Would you like to launch online advertising campaigns on Instagram but you don’t know how to get the most out of it?
In this article I will show you how to run profitable campaigns on Instagram Ads by reviewing their formats, giving you some practical advice to avoid the beginner mistakes that we have all made and giving you a practical example where I will give you the keys to “put your brand in orbit” in Instagram today.
But before we get into the practice, let’s take a look at the journey Instagram has traveled to become the jewel in the crown of the Facebook empire.
How advertising works on Instagram
Instagram began as a social network exclusively for photography in 2010, but since it was acquired by Facebook in 2012 it began to expand the variety of content and publication formats.
Until today, when it has become a generalist social network where all kinds of content have a place. Of course, maintaining that visual appeal that has always characterized it.
All this has made it possible to achieve an exponential growth rate in recent years until it is currently one of the most used social networks on the planet, with about 1,000 million users and only surpassed by YouTube and its older sister Facebook.
As it expanded, the inclusion of advertising on Instagram was prepared, which was opened to all companies in 2015 by integrating its management into the Facebook Ads advertising platform.
And, since then, it has become one of the platforms with the best advertising interaction and profitability rates in the market.
According to a study conducted by Instagram in 2016, “75% of Instagram users take actions (such as visiting a website, doing searches or purchases, or recommending the company to a friend) after seeing a post that inspires them.”
But don’t be fooled: not all companies that invest in Instagram Ads manage to make their investment profitable, far from it. Only those who draw up a strategy and know-how to design their campaigns correctly get results.
Don’t despair, you don’t need to be an expert to create simple and profitable campaigns on Instagram. And also, today you are in luck because in the following points I will show you everything you need to know to achieve it.
But before entering the matter, just in case you are still not convinced, we are going to see all the benefits that you will get by investing in this social network. Don’t miss them!
5 benefits of investing in advertising on Instagram
You must bear in mind that Instagram is a business that bases its income on the advertising investment of companies. Therefore, to take advantage of its full potential you have to go through the box.
Some of the benefits that Instagram Ads offers are:
- Reach your potential customers in the same environment where they interact with their friends and references.
- Get an impact on your audience by taking advantage of all the visual possibilities it offers you.
- Reach users who are interested in your products/services.
- Improve your image and transmit the values of your brand.
- Increase your followers and create a community around your brand.
7 tips for creating Instagram ads that stand out
Before analyzing the different advertising formats available on Instagram and starting with the guide to creating your campaigns on the social network, I will give you 7 tips to make your ads stand out.
- Simulate the amateur format: don’t forget that Instagram is a social network where users seek to interact with their friends and acquaintances. Therefore, if you simulate an amateur format in your creativity, you will attract the user’s attention by identifying your ad with a publication of their friends.
- Create spatial inconsistencies: Create compositions that confuse the senses so that they stop at your ad. The sensation of weightlessness, inverted reflections, and impossible perspectives are usually the most common.
- Includes smiling faces: humans are attracted to other faces, and if they are smiling, even more so. And if they also appear enjoying your product or service, you will be sending an implicit message to users that will make them want it.
- Use in humor: humor and wonder are two of the ingredients that work best on social media. If you can use it in your creatives, you will trigger your interaction and the reach of your message.
- Tell stories: people are attracted to stories, you just have to see the “boom” of the series. And if you manage to transmit emotions related to the consumption of your product/service with them, it will become an indelible mark in the brains of your customers.
- Maintain consistency: everything said above should not be at odds with maintaining consistency between your creativity and your product/service. Do not forget that the objective in itself is not to create the content that generates the most interaction, but to reach our target audience and that this helps us increase our sales.
- Raise the quality: Another way to stand out is through quality. If you offer higher quality content, you will attract the attention of users and increase the effectiveness of the campaigns. A clear example of this is the creatives used by international brands such as Nike, Coca Cola, etc. But you don’t have to spend thousands of euros to achieve it, if you manage to offer the best quality among your competitors, you will achieve the same result.
What kinds and formats of Instagram ads can you use?
Once we have reviewed the characteristics of advertising on Instagram and its benefits, and you have the keys to create ads that stand out, we are going to analyze all the ad formats that you can use on the platform.
In this way, you can unleash all your creativity knowing the rules of the game. In addition, I will give you some tips on how to optimize each format so that you can get ideas to apply in your campaigns.
The image format is the most used and simple (a priori) to implement. However, to create an image ad that grabs the attention of your target audience in an environment where the level of photographic quality is very high, it is not easy at all.
Try to include a quality image that, in addition to transmitting a message that reinforces the objective of your campaign, stands out for its quality and creativity.
All the investment you make at this point will pay off. And you will get a lower advertising cost and a higher conversion.
The most used format is square, but you can also use the vertical format.
Video is the star format on social networks, establishing itself by far as one of the formats with the greatest interaction and that best connects with users.
This is due to two factors. First of all, moving images attract more attention than a static image, and, on the other hand, you can transmit much more information through a video and users will appreciate more details that will indicate that they are before their best purchase option.
However, the video also has a great disadvantage: its difficulty and high production cost.
Making quality videos has a high cost that many businesses cannot afford. But surely you have a latest generation mobile right?
Well, take advantage of that “gazillion” megapixel camera and start creating simple videos for your campaigns. In the following sections, I will teach you how to spy on your competitors’ ads to inspire you and get ideas when creating yours.
