Instagram Ad Services
Put This Platform’s Power to Work for Your Online Business!
Expand Your Brand with Instagram Advertising Services
While Instagram might not boast the following of Facebook, it is still one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with over a billion active users. Like Facebook, Instagram boasts enormous reach and the unique selling point of being able to appeal directly to users’ visual senses. Instagram is the world’s foremost social media platform that hinges on visual media.
Instagram’s unique visual focus, coupled with its amazingly broad reach, makes it one of the most lucrative platforms for spreading brand awareness, reaching new audiences, and conducting business. Efficiently targeted and managed Instagram advertising services can pay for themselves many times over, increasing interest in your products, building customer loyalty, and generating new streams of revenue for your business.
Advantages of Instagram Advertising Campaigns
Because of its broad reach and unique positioning, Instagram is perfectly suitable for running ad campaigns that are directly targeted at users that might not be highly interested in your brand, products, or services because they simply don’t know about them yet.
If your business is currently running digital marketing campaigns to generate new interest in your products or services but is not taking advantage of social media advertising, specifically on Instagram, here’s what you could be missing out on.
Reach new audiences, generate new revenue streams.
Advertising on Instagram is nearly guaranteed to introduce you to new audiences that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to target. Each social media platform has its own loyal following and Instagram is no different; by creating a selectively targeted and continuously optimized Instagram advertising campaign, you can reach new audiences and grow your business through additional sales.
Gathering relevant information about your customers.
Instagram is not only useful as a money-making tool. When you run an Instagram ad campaign, invariably some of your audience will not convert, but that does not mean that the ad budget was allocated or spent in vain. Simply by advertising on Instagram, you can learn more about what formats of ads, what types of media, and what types of products, servicing, and positioning appeal to your audience. This valuable information about customer preferences and consumer behavior can be invaluable to your business as it continues to define your ideal buyer persona.
Expand brand reach and recognition.
While by some metrics an Instagram ad campaign that fails to conclude any new sales would be a failure, the platform can still be used to effectively expand your brand reach and recognition. With so many users, Instagram, like other social media platforms, can be vital for spreading awareness about your products and services.
Manage existing customer relationships.
Retargeting and remarketing efforts can be used to help manage your existing customer relationships, as our creative social media marketing team will construct new ads and targeting plans to convert visitors that show interest in your products or engage with your posts or ads but do not buy the first time they see them. In this way, an Instagram ad campaign can be a valuable tool for customer relationship management by capturing important information about user preferences and behavior.
How to Advertise on Instagram?
Almost any business can sign up for Instagram Ads Manager and start creating an ad campaign in very short order. Once you complete your account setup, you can name your campaign, set your campaign objectives, allocate a budget, and even start defining your target audience.
However, running an efficient Instagram ad campaign requires a great deal of expertise, specifically with social media management and eCommerce PPC management, either aspect of which could quickly become a full-time job – not to mention choosing the right types of Instagram ads to appeal to your target audience.
Types of Instagram Ads
Instagram Advertising Formats
One aspect of establishing a new Instagram ad campaign is choosing, then developing the Instagram ad formats that appeal most closely to your target audience and will enable you to extract the highest value from the campaign.
Instagram Video Ads
Instagram video ads are like photo ads in many ways, except instead of a static photo, video ads contain video snippets intended to attract the attention of viewers and then engage them. Because viewership rates are higher on Instagram than on other platforms (probably attributable to the fact that the platform was designed around sharing visual media), video ads can be highly effective.
Because of the time limits placed on IG video ads (typically around a minute), most Instagram video ads are only snippets or teasers of the full video promotion that may be stored on another platform, like YouTube or the company website.
Nonetheless, IG video ads that show products in use can generate a great deal of customer interest, and depending on the positioning and promotion of the video ads themselves, the campaign views may balloon significantly if sufficient customer interest is generated.
IGTV Ads
IGTV is basically the name given to longer videos that can be posted to Instagram. They’re effectively video ads, but they can be much longer, up to 20 minutes. Because of this, they can help advertisers, especially those for whom audiences are highly attracted to video-based content, to circumvent the short video ad requirements of Instagram. IGTV ads can be effective for businesses that rely on longer form video-based content to communicate value.
Instagram Photo Ads
Arguably the simplest and most straightforward of all Instagram ad formats, Instagram photo ads take advantage of the visual nature of the platform to deliver basic pictorial ads. Since the platform was designed for photo sharing, it so happens that these are also the most common type of Instagram ads.
Aside from the fact that photo ads require attractive, engaging visual content to be effective, they also benefit from catchy, engaging captions containing relevant information and tags.
Instagram Story Ads
IG stories are some of the most popular features on the platform, and story ads typically display as a user is navigating between stories of the accounts he or she follows. Story ads are typically very short and cannot be revisited; this may be considered a drawback, but since many users are aware of this fact, they may be more likely to swipe up (which results in a visit to the ad’s landing page).
Story ads can be used to improve brand reach and particularly to increase traffic to a business’s website, especially if the ad is so crafted in such a manner that is strongly appealing to the target audience.
