TeamInstagram advertising is a method of paying to post sponsored content to reach out and engage a larger audience. While there are several reasons for placing adverts on this platform, it is mainly used to grow brands, traffic and generate new leads. Instagram gives you the granular control to target a specific location, gender, age, behavior, and interests like other social media advertising platforms. Instagram uses Facebook demographics to display ads to the right people which makes the platform an advertising powerhouse since Facebook has a detailed history and specific target options. Go through this guide to get a glimpse of how to start advertising on Instagram.
Set Marketing Goals
Before taking any step, you have to set the objectives for the advertisement. Instagram only works with the following goals.
- Brand awareness
- Lead generation
- App installs
- Reach
- Video views
- Traffic
- Conversion and engagement rates
Brand awareness is the most common goal to put out your ad to more potential clients. If reach is your objective, it will involve maximizing the number of people who see your advert. If you intend to run your advertisement through the Instagram story, then reach is the only objective select. The exciting thing about the reach goal is that you can use the Facebook split testing feature, which allows you to separate two ads to compare which one gets more positive feedback.
You can opt for the traffic objective if you want to send more people to your page, website, or application installation. You have to add the link you wish for the targeted audience to follow, and the traffic will flow. If you are looking for more likes, comments, and shares, your goal should be engagement.
Creating a video can be costly; therefore, not marketing it through video views is like buying your ticket to the Bahamas and leaving it on the table. If you want to push your video, then video views should be your objective. Whichever objective you choose, ensure it is suitable for your advertisement.
Identify your Target Audience.
So you have finally settled on your Instagram advertisement objective, now you need to place your ad before an appropriate audience. Choose the audience that can relate to your content according to their age, religion, beliefs, language, and location. Once you feel like your intended audience is tapped to potential, you can find a lookalike audience whereby Instagram will suggest other people who have the same interests as your followers.
Once you have configured your audience, Instagram will supply you with a guide indicating how big your audience is. Pay close attention to this tool, if your audience is too huge, then probably it’s not targeted enough, and if it’s too specific, then the advert may not reach many people. Therefore such Instagram analytic tools help you strike a balance when choosing your audience.
Choose your Placements
After you have identified your ideal demographic; now it’s time to make your placements. If your goal is to show the ad on Instagram, you should select Instagram. If you do not choose a specific platform, the ad will appear on Facebook and Instagram. This isn’t necessarily bad, only that if you have made certain content for Instagram, it should be aired there.
Set your Advert Schedule and Budget
If you have already mastered how budgets work on Adwords and Facebook, this step should be pretty easy for you; if you are not familiar with it, take a deep breath, and let’s dive into it. So, you may not know the exact placement for your budget or advert schedule if you are a first-timer, and thus, all your decisions may be based on trial and error or hearsay. However, with time you will learn from experience.
The excellent part about airing your ad on Instagram is that you can pause it at any time you feel like your budget is not allocated correctly. So the big question for most marketers is whether to go for daily or lifetime budgets. I’d personally recommend a daily budget, especially for beginners, since your budget won’t be spent too quickly. However, the lifetime budget also has its upside, which is it allows scheduling your advert delivery.
When setting your schedule, ensure you target your ad to run on specific days of the week or times of the day. The time you choose has a significant impact on the engagement or conversion rates of the advert. Therefore to utilize your budget adequately, come up with a good schedule.
Wrapping Up
After ticking all these steps, you can finally proceed to create your advert. Depending on your campaign objective and the advert format chosen, come up with a creative and exciting ad copy, then track it and see if the advert yields any returns.
