Tips to creating the perfect Instagram Advertising campaign
Instagram is a free photo and video-sharing social networking service. It is one of the best tools to acquire more exposure and website traffic as followers do not need to pay for their accounts. Instagram Advertising, on the other hand, is a paid tool to reach a more targeted and larger audience.
Instagram advertising and instagram ads can feel really overwhelming! There are so many aspects to making sure an instagram campaign works well and delivers on your target and budget!
So we have loosely put together an “Instagram advertising How to”, supported by professionals from around the world that have actively used Instagram Ads and promotions tools
What should I use Instagram Ads for? Engagement? Clicks?
Before you even get started on an instagram advertising campaign – make sure you have spent some time focusing on your bio and information associated with your Instagram account. You also want to make sure you are on a business account profile.
You can grab our comprehensive Instagram Audit and content template here.
The reason I suggest focusing on your profile first is because it’s how most
people will interact with you for the second time. It helps form their
impression of you beyond whatever content you’ve created for your ads. You want to make sure you’re communicating your brand messaging in a way that fits with your image.
Instagram Ads is a great opportunity for getting leads or attracting
Erico Franco, Inbound Marketing Manager, Agencia de Marketing Digital
engagement to your brand. While running ads on Instagram always keep in mind before announcing what is your goal: brand awareness, increase sales of a product, etc. Then think a topic for the ad and create a responsive and fast landing page that works for that topic. Be very careful in the choice of the image because it is the main element of the ad, you can test different images to test performance of each one. Also do a research for hashtags that you should use, use hashtags that has a good traffic. Another important point is to take advantage of key moments to send the ad on Instagram, which can be, for example, a holiday.
Being clear about an Instagram Ad strategy and what you are hoping to achieve from the outset is critical in making successful campaigns.
While crafting your ad, one has made sure that a strong plan can help you achieve with this ad and that will be achieved once you know that what is your reason behind this ad? What is your goal for this specific ad? How will you track the progress of this ad? Such a question helps you to have a clear objective of the ad.
Shagun Chauhan, Marketing Manager, iFour Technolab Pvt Ltd
Instagram ads need to solve an issue to stand out
You have to stand out. Even though “pay to play” is prioritized, most people are used to being advertised to. In 2020, your ads need to stop feeling like ads and solve real pain in your ideal clients’ life.
Ashley Monk, Owner, By It Media
The most important factor that we take into account when building our creatives are Does this visual grab a person’s attention in under 1 second?
Users are used to scrolling through their feed fast and they are used to
seeing the same things over and over. Our job as a marketer is to have a
smooth interrupt so that we can get some attention.Most advertisements will get clicks to the website, but the name of the
Michael Chammas, Founder, Makro Agency
game is to get the most relevant clicks and the most cost-effective price.
One of the main ways to achieve this is to have a very eye-catching
creative that resonate with your target market.
TOP TIP: Don’t just add a picture of your product, add text over your image. Make sure you don’t add over 20% of the text to stay within Facebook/Instagram’s guidelines.
Text is a great way to communicate a powerful message across on top of a very eye-catching image of your product. Having some colors on the image will also be a plus to grab people’s attention.
Creating visual content for instagram ads is important
The Instagram platform is elegant to have a clean, professional, and aesthetic look and feel. Simply focusing on the quality and authenticity and a suitable photo that doesn’t look like an ad and matches the platform.
Shagun Chauhan, Marketing Manager, iFour Technolab Pvt Ltd
Instagram is a very emotional platform where people feel things and connect with imagery. When planning an Instagram ad campaign, try to approach it with an emotional selling approach, not your typical logical selling approach.
After you’ve gotten an initial reaction, remarket your ad to those people
Bernie Wong, Founder and Owner of Social Stand Limited
who have not yet paid an Instagram video ad with a different approach in the hopes of having them purchase.
Is it better to use images or videos for Instagram Ad campaigns?
Videos, videos, videos. Videos work best on advertising on Instagram. You can also try using a video gallery ad option that works very well as well. Best way to manage it is to have a campaign for conversions, with 2 ad sets for cold and warm traffic. Have another campaign for Clicks for cold traffic. Test ads and if they do not show good results within $100 ad spend, stop it and try a new audience/ad/funnel offer.
