Do you want to learn how to effectively utilise the power of Instagram ads to promote your brands?
Finding the perfect way to boost your brand and generate views can be tricky for someone who has just started learning about digital ads.
But not to worry, that’s exactly where social media comes in with all its happening features.
Well, social media platforms like Instagram are the most efficient ways to promote one’s brand. Though, you need to get it done right to derive the desired results.
In recent years, Instagram has gained popularity and become one of the leading social media platforms. Despite being almost half a decade younger than Twitter, it has surpassed incredibly in terms of audience.
With over 1 billion active users, it’s fast becoming the to-be-place for businesses as they tend to expand their brands with advertising and receive tremendous advantages of Instagram influencers with their exponential power to reach the target audience.
Guess what’s most surprising?
It’s not just a platform for the young, and this helps you cater to a large audience. 32% of users are aged between 25 to 35 years, making it almost ⅓ of the global IG audience.
And with great Instagram talks, older adults are joining in the fun too. So you need to stay calm when it comes to targeting the audience.
Instagram should be strongly considered when working with an allocated budget for paid socials. It’s reported that 27% of users find new brands and products through social ads on Instagram.
A significant insight that you should know – Instagram is a premium ad space with the utmost potential to generate massive revenue.
However, if you still need to get your hands on Instagram-sponsored advertising features, you are not thoroughly utilising your brand’s advertising budget.
There are several propelling reasons to begin Instagram ads, but the capability of marketing the content so well is the most compelling one.
It’s a common phenomenon that people remember 80% of what they see, and visuals have the definite power of retention. This is exactly where Instagram makes it to the most leads.
After Instagram’s inception, it has now become the 4th most popular social media platform. This makes it a powerful tool to be utilised as an advertising channel.
How about we take you on a walk through a few major insights into Instagram ads, their several types, whether they make a good option for your business, and devise and measure your first-ever campaign?
So, let’s get started!
What are Instagram Ads, and Why Use Them?
Instagram, a photo and video-sharing platform, helps you connect with the world. Similarly, an Instagram ad is a paid feature to promote a brand. Well, it depends; an ad can be an image, gif, video, or maybe a combination.
Interestingly, products are not just captured and described on this app; instead, they are unconventionally displayed. With an option to endorse the product by celebrity and influencer’s presence, it boosts both effectiveness and trustworthiness, making Instagram a compelling model for the brand’s identity through visual representation.
With the versatile representation of ads, these can appear on the user’s feed, story, IGTV, reels, or explore section. However, in contrast to regular posts, the ads appear with sponsored labels to identify themselves.
Of course, behind almost every ad, the intention is to generate web traffic and boost conversions; hence CTAs work as a beneficial element.
As mentioned earlier, Instagram is commonly misunderstood as Gen-Z and Millennial things, but that’s so not the case. Plenty of users on Instagram belong to the Gen-X and Baby Boomer categories too.
60% of Instagram’s total population is aged between 18 to 34, making it a youthful platform; however, the remaining audience is 35 and above hence leveraging a considerable opportunity for targeting a versatile audience.
With plenty of great reasons for businesses and individuals to utilise Instagram paid features, the following are the strong ones:
Visuals entice the audience more
Instagram possesses great potential for brands and businesses to target the appropriate and selective audience, display various products and offers and build healthy relationships with customers via visually appealing and creative ways.
Creating far-reaching brand awareness
It is an excellent platform for brand awareness and an ideal way to boost conversions. With incredible visual techniques such as video and image posts, Instagram offers hashtags, carousel posts, IGTV, reels, and several other features to create impressive campaigns generating brand awareness.
Vast advertising tools
Facebook and Instagram also feature practical tools to target people based on their interests, search history, gender, age, and social inclination. With such demographics, you can make the most out of Instagram ads.
Include CTAs
Including CTAs, like clickable URLs, helps viewers conveniently redirect to websites, signup forms, promotional offers, eCommerce sites, and much more. As per Instagram, stories with CTAs are 89% more likely to derive results.
Influencer marketing
Involving influencers and celebrities in your brand campaign or having a PR or shoutout massively increases your brand identity and builds trustworthiness amongst the audience. People tend to rely more on renowned personalities, and this technique has proven records for delivering outstanding results.
What are the Different Types of Instagram Ads?
Instagram supports many advertising formats, including Image ads, story ads, video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, explore ads, IGTVs, shopping ads, and reels.
Let’s dig into each one of them:
Image Ads
As a beginner, this option is a good start. Click a photo or photos in square or landscape format. However, the images should be outstanding so they grab the user’s eye as they scroll through their feed.
Linking your photos to the website link, with multiple CTAs such as Visit now, Watch more, Learn more, Contact us, and so on, creates a better impact.