3. Carousel or sequence
Through sequences or carousels, you will be able to show several images or videos in your ads. And you can take advantage of this functionality to:
- Highlight different angles of a product
- Show multiple products
- List characteristics of a service
- Create a composition in a mosaic format
- Tell a story in various stages
- And along with etcetera
As in all cases, creativity to power. But something that works very well to get users to see all the images on the carousel is to include visual marks that indicate that there are more images to see. Or, in the case of including video, invite the user to swipe to see the next video.
Stories are one of the strengths of Instagram, reaching the point that more than 500 million people use them every day.
Stories have many advantages, among them, that they are a inverse experience, in which for 30 seconds you will have the user’s full attention and you can convince them to carry out the target action.
In addition, it limits you to only using a single image or video. Rather, you can use multiple images or videos to expand the creative possibilities and the message you convey.
Through the collections, you can show users a collection of products in a highly visual format and completely adapted for mobile phones.
In addition, if you install the Facebook pixel on your website and synchronize the catalog of your online store with that of Facebook, you will be able to show in a personalized way the products that interest your potential customers the most.
How to discover your competition’s advertising strategy on Instagram?
Now that you know in a summarized way the possibilities that the platform offers you, you have to know what is working in your sector and where the level of your competitors is.
This step is essential and will save you a lot of headaches to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I’m not telling you to copy your competition, far from it. But before going out to play the game you have to know your opponents. That is: your competitors.
But you can go much further if, in addition, you look at the big players in your sector, those who have the most capital and carry out the most creative campaigns. You will surely get a lot of ideas to apply to your Instagram Ads campaigns.
With that said, let’s see how you can research your competitors’ ads. You will only have to follow these steps:
- Enter the Instagram profile that interests you
- Display the side navigation menu
- Click on “information about this account”
- Enter the “active ads” tab
- You will be able to investigate all the creatives of your competitors
How to create advertising campaigns on Instagram [Guide]
If you have come this far, you already know the characteristics of advertising on Instagram, the available formats, and some tricks to get creatives that connect with your audience, and you will have been inspired by researching your competition.
Now we are going to take action and we are going to create your first advertising campaign on Instagram, step by step.
1. Link your Facebook page with your Instagram profile
First, you will have to link your Instagram account with your Facebook page. Since it will be from the Facebook Ads business manager from where we will manage the campaigns on Instagram.
I leave you this link to an article where you will learn how to create a Facebook page for your company and how to configure it correctly.
2. Enter the Facebook Ads business manager
The next step will be to go to the Facebook Ads business manager and create an advertising account.
This advertising account will be linked to your Facebook page and Instagram. You should know that you can create and manage an infinite number of personal or client advertising accounts.
The most common is to have an advertising account for each brand or business.
In case you don’t know, the Facebook pixel is a code that, when inserted on your website, stores the behavior of your visitors in the Facebook Ads business manager.
And through this data, you can create remarketing campaigns on Facebook too, for example, impact users who have visited your website and left without completing their purchase.
Well, even if it seems very advanced at this time and you do not want to complicate your life anymore, I advise you to install it because, in this way, if in a few months you want to carry out more advanced campaigns (and I bet what you want that it will be), you will have a large database to work with.
The process is very simple, and if you have installed the Google Analytics code on your website, you will have no problem getting it.
3. Create a campaign and select your objective
Now that you have your advertising account operational, it is time to create your first campaign.
And it is at this time that many are assailed by the same question: what campaign objective should I select?
We are going to briefly review what objectives exist and when you should use each of them.
First of all, you have to understand that the campaign objective is divided into three groups that represent the purchase decision process of your target audience. That is, in what phase of the sales funnel they are measured by the distance that separates them to become customers.
Let’s look at them briefly:
- Recognition target group: target group focused on impacting users who don’t know you (cold traffic) and getting them to discover your brand and the product/service you offer. In this category, we will not ask users to take any action and we only want to convey authority and trust to them. In this group are the objectives of:
- Brand recognition
- Consideration group of objectives: once you have achieved the recognition of users, you must move on to get them to identify you (or consider) as a solution to their problem. Now that they trust us and take us into account, we can ask them for something, such as visiting our website, downloading a PDF, filling out a form, etc. Within this group are the objectives of:
- Application download
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Conversion objective group: finally, there are the objective groups with which we will get users to finalize their purchase when they have shown that they are interested in our product/service. This is where the remarketing campaigns that you can carry out if you install the Facebook pixel will enter. In this category are:
- Catalog Sales
- Business traffic
4. Create a set of ads and segment your audience
Once you have established the objective of your campaign, you have to create an ad group, in which you will segment the audience you are going to target and the locations where the ads will appear on Instagram (stories or feed).
You must understand that each campaign can have multiple ad groups with which you will target different audiences.
For example, a business school will create a campaign to reach users who have been interested in one of its courses and will create several ad groups to target different profiles of potential clients (managers, students, workers, etc.), and each of them will buy for different reasons, so the messages will have to be personalized.
And, in turn, within each ad group, we will create several versions of ads with different copies and creatives to optimize messages and increase profitability.
5. Create your ads on Instagram
Finally, as we have advanced in the previous point, we will have to create the ads for Instagram. Adapting both the creatives and the text to the placements you have selected in each ad group, as well as the audiences you have targeted.
Inspiring examples to improve your advertising on Instagram
With this, we have already reached the end of the theoretical part of the article. You already know everything you need to know to start running your Instagram Ads campaigns.
And finally, I will show you inspiring examples to improve your advertising on Instagram. I hope they are useful to you and that you get successful campaigns, improving the profitability of your business.