Instagram Sponsored Ads
Sponsored ads are a unique ad format through which a business can promote its own IG posts as an ad itself, in which case the post will become the ad and is known as an “Instagram sponsored post.”
Because the business in question effectively pays to “boost” its posts, these types of ads should be reserved for posts that are expected to generate a great deal of customer interest. For example, some businesses reserve their budget for sponsored ads to promote special events, sales, or exclusive services. They can also be generally used to improve brand awareness.
Instagram Carousel Ads
Carousel ads are very similar to video ads or photo ads, except they feature a group of images instead of one. If your initial photographic ad captures your target user’s attention, they’ll be more likely to “stay” and swipe through the ad’s images, increasing Instagram post engagement and attention. Like the other Instagram ad formats mentioned here, they can be highly effective at driving traffic to your business’s website, especially if the ads themselves feature content that is attractive to your target audience.
Instagram Mapped and Guided Ads
Mapped and guided ads use a series of tags to help users navigate through a series of posts. They’re not widely used, but they do enable a somewhat “personalized” experience for the shopper since the ads can be used to allow customers to “create” an image of a product customized to their tastes based on the preferences and options they select. While they are time-consuming to produce, they can be effective for creating a personalized, directed advertising experience, boosting click-through rates, and catching attention.
Defining Instagram Ad Objectives
It’s also important to establish Instagram ad campaign objectives before you invest in one. If you don’t set the campaign objectives ahead of time, it will be difficult or impossible during the course of the campaign to determine if the project is meeting goals and worth the investment or not.
There are other campaign objectives you can set for an Instagram campaign which will vary according to the unique needs of your business, but the following three are among the most common, especially for eCommerce businesses.
Spreading Brand Awareness
Instagram ads can be used to effectively spread brand awareness as well as to generate interest; in this manner, they can be used to sew the seeds of customer engagement and interest. Even customers that don’t convert through the ads may go on to learn more about your brand before eventually converting. For the purposes of spreading brand awareness, an IG ad campaign can also be used to gather valuable information about your user behavior so your business can further refine its buyer persona as it grows.
Generating Higher Levels of Traffic
Instagram social media ads can also be used solely for the purpose of generating higher traffic to your website, which can be an important metric for organic growth statistics, potentially having a positive impact on your other organic growth strategies (like eCommerce SEO) as well. Again, as for the purposes of spreading brand awareness, when an IG ad campaign is run for the purpose of generating higher traffic, it can be used to gather valuable data about your target market that can then be used in customer relationship management initiatives down the line.
Generating Higher Conversions or Sales Figures
Generating higher conversion rates or sales is the main reason most eCommerce businesses run social ad campaigns in general. For most eCommerce merchants the ultimate goal of concluding a sale is the reason for investing in Instagram ad management services. When a business runs an Instagram campaign with the purpose of generating sales through the ads themselves, it is critically important to craft ads with original, attention-grabbing content, optimized in accordance with the expectations and perceptions of your target audience, with calls to action and with Instagram hashtags, where applicable.
Targeting as a Component of a Successful Instagram Marketing Campaign
Instagram’s Ad Manager, like Facebook’s, lets you set three different types of audiences, which are known as saved audiences, lookalike audiences, and custom audiences. Typically speaking, saved audiences are targeted fairly broadly according to some of the features enumerated below; custom audiences are audiences that are compiled according to target criteria that you set, or they can be compiled from email lists, from other databases, or according to their behavior on certain platforms. Finally, there are lookalike audiences, which can be generated based on their similarity either to one of your saved or custom audiences.
Whichever audience you are trying to create, Instagram allows you to target your intended audience according to some of the following factors.
Demographic Factors
Instagram Ads Manager enables you to target audiences based on a variety of demographic factors including but not limited to age, sex, language, and other unique demographic identifiers. Because these demographic factors guide user behavior, they are some of the key determining features in defining your buyer persona, especially at the outset of a campaign. They can, however, be adjusted during the course of an ad campaign.
Geographic Factors
Social media platforms like Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads can also be targeted according to location. Fortunately, you can define these criteria very easily within the Instagram Ads Manager and make adjustments throughout the course of the campaign. You can target IG ads according to country, state, region, county, city, or postal code. You can even set a specific address radius or DMA (designated market area).
Factors Associated with User Behavior
User behavior is most likely the most valuable factor that influences the optimization and success of an Instagram advertising campaign. Through the Ad Manager, you can target audiences based on interests, but targeting the actual actions that users take during the course of a campaign will prove invaluable to eventual profitability.
Measuring the Success of an Instagram Campaign: Continuous Optimization
Much of the success of a social media strategy like an Instagram ad campaign does not come from the initial steps you take while setting up the campaign, but how closely your Instagram ad services provider monitors the campaign and makes adjustments accordingly. These ongoing monitoring and continuous optimization practices will help you improve the effectiveness of your ads, increasing your profitability and potentially scaling back the costs of your campaign.
