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If you’re looking for ways to revamp your Instagram strategy, look no further than incorporating Instagram advertising into your plan of action.
While this tactic requires some capital to put behind it, there are plenty of reasons for brands to try it out. There are over 1 billion people accessing Instagram each month, with the average user scrolling through the platform for 53 minutes each day, and you want your brand to be where they can see it.
Whether you’re new to Instagram marketing for your business in general, or you’re just starting to adopt Instagram ads, we’ve got your back with this guide.
Read on for our walkthrough of Instagram advertising, why it’s a great strategy for your business and how to create your first ads.
Instagram started offering ad spots to select businesses after it was acquired by Facebook in 2013. After they opened Instagram advertising to all businesses in 2015, it grew exponentially, and by 2017 reached 1 million advertisers.
Instagram advertising is managed right inside of Facebook’s Ads Manager, giving advertisers access to a plethora of targeting options, as well as making it possible to create ads for both platforms at the same time.
For Instagram-only ads, you can create ads that appear in your audience’s feed as well as Story ads that play in between user Stories as users tap from Story to Story.
While organic social media strategies might seem cost effective at first, they’re time consuming, rely on a lot of trial and error, and can only get you so far when you’re up against ever-changing social media algorithms.
This is why it’s so important to focus on a social media strategy that incorporates both organic and paid tactics. This way you get the best of both worlds. You’re actively engaging with your audience and posting content to your Instagram feed, but you’re reaching out to an even larger audience who might not know about your brand yet with paid ads.
As a visual platform, Instagram ads give you a great way to show off your product, and with Instagram shopping, you can even make it easier than ever for people to convert to customers right off the bat.
Instagram advertising costs depend on several different factors like the mobile device you’re targeting, demographics, day of the week and whether or not your ad is running during a major televised event.
It all comes down to your target audience, which is why it’s so important to learn your Instagram demographics. Here’s a breakdown of basic user demographics on the platform.
Another factor that affects ad cost is the ad’s placement. While Facebook’s right column ads tend to be the most expensive, both Instagram feed and Story ads are some of the cheapest placement options, ranging from about $0.80 to $1.30 CPC.
So how do you go about fitting this into your current marketing budget? It’s important to focus on your key goals and objectives for the year and only dedicate money to ads and campaigns that help your bottom line.
Put money behind posts and content that you already know perform well organically. Test everything to see what performs best, and dedicate most of your ad spend to that. Make sure to measure your ad success and take note of anything that didn’t do as well as you’d hoped.
As we’ve mentioned, you create your Instagram ads right inside the Facebook ads manager. This makes it easy since you get to manage your Facebook and Instagram ads all in the same place.
To get started creating your first Instagram ad, log into your Facebook account, head over to your ads manager and start a new campaign.
Once you create a new campaign, your first step in creating Instagram ads is going to be choosing the objective behind your ad.
There are many different choices, broken down into three categories – Awareness, Consideration and Conversion. The ad types available to choose from are:
Be smart about picking your objective. If you choose an objective that doesn’t make sense, like creating a traffic ad for a video or a messages ad for an Instagram placement, your ad will likely be denied.
Plus, you don’t want to waste your ad budget by choosing an objective that doesn’t make sense for the content you’re putting within the ad.
After selecting your ad objective, the screen will extend to allow you to name your campaign. This is the best way to keep track of your ads within the Instagram ads manager, so I highly recommend you name each campaign with intention.
What are you promoting? Is it a monthly ad? Add which month you’re creating. Include the name of the promotion. Find a naming method that works for you and helps you to easily find your ads and track their performance.
While we’re here, you can also choose to get started on a split test ad and try out different variations, as well as decide to optimize your budget across ad sets or not.
A split test, or A/B test, allows you to test different ad variations or ad sets against each other, allotting the biggest budget to the ad that performs best.
Campaign budget optimization will automatically distribute your ad budget across your ad sets. You can choose to do this, or manually set how much each ad set should spend based on your own past testing and results.
Although selecting your audience comes first on the page, it can actually be a good idea to scroll past it at first and choose your Instagram-only placements. Different ad features are available for different placements, so getting this out of the way is a good idea.
All you have to do is uncheck Facebook and Audience Network from the platforms to ensure your ad will only be running on Instagram.
Ah, now the good part. Targeting your audience is where you get to dive into the nitty gritty of Instagram advertising.
You don’t want to waste money by trying to target anyone and everyone. This is your opportunity to really nail down the demographics, interests and behavior of your brand’s target audience.
You’re able to target the following audience categories in the ads manager:
You’re also able to create custom audiences based on pixels that you’ve placed on your website. These will be users that have visited your website, or perhaps a lookalike audience of people who have similar behaviors and interests.
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.
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.
Once you’ve completed the last three steps, click continue to head over to your ad creation dashboard. This is where you’ll upload your content, write your ad copy and publish your ad.
This is also a good time to give our Instagram ad sizing guide a second look as well to ensure you’re uploading the correct sized ad assets.
Different formats are available based on the ad objective you chose at the beginning of this guide, but the basic Instagram ad formats are:
Ready to get started creating Instagram ads all on your own? We can’t wait to see what you put together.
If you’re looking for more tips to manage your entire Instagram strategy from paid to organic, check out our comprehensive guide to Instagram marketing strategy.
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