Spend as much as you can if you are making positive ROI. Standard ROI for Facebook is 100%, but I have seen campaigns return as much as 500%.
Will Cartwright, Owner of GetKnownPros
A good practice is to make sure that your video content is as short as possible. We usually recommend 6 seconds in duration because we have always found that the shorter we go in length, the better our client’s results have been. It’s also a good challenge to give yourself, can you communicate your brand’s message in such a short amount of time? If you can’t, then it is a good indication that your message is too complicated for your customers, you either need to simplify it or head back to the drawing board.
Sean Carroll, PPC Consultant based in Brighton, working in digital marketing for over 5 years, Vixen Digital
How much should I spend on Instagram Advertising?
Instagram advertising costs can vary, and trying to estimate this would be like guessing the length of string you have never seen. So how much should instagram ads cost?
On average, costs of Instagram ads CPC (cost-per-click) is around $0.50 to $1.00 and could reach up to $3.00 per click. According to Forrester, Instagram Ads have the highest engagement rate out of all digital ad placements. This means that sometimes, you could pay a little more for a click or 1,000 impressions and still come out as a winner.
According to HubSpot the cost for Instagram ads hovers between $0.70 to $1.00 per-click on average. That being said, costs tend to vary between industries, physical locations, days of the week, time of year, ad placements, targeted ages, targeted sexes, and other categories.
It can take a while to find your sweet spot with how much you should be spending on instagram ads, but the number one mistake we see if people trying to spread their money too thin. If you only have $200 to spend for the entire month, spend it over the course of a few days ($200 over 4 days = $50/day), not weeks ($200 over 4 weeks = $7.14/day). You’ll see a larger impact and can more directly attribute success to that ad spend vs if you were to stretch it out over the entire month.
Remember its important to have an Instagram Ad strategy to establish the size of your Instagram advertising campaigns
Lets have a look at what some of the professionals have said;
There’s no good amount to spend because the truth is, it depends. That may sound like a cop-out, but to run any successful advertising, you need to determine clear and measurable reach, lead, or revenue goals that will correlate with spend. Without them, you’re essentially gambling with your bid. If you need a general answer, I would say it’s not worth your time or money if you won’t spend at least $20 a day. You can get by with $10 if you’re an expert with a great audience, but if you know what you’re doing, you can get $2 back for every $1 you spend on Facebook. With those stats, wouldn’t you want to keep spending money?
Ashley Monk, Owner, By It Media
When it comes to spend and an ROI, these aren’t really easy to set numbers to. A good rule of thumb with any type of advertising is budget what makes sense of your business, and for the goals of your campaign.
If you are running ads to an email opt in, then you may have a goal of getting a certain amount per email, whereas with a purchase conversion ad, you would need to know the life of your customer and the cost to acquire them to determine what a good ROI should be. For anyone starting out with ads, understand that there are ads which are designed for brand awareness and do not have a trackable ROI to them (such as video view ads to build a warm audience). Testing ads with different audiences, images and copy will allow you to see what works or doesn’t work in your campaigns. Have an open mind, a healthy budget and some well spend time learning how your ads work.
Kelly Sturtevant, an award winning Facebook Ads Strategist who
specializes in digital marketing strategies to help entrepreneurs and
business owners grow their online presence, generate leads and attract
their ideal customer to their products or services, Blue Page Social
This is a tricky question because both your budget and ROI are determined by what your Instagram campaign goal is. For example, the ROI would be different between a brand awareness campaign and a sales campaign because they each have different goals and KPIs. Individually, these campaigns would have different ROI, but they would both be contributing to your overall ROI or return on ad spend (ROAS).
Our usual minimum, monthly recommendation for budget is at least £500 ($600) per campaign. Then, we’d be aiming to achieve a starting ROI of 100% depending on the overall goals and KPIs of the campaign.
Sean Carroll, PPC Consultant based in Brighton, working in digital marketing for over 5 years, Vixen Digital
What is the best way to run instagram ads?
Running Instagram ads couldn’t be simpler. It helps that these ads are
connected with Facebook and have an analytics portal too. You can run ads
from as little as $1. Obviously your target audience, reach and length of
time will have an impact on the price.