Here’s what we look for…
Reach and Impressions
Reach refers to the actual number of users that have seen your ad and impressions refer to the number of times your ad has actually been viewed or seen during a given period of time. Both of these figures are extremely important for an Instagram ads campaign because without reaching an audience, there’s no chance they can convert. One of the first objectives is to ensure that the ads we develop will not simply reach a significant number of eyes, but that those users are members of your target market. Otherwise, your ads might suffer from low engagement, from clicks that don’t convert or simply be ignored.
Click-through Rate and Cost-Per-Click
Click-through rates refer to the number of users that actually click through your Instagram ads to your website. A high click-through rate can be a good thing if it results in a conversion (or otherwise meets your objectives). However, ads that generate a lot of clicks that don’t meet campaign objectives indicate some misalignment of ad content, strategy, or poor optimization of the destination or landing page. These are some key considerations our Instagram experts follow when monitoring the success of an Instagram ad campaign. Cost-per-click is an indicator of how much, on average, you end up paying for each click you earn on your ads. High cost-per-click is acceptable as long as your conversion rates offset it, but the goal is to drive down the average cost-per-click while maintaining high conversion rates.
Instagram Engagement Rate
Instagram engagement rate is a critically important measurement of how users interact with your ads, given by views, comments, and other behavior. Instagram ad engagement is a huge indicator of the success of a campaign because it will lend you invaluable soft insights into how effectively your targeting is performing and whether users who actually see your ads like them or not. Even if ads do not convert, high engagement may indicate commensurate interest. These users may be candidates for remarketing or retargeting, but their behavior can also help you craft your ads to be more attractive to others like them; tracking targeting factors associated with users that engage with your ads may constitute a significant portion of the ongoing optimizations associated with your campaign.
Conversions
Conversions are, ultimately, the metric you want to follow. As any social media expert can tell you, if your main eCommerce goal is to make money through an Instagram ad campaign then conversions are the metric you need to watch. Conversions can equate to basically whatever goal you set to gauge the success of your Instagram ad campaign. Conversions could be sales, building your follower base, or even getting users to sign up for a newsletter, but they are ultimately the key metric to watch as they will tell you whether or not your ad campaign is succeeding. Conversions alone will give you an indication of whether or not your campaign is a success, but on its own conversion rate will not tell you where you need to make improvements. That’s why you need to closely follow the metrics enumerated above.
Continuous Improvement:
Drive Profitability Up and Costs Down
The purpose of tracking the metrics mentioned in the previous section is to increase the performance of your Instagram paid promotions and advertising campaigns over time. By closely monitoring the above metrics and attending to targeting cues, our Instagram ad management experts will perform a series of continuous optimizations, slightly altering ad content, messaging, formatting, targeting, and other factors in order to more closely meet the expectations of your target audience.
Together, these ongoing optimizations will ultimately result in ads that are more favorably received by your target audience, resulting in higher rates of engagement, greater brand awareness, and increasing conversion rates. The ultimate goal is not simply to make money for your business but to drive down the cost of the ad campaign over time, increasing your return on investment.
Choosing an Instagram Advertising Agency Partner
1Digital® Agency is a full-service social media agency that can unite the efforts of your Instagram advertising efforts with the efforts you pursue on your other social media platforms. In addition to Instagram ad services, we also offer Facebook advertising services and social media management services for other platforms.
Taking a holistic approach to social media marketing will not only help you balance Instagram ads costs but also improve your efforts across the board, as the data you gather from one campaign can be used cross-functionally. You can also utilize your other social media campaigns to further refine your definition of your ideal buyer persona.
Unite Your Instagram Ad Management with Other Digital Marketing Strategies
In addition to being a full-service social media advertising agency, 1Digital® Agency has years of experience executing other digital marketing initiatives. Since 2012, our digital marketing savants have been developing industry-leading eCommerce SEO campaigns and have been uniting these with eCommerce PPC management best practices to generate exceptional results across the board for clients in a wide range of industries.
Together, these ongoing optimizations will ultimately result in ads that are more favorably received by your target audience, resulting in higher rates of engagement, greater brand awareness, and increasing conversion rates. The ultimate goal is not simply to make money for your business but to drive down the cost of the ad campaign over time, increasing your return on investment.
In addition to eCommerce SEO and PPC strategies, our digital marketing team also specializes in email marketing and content marketing. The best thing about working with a social media management partner that offers a wide range of other digital marketing strategies is that all of your efforts can work together toward your common goal of building your business and growing sales.
A unified digital marketing strategy is just one call away. Get in touch with our Instagram advertising experts at 888-982-2852 or at info@1digitalagency.com today to start building a better strategy for long-term positioning and growth.
Take Your Business to New Heights with Instagram Ad Services
With more than 10% of the current world population as users, Instagram is one of the most robust social media platforms in the world. That makes it an effective tool for reaching new customers, building brand awareness, and generating sales, but its size and scope demand expertise. Contact our Instagram Advertising Services experts today to start putting this highly effective marketing tool to use for your eCommerce business.
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