Video Ads
Make your ads more dynamic and versatile with video ads. Instagram offers up to 120 seconds to promote your content.
Considering that these ads take a little longer when making, the results they yield are worth it. And if you don’t know, then it is that Instagram video ads receive triple the engagement than photo ads.
Stories Ads
Stories are another dynamic option to display your products. As the name suggests, they appear in the user’s story feed. This can be a mix of photos and videos.
They are the preferred options as they seamlessly integrate into the user’s feed and pop up between their following stories. Video ads longer than 10 seconds are divided into separate story cards.
Carousel Ads
A carousel ad is your go-to option if you have a story to narrate or several posts linked to each other. This format offers to organise up to 10 images or videos within a single ad, each with its separate captions and links.
When making one, you can choose the order of display in which you want your photos and videos to be displayed.
Collection Ads
Interested in showing a series of items within a single ad? Then all you need is a collection ad. This option helps you discover, browse and purchase products.
This ad appears on the user’s feed highlighting several products under a single head. This ad then redirects to a landing page for an instant shopping experience.
Explore Ads
These ads are found on the user’s explore feed, and as the name suggests, this is where Instagram sources the content based on the user’s specific interest.
These are the video and photo ads of the brand and products that the users need to follow.
Reels Ads
Reels are now the fast and most popular Instagram feature. These 15 to 30-second clips are found in the explore feed of users.
This is the most engaging and dynamic mode of IG advertising and a tremendously significant way for your business to reach new audiences.
IGTV Ads
IGTV are video ads played when users click to watch IG videos from their feed. These are shown in the middle of the video, potentially with an option to skip as well.
This feature is available for the Instagram Creator accounts in a few specific countries, with more countries rolling out soon.
How to Set Up an Instagram Ad Campaign
With multiple types of ads available, choosing one to use for your campaign is sometimes overwhelming. But nothing to worry about – Ads manager is all set up for experimentation, and that’s how you can test multiple formats to see which best works in your favour before launching a campaign.
Once you decide which type of ad to proceed with, it’s time to move to the next steps.
Targeting Your Audience on Instagram
Defining the audience is one of the most crucial and integral tasks. This is an honest suggestion to take and invest your time and efforts to determine your audience concerning the geographical location, age group, gender, native languages, and financial classification if required. You can update these details under create new audience tab in the ads manager.
You can also choose the saved audience. Saved audiences are helpful if you have your custom audience data, like the history of web visitors or viewers of previous campaigns that performed well.
Creating Eye-catching Instagram Ad Content
Now it’s time to create one. Soon after choosing the Facebook page and corresponding Instagram accounts, select your preferred ad format.
With all the fundamentals being done, the fun part is to design your ad to make it look eye-grabbing. There are three utmost essential things to keep in mind: the format of the ad, the text you are using, and CTAs.
From several Instagram formats, one is to be chosen for the collection. The text part requires a copy of the advertisement to accompany your visuals.
When coupled with the right and relevant text, images and videos drive more audience. CTAs are the cherry on top, helping users redirect toward the website, IG, and main Facebook page.
Monitoring and Optimising Your Ads
With adequate information on your campaign size, allocate a budget for publishing it. When starting, keep your budget minimal to find out what works best for you.
Instagram offers various placing advertisements, and you may choose to advertise on any of them as per your analytics. Any post that works to your benefit and is performing well promotes within the app and makes it visible to the ones who need to follow you.
For that, you will need a business or creator account on Instagram and a Facebook business page connected to your Instagram accounts. After this, it’s as simple as clicking the promote button on any post you wish to turn into an advertisement.
Measuring the Success of Your Instagram Ads
Measuring and tracking your ad’s performance is crucial. Now that might seem quite obvious to some, but many marketers overlook this step. After launching the campaign, they just let it run.
However, optimising your Instagram ads and campaigns saves a lot of money and effort in the long run but does it actually make sense to keep the ads running even if they are not converting? Obviously no.
Hence keeping an eye on measuring the results is a vital part of an advertisement campaign, and it is a blunder to overlook this.
Conclusion
The visual narrative of Instagram has brought many to opt for IG advertising. It is one the most innovative ways to continue a two-way relationship with your customers and helps to engage many new prospects potentially.
To build and launch a valuable Instagram ad campaign, you must first dedicate the time to learn how to make engaging content and target your audience. Also, setting your goals is essential to yielding maximum results.
Many congratulations for making it till now! It was undoubtedly a detailed guide to IG insights you must know as a beginner.
Hopefully, after this much reading, you must have better knowledge and confidence to launch your Instagram ads campaign.
Much luck!
