. You set the budget, then Instagram’s ad engine will spend it as efficiently as possible based on the objective you’ve selected.

First of all, you need to choose between a daily budget and a lifetime budget.

Daily budgets allow for your ads to run indefinitely while spending up to your allotted amount each day (you can still set start and end dates), while lifetime budgets will run for a set amount of time.

If you choose a lifetime budget, you can also select a specific schedule for your ads to run. Perhaps you want them to only be shown on weekdays or weekends. You’re able to manually choose the days and times your ads will be shown to your target audience.

5. Making the right bid

Instagram is an amazing channel for brand awareness campaigns because the medium lends itself to really beautiful, memorable visual advertisements. How much money should you be throwing down to win Instagram auctions and get your ad in front of people? As with most of the strategies behind running a flawless Instagram ad campaign, you need to think about your objective before you make that decision.

Next, you need to decide whether to bid manually or automatically.

Automatic Placements: Ads will be shown to your audience wherever they’re likely to perform best. this works well when you have a large audience and not too much competition for each ad placement.
Manual Placements: You can choose specifically where your ad will appear (and not appear). If you want to limit your ads to show only on Instagram (not Facebook), you can choose these using Manual Placements manual bidding might be more cost-efficient for your ad campaign.

Benefits of Instagram Advertising

Here are our top reasons:

Instagram is a massive, ever-growing diverse online community with unlimited marketing potential.
Instagram and Facebook are connected, so it’s easier to target your audience based on Facebook data.
The setup and creation of ads are done through Facebook, making it super easy.
The engagement rate on Instagram is higher than the engagement rate on any other social media platform, especially for purchasing purposes. As long as your product is visually engaging, you could drive purchases that are beneficial for your ROI.
You can easily integrate Shopify and sell your products instantly
Showcase your brand through Stories
Instagram ads are not intrusive. They look the same as regular posts.
Instagram measures the success of your campaign based on awareness, reach and recall instead of follower counts, likes, or comments.
Most people use their smartphones to read their news, socialize on Facebook or post their own stories and update social media timelines. Most smartphones feature high-end cameras that can shoot photographs to be immediately posted on Instagram. Everybody can be an amateur photographer. Instagram is the best channel for this type of media and it’s why most mobile users have Instagram accounts

Define Your Goals

Instagram is first and foremost a mobile medium, so be sure to keep that in mind as you’re developing your campaign, too. The goals of your Instagram ad should reflect the best possible experience for your audience and customers. For example, if your website or online store isn’t improving for mobile users, your Instagram ad should focus on brand awareness or list growth rather than encouraging web traffic or increasing conversions.

Determine Your Audience

Choosing the right audience—and keeping your content suitable to that audience—is the key to running a successful Instagram ad. If you’re a retailer that specializes in men’s winter clothing, for example, don’t target an audience that consists of both men and women between the ages of 18-65 and who live in the United States choosing such a broad audience often leads to lower Instagram engagement and click through rates, which can even result in your ad being canceled.

Instead, use your contact list to build an audience of Instagram users who are similar to your existing customers and subscribers. Now, you can leverage your subscriber activity and e-commerce data to create powerful segments that help you show relevant ads to the right people.

Targeting Ideas

Potential customers. Create a fragment of subscribers who haven’t made a purchase just yet. Drive traffic to your store by displaying your newest items, highlighting your best sellers, or advertising a special offer for new customers.
Recent customers. Create a segment of customers who have recently purchased an item from your store, then target them with ads that stimulate similar products they might also enjoy.
Repeat customers. Create a segment of customers who have placed multiple orders from your store, then show your appreciation by giving them early access to new products or exclusive sales.
Lapsed customers. Create a segment of customers who haven’t made a purchase from your store or opened/clicked your email lately, and create an ad to re-engage them.
Former customers and non-subscribers. Create a segment of people who have unsubscribed from your list or haven’t subscribed yet. Target them with an ad that builds awareness around your business, delivers your message, or offers incentives.
People similar to your best customers. Once you’ve connected your store, you can create a segment based on the purchase history of your customers. For example, you might choose to use a segment of customers whose total amount spent is more than $100, or a segment of customers whose total number of orders is greater than 2.
People similar to your most involved subscribers. Create a segment based on subscribers who have a high contact rating. In this instance, you’d use a segment of subscribers with a contact rating greater than 4 stars

Cost to Invest in Instagram Advertising

The cost of Instagram ads is highly dependent on a variety of factors – there is no benchmark price. Some cost factors include:

Your targeting
Competitiveness of your industry
Time of year (costs often go up during holiday shopping periods in Q4 such as Black Friday)
Placement (costs can differ between ads shown on Facebook vs Instagram)

The best way to evaluate your budget is to set up a draft campaign in Ads Manager and look for the Audience Definition and Estimated Daily Results modules, which will tell you if your budget settings will be sufficient to reach your appropriate audience within your appropriate duration.

Note that there is no “best practice” for how much to spend. You can get started by spending just a few rupees a day, and scale up from there based on success.

In order to control the costs of your Instagram ads, you can set either daily budgets or lifetime spending limits.

Choose the Right Image Post with HT Advertising

When you create an Instagram ad campaign you’ll have the option to create a carousel or single-image ad, just as you would with Facebook. Carousel ads work well when you want to tell a story or exhibit a collection of products, but if you’d rather call attention to or drive sales of a particular product, a single-image ad is a better option.

Instagram is a visual platform, so there are several things to keep in mind as you’re selecting your images, besides the image size.

Focus on your products. If your Instagram ad is planned to showcase or sell your products, don’t be afraid to use eye-catching images that put the focus on those products. This differs from Facebook ads, which instead thrive on slice-of-life imagery that shows the benefits of your business or products, even if that means putting less emphasis on the products themselves.
Keep text to a minimum. Remember that Instagram users are there to see images. As you’re planning your ad, try to think of new and interesting ways to tell the story of your brand and products without using words.
Use high-resolution images. A beautiful, high-quality image will help grab the attention of your audience as they scroll through their Instagram feeds. And since most smartphones are equipped with powerful cameras, you won’t need any special equipment to get started—just set up the shot, make sure the lighting and composition are compelling, and snap a quick picture