It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Instagram advertising is both a serious and easy way to get your message out to your target audience. Instagram recently opened up advertising to everyone so now anyone can do it, and you should be using it. There are over 400 million users on Instagram – making it a legitimate social network to advertise on.
Captivate
Just like Instagram’s parent company Facebook, you are not allowed to have your image advertisement contain more than 20% text. This keeps advertisers from spamming their images with text. Instagram doesn’t want to compromise the integrity of its platform by allowing spammy advertisements to ruin a user’s timeline. So when you make an advertisement and place it on Instagram it’s imperative to have captivating images that capture the viewer’s attention to get them to stop scrolling and digest your ad.
Setting It Up
To make Instagram advertising even easier, you can set up an ad campaign directly through Facebook’s Ad Manager or Power Editor. Instagram appears as a placement option when you’re building a campaign through Facebook. Remember to sync your Instagram account with Facebook’s Business Manager so you can advertise directly to your specific Instagram account. Otherwise, the Instagram ad you set up will not link to a profile, meaning the viewer can’t click to the account to view more. That’s just a waste of money.
Choose Wisely
There are three basic ad formats you can choose from: Photo, Video, or Carousel. Each has a different effect on your audience depending on the goal of your campaign. Choose wisely, because certain ad formats yield better results when matched correctly with campaign objectives.
Objectives
Similar to Facebook advertising, there are a variety of different campaign objectives to choose from. If the goal of your campaign is to send traffic to your website, it would make sense to set up a “Clicks to Website” campaign. If you have a mobile app and you want people to download it, you’re better off using a “Mobile App Install” campaign objective. Maybe you just want to drive more interaction on your post, “Per Post Engagement” is likely the best choice for you. When you are strategizing your campaign this is an important step to plan out. You can see the full list of campaign objectives on the Instagram website.
Things to Remember
Instagram has a user base of over 400 million people, but only around 80 million reside in the United States – target carefully.
Experimentation is key. Figure out which ad formats work best for your objective and scale from there.
Don’t forget to stand out. There are millions of posts a day, your content has to be original and stand out. Now that Instagram has switched to an algorithm based timeline, it will only show what it believes to be more relevant posts. Which means your posts may not gain as much exposure. Don’t be afraid to get creative!
