Instagram has around 1 billion monthly active users making it one of the most popular social media networks to exist. With so many users, it carves out a huge opportunity for small business owners to fly towards success by using Instagram’s powerful advertising tools. If you are looking for affordable ways to promote your business, you must consider running Instagram ads to reach a larger clientele.
If you want to achieve great results but don’t have the time or energy for it, reach out to the experts at Hibu and they will take care of everything for you! By creating an affordable Instagram advertising campaign specialized for your small business, you can use the help of their services to achieve your business goals in the most efficient way!
How Instagram Advertising Works
If you have an active Instagram channel, your posts are only seen by your followers whereas, an Instagram Ad will allow you to reach a larger audience and spread your business further by being in front of new potential customers.
Instagram ads are interspersed in the feed and stories section of Instagram and they appear seamlessly on other people’s Instagrams. They look similar to a regular Instagram post or a story update, with only the word ‘sponsored’ on top or a banner at the bottom of the image with a call to action for example, ‘Shop now’ or ‘Learn more’, so that it can grab the attention of the user and provide prompt opportunities to view your product.
Before publishing an Ad, you can always customize your preferences and specify your ad objectives and target audience. You can also define your budget and the ad format that you want to display, including photo and video options. Once the basics are sorted and the ad is published, you can then track the outreach and make adjustments to make your online advertising strategy even better.
Is Instagram Advertising right for you?
Instagrams Advertising platform is great for businesses that want to increase their online reach engagement and sales. It is a visual platform therefore, businesses with visually engaging and creative content tend to get the best results out of advertising on Instagram.
Here are a few types of businesses that Instagram advertising is right for:
1- Businesses with visually engaging products:
If you sell products that can visually engage the customer such as clothing, accessories, crafts, furniture, foods, and drinks, Instagram ads are perfect for you to showcase your products to a new clientele.
2- Service-based businesses:
If you are a service-based business, you can use Instagram ads to showcase your service, and tell prospects why you are perfect for the job to get done while visually engaging the customers into your service either through images or videos.
3- Tech companies:
Video ads can come in handy the most for tech companies who can display their services through videos and connect with the user visually while displaying their service and abilities.
Instagram has the highest engagement rate of any of the major social networks, therefore, it is a great channel for businesses to invest in and strive through.
Instagram Advertising Costs:
As a fast-growing social media channel with advanced targeting options, high engagement, and proven sales generation, Instagram advertising provides a high scope for small businesses to reach a large clientele.
With Instagram, you can define your daily or lifetime advertising budget that starts at just $5 a day. Your daily budget is an average daily cost and may vary on your placement opportunities. This cost is based on the number of times your ad appears on the user’s Instagram stories and feeds.
Depending on your optimization goal, you can play around with your outreach, however, if you are just starting, it is best to use the recommended default settings till you understand the strategy well.
7 Types of Instagram ads
Once you’ve set your budget and your target audience, you can now work on your content! You can choose from a few Instagram ad formats that include Photo Ads, Video Ads, Carousel Ads, Sponsored Ads, Mapped Ads, Story Ads, and IGTV Ads. You can also choose your ad placement from the news feed, in between stories, or both. Here is an overview of all your options!
-
Photo Ad
Photo ads are the simplest format, displaying one image of your product. If you choose this format, this image must be eye-catching to promote your product or your service. For some people, this is the best format as it is the easiest to set up and grabs the attention of the user right away!
Here is an example of one of the ads by a watch company called MVMT with a photo ad along with some text to display all of their designs at once!
-
Video Ad
Video ads last from 30 to 60 seconds in length and are great if you want to show a product in action or for companies that don’t have a tangible product, like software companies or service-based companies. Video ads are much more engaging and companies alter their product marketing based on this to engage more viewers.
-
Carousel Ad
Carousel ads are a collection of two or more images or videos that the users can swipe through to view your library of photos and videos. Carousels are best for people who want to show multiple products and have a lot more to offer.
Here’s an example from the online education platform MasterClass. MasterClass uses a Carousel ad to highlight a collection of their online courses.
-
Sponsored Ads
For a Sponsored Ad, this is an option available to business accounts on Instagram, and it allows the brand to promote their posts through paid ads. These ads directly link the viewer to the business’s website, e-store, or profile so that they can reach a following while directly selling their products and services to interested viewers.
-
Stories Ad
Stories ads show up within the “Stories” section of Instagram and you can create Photo or Video ads, which can be as long as 15 seconds which will appear within the stories feed of your audience and as Stories are a new and popular Instagram feature with content expiring within 24 hours, you can add limited-time or promotion offers here so that the urgency can be directed to your audience to respond promptly. These ads are back-linked with a ‘Swipe Up’ option that redirects the viewer to your business’s website or profile.