Avoid using the in-app promotion tools. The limited functionality and targeting options means that you’re less likely to be reaching your ideal customer. Try to use the Facebook Ads Manager to run your Instagram campaigns instead. You can link up your Instagram account and create your campaigns within the ads manager. This gives you a lot more targeting options and control, you can even test using some of Facebook’s campaign advertising objectives
Sean Carroll, PPC Consultant based in Brighton, working in digital marketing for over 5 years, Vixen Digital
When creating Instagram ads within Ads Manager, it’s important to build
dedicated ad sets with specific Instagram placements. This will ensure your budget isn’t diluted across other non-profitable placements.It’s important to also optimize ad creatives to fit a square format,
maximizing the amount of screen real estate your ad will have within the
feed.Finally, brands should remember that Instagram ads only display the
headline field of an ads copy. You’ll need to be succinct when writing this
text, making it concise and engaging.Once you’ve run some initial campaigns, it’s possible to determine the
Lachlan Kirkwood, Digital Marketing Specialist, Click Through Marketing
average cost-per-acquisition for each ad. Using this data, you can make
well-informed decisions about future campaigns and budgets.
If you’re target audience is on Instagram, you do want to spend
a little bit more time constructing ads specifically for the platform.
This includes having ads that are specific to Instagram stories, both in
dimensions, and length of video (under 15 seconds). Story ads should be
visual, quick and eye catching. These need to get the attention of your
audience while they are scrolling their stories feed. Using personal
video or images created like an actual story are the best way to uses
these types of ads.When running newsfeed ads, videos can be up to 60 seconds in length and should be the standard square image. Because Instagram does not allow for clickable links in posts, you would want to ensure your ad copy
Kelly Sturtevant, an award winning Facebook Ads Strategist who
doesn’t have links listed as it can make it less professional. Instagram
gives you a clickable bar under the ad where your links would go.
specializes in digital marketing strategies to help entrepreneurs and
business owners grow their online presence, generate leads and attract
their ideal customer to their products or services, Blue Page Social
Targeting your perfect audience on Instagram
If you are not already tracking your statistics on Instagram, you will struggle to know your target market, when they are online and when the online presence is most prevalent as well as being most relevant.
Once your goal is finalized, think about the audience’s interest, users
Shagun Chauhan, Marketing Manager, iFour Technolab Pvt Ltd
interacting with individual ads, which ads trigger a purchase action. If
one knows their audience then it will be easier to create content that will
interest their audience.
Determining detailed targeting can sometimes be useful for specific initiatives (say getting in front of someone who shops at a specific big box store, or who lives in a certain area) but often using targeting that is super detailed can result in= missing potential customers or not fully spending your ad dollars during your desired timeline.
How to avoid Instagram Advertising “Fatigue”
When people see the same piece of content too much, they get ad fatigue or, in other words, they get sick of seeing the same thing. That’s why it’s
important to preserve moderation in increasing impressions and find your effective frequency or the sweet spot in the number of times your ad has to be seen by an individual user before they take action.Here’s how you can do it: let’s assume one of your ads has 100 reach and
Kasia Majewska, Marketing Executive at NapoleonCat
250 impressions. Your ad frequency, or the number of times each user has seen your content on average, would be 2.5. Count ad frequency for all your ads and observe user behavior. If your Instagram ad frequency increases and your conversion rate goes down, you know that people have seen your content too much and are getting annoyed.
My biggest tip is to make sure your Instagram campaign is cohesive and fits in with the rest of your marketing materials. In a very competitive and oversaturated market, you need to be willing to have your customers hear about you from other sources, not JUST social media. And then, when they have already heard about you, your Instagram ad is what gets them to pull the trigger and click shop.
Molly Borman Heymon is an entrepreneur and social media marketing futurist, as well as the author of The Instagram Iceberg
6 Actionable Tips to the perfect Instagram Ad:
- Make sure your bio is top notch!
- Design the a well planned Instagram Ad strategy
- Keep your captions precise. People are easily discouraged by long captions.
- Be clear about your target audience
- Make use of Instagram Stories. Create a summary or capture a highlight of what you are offering in one photo or video to tickle your follower’s curiosity.
- Be open to testing a couple of Ads and being open to spending some money to find your perfect “ROI”
