Whether you are a small business trying to reach your local target audience or an up-and-coming brand that wants to find the best way to talk to its customers, you cannot possibly ignore Instagram as a platform.
Instagram has a user base of 1 billion monthly, with each person spending almost 53 minutes each day on the platform. This is the gold mine of an audience that your brand is trying to reach.
While your page’s organic posts get the views and likes that you desire, they reach only a fraction of the real crowd that they can possibly reach.
This is where Instagram business becomes an important tool for all brands to tap into.
Instagram Business Profile and Its Advantages
Instagram business is when you switch your brand’s profile from a regular user to a business one.
This change has a lot of advantages for your brand, such as –
- You can promote your posts.
- You can run ads on Instagram.
- You can apply for verification for your account.
- You will also be able to add additional information about your business, such as a phone number, an official email ID, and its physical address.
- You can view your audience, content, and activity statistics.
Having a business profile opens up many opportunities for you as a brand. You will be able to understand your audience better and create content that is more relevant to them. You will also be able to reach a whole new follower base through your Instagram ads and garner more followers.
How to Use Instagram Ads Optimally?
Since it is a Facebook enterprise, you can easily do paid advertising on Instagram using Ads Manager on Facebook business. This allows you to choose and set specific objectives for your ads.
The objectives for your ad can be classified among the following;
- Brand awareness: This objective suits your need to tell more people about your brand. For your products or services to be considered, people first need to know you; this is where brand awareness comes in handy!
- Reach: If people know who you are, and you need to appear on the feeds of more people than you currently are, this should be selected as the objective for your ad.
- Video views: If your team of digital marketers is creating clever and fun videos that you want to see go viral, this might be the objective you select for your ads.
- Conversions: This is for when your brand has specific goals to convert your ads to sales, sign-ups for a service, or contributions to a crowdfund.
- App Installs: Whether you want people to check out your new, cool app or move traffic from your website to a more app-oriented engagement, this is the perfect objective for your ad.
- Lead Generation: Perfect for those trying to create a database of their target audience, this objective helps gather data such as audience demographics, names, phone numbers, and addresses for future callbacks and direct marketing.
- Traffic: This objective is to increase your brand’s website traffic. You can run ads with this objective to redirect your audience from Instagram to another external page where they can engage with you.
Using these objectives, you can devise the perfect way to target your audience and maximize your Instagram ads.
But your endeavor as an entrepreneur to gain the most out of this platform should not end here.
Get Creative with Your Ads
The most important part of your ad that will make people engage with you is the creative aspect.
You can use as many targeting criteria as you want, but if your ads are not intriguing, your audience will unlikely elicit the reaction you want from them.
Here are four easy ways in which you can create great Instagram ads for your business –
1. Make Them Visually Appealing
Instagram is a visual platform; if you run ads on it, you must ensure they will catch your audience’s eyes.
Make sure you use extremely interesting images or GIFs that say a lot about your brand, product, or service using very few words!
Keep the written content confined to the post copy, which also must be easy to read and informative, but only in a line or two.
2. Make Interesting Videos
Content in video form has a higher possibility of being viewed, so if you have the budget, make informative and interesting videos about your brand. Make sure that you catch the audience’s attention in the first 3-7 seconds before they move on to the next post on their feed!
3. Use Instagram Story Ads
People spend more time tapping through stories than they do on their feed posts, and hence, it would be very cool to advertise your brand and products using this method.
They are short and easy to catch the eye. You can make these ads text-heavy and informative while using great visuals. They appear between stories posted by friends of the user and can be a great way to quickly catch their attention in 15 seconds or less!
You can create a perfect ad using one of the readily available Instagram story templates.
4. Retarget your Audience
Don’t go for a new audience group whenever you run an ad. The best way for your audience to engage with you and remember you is to keep seeing your ads repeatedly on their feed.
The first time a person sees your ad, they might not click on it, but if you show them your products enough, they might be intrigued to visit your profile or engage in the way you desire.