-
Mapped Ads
Mapped Ads use the Tagging option to redirect the audience from one page to another, based on the chosen customization. This type of ad not only keeps the audience engaged for longer but also increases the click-rate of the business and is equally entertaining for the audience as well. These types of ads are rarely used but they can do wonders for product-based businesses.
-
IGTV Ads
IGTV is a relatively new feature on Instagram that is being used by brands and influencers to post video content that can be used to promote the product and influence the audience. Similar to Youtube, these ads remain on the business’s page and can be viewed later on as well. On IGTV, viewers can post videos even as long as 20 minutes therefore there is no restriction that video posting on Instagram feeds has.
How to Set Up Your Instagram Ads in 6 Steps
Setting up an Instagram ad is the easiest thing and now it can be done through Facebook Ad manager!
Here’s how to set up your Instagram Ad:
- Choose Your Objective
Your Instagram Advertising Objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads. Your objective will fall within one of three categories; here is an overview of each category!
- Awareness – These objectives create new interest in your product or service by widening your reach to the audience.
- Consideration – These objectives are meant to get people interested in your products or services and to drive some action to increase website traffic, boosting engagement, and generating leads through your audience.
- Conversion – These persuade users who have expressed interest in your business to purchase Call-to-action motives.
- It is important to define Your Target Audience
After you choose your marketing objective, you’ll need to define the audience that you want to see your ads. You must have a sound understanding of your target audience to fully benefit from your Instagram advertising.
Custom Audience targeting helps you reach people who have already interacted with your business are great for staying in front of your existing audience. Lookalike Audience targeting helps you reach new users who are similar to your existing audience.
There are also some Detailed Targeting options where you can specify demographics, interests, and behaviors. Ideally, you want to modify your specifications to the point that will give you maximum engagements, reaches, and boosts.
- Choose Your Ad Placements
The Placements section is where you specify where you want your ads to appear on Instagram. You can choose for your ads to appear in the Instagram Feed or Stories, or both. Ads placed in the Instagram Feed are more common since the Feed has been around a lot longer than the Stories section.
Instagram Ad Placements
- Set Your Budget
One of the best parts of running Instagram ads is that you can start small with a minimum of $5 a day and then increase spending more once you get the hang of it and you start seeing what is performing well. You can start by entering a daily budget, which is the average amount of money you’ll spend on ads each day, or a lifetime budget, which is the total amount you’ll spend on your advertising campaign. Within the “Advanced Options,” you may have some ability to customize your strategy more depending on your advertising objective.
- Add Images and Text
As a visual channel, the graphics that you choose to display for your ad will be crucial to your success. It’s best to upload high-quality images from your business that show off your products or services and make sure your images are in line with the recommended image specs.
Next, you can add a caption! You want a short and catchy caption with just a sentence or two to promote your product or service.
You should also add a call to action, which appears below your image; Your call to action options include Learn More, Contact Us, Shop Now that will help engage and redirect your viewer to your page.
Instagram Ad Image and Text Setup
- Create Your Ad and Publish it once done!
Once you have everything in order, you are now ready to finally create your ad. You can start by creating an Ad Name and make sure you’ve connected to your business’ Instagram account so that the Ad can link to the right place. Next, you can choose your ad format, and plug in the required information. Review your ad details to make sure your targeting, placement, budget, and campaign details are all correct. Once everything looks good, hit Confirm to publish to your ad, which you can still make changes to if needed.
How to Track Results and Optimize Your Instagram Ads
Once you publish your ad, track your performance, and see how your ads are performing.
Optimize your ads while keeping the following metrics in mind.
- Impressions – This is the number of views that your ad receives.
- Clicks – This metric is the number of clicks your ad is generating.
- Cost per result – This is the amount you are paying for a user to take any action, like click on your ad.
Instagram Reporting Within Ad Manager
The best way to optimize your Instagram ads is to determine which metric is most important to you based on your advertising objective, experiment with different ad formats, and come up with the best combination optimized for your target reach and audience.
If your Instagram ads are not performing as well as you’d like, consider making these changes and then analyze the results.
- Update your images/videos – Being a visual Channel, it is important to choose the right graphics to engage and invite your users to your product or service in a quick span
- Revisit your targeting – Make sure your ad is reaching a relevant audience that will potentially convert into your clientele. Through analysis, you can choose a different approach too if things don’t work out well.
- Try a different ad placement – Experiment with Feed and Stories placement to see if one performs better for you.
Bottom Line
Instagram ads are a fantastic way to get your business in front of new prospects. After you run a couple of ads, you’ll become more familiar with the process and have a better idea of what performs best for you, and will be able to optimize your ads perfectly.
If you want to try Instagram advertising but don’t have the time, you can also reach out to the experts at Hibu. Visit their website to learn more and schedule a free marketing consultation with them to help explain your needs and requirements to them better!