How to Make the Most of Instagram Ads?

by Sayyed Noman Ali Digital Marketing Manager

Instagram advertisement: Appeared as a photo and short video sharing social network, Instagram has emerged as one of the most potential marketing platforms today. A striking study by Smartly.io finds that 29% of businesses spend the majority of their ad budget on Instagram.

Now, the challenge is to make the most out of Instagram ads. If you don’t find your users engaging with the ads, it’s time to change your strategy. Today’s audience needs much more than the clichéd “buy this now” approach for interacting with a brand.

In this blog, we will take a look at some of the effective tips to make the most of Instagram advertisement. Let’s dig deeper.

Instagram Advertisement: Quick Tips

Set Your Target

According to the experts of digital marketing services, targeting your audience is the first step to run paid ad campaigns on any social media platform. And Instagram is no exception to that.

Lookalike Audience – Lookalike audience lets you create a custom audience for your advertisements that replicates your existing followers. It can help you explore new audience that has similar demographics, interest, and behaviours as your current audience.

Remarketing – It will help to narrow down your focus on the people who have visited your website. You can also add other modifiers to target people who took an action on the site or abandoned carts. All these will allow you to reach people who have a high potential to convert. As the click-through rates of your ads and conversion rate increase, the cost-per-click rate will decrease.

However, if you want to reach a wider audience through your ads, you may not zero in on your target audience.

Strategic Use of Hashtags

Do hashtags really work?

Yes, they do!

The key is to use the right hashtag. Flooding a campaign without hundreds of hashtags won’t do the trick that even a handful of strategic ones can!

Here are a few tips to get started:

Use hashtags that are relevant to your post and business. These will give your posts a direction.

Use simple and popular hashtags that people may use and discover your posts. Going overboard or too experimental with hashtags is not the ideal step as only a few people may find out your posts.

But make sure not to use extremely popular hashtags as your post may get lost in the shuffle. You can find the popularity of a hashtag by simply typing a few words in the Instagram search bar. Check out the Instagram autogenerates – these will show how many posts feature a specific hashtag.

Check out the hashtags your competitors are using. You can use various hashtag research tools like Hashtagify, Archie.co, Websta, Hashtags.org, etc.

Pay attention to the number of hashtags. On analyzing 65,000 posts, a study by TrackMaven finds that 9 hashtags can be the ideal number for post engagement. You can also test on your own and find out how many hashtags are working for you.

Engage Users through Instagram Stories

It is not a direct advertisement method but Instagram stories positively impact your ads. Basically, the stories are Snapchat-like feature where you can post an image or video that lasts for 24 hours. These help to increase user engagement.

Today’s people have a nominal attention span during social media browsing. They watch different posts from different brands and likely forget most of them. If you want to drive brand memorability, you need to constantly engage them with lots of posts.

For that, you need not crowd your main feed with thousands of images or videos. Use Instagram stories feature. If you have an e-store, you can promote your happy clients in this section instead of cluttering your feed.

Another advantage of the Instagram story section is that it features your brand on Instagram’s Explore page that people visit to browse new content. That way, you can reach out to more visitors. Remember, having a wide set of audience will positively impact your advertising efforts.

IGTV Ads

IGTV ad is yet another way to reach out to people. Such ads appear when the users click to watch IGTV videos from the preview button in the feed. Let us outline a few standards to follow while curating IGTV ads:

Share original content
Follow community standards – steer clear of violence or hate speech
Create user engaging content
Make sure the preview is extremely engaging and encourages the viewers to check out the IGTV ad and interact with your brand

Strategic Ad Scheduling

If you want more people to see and interact with your ads, you need to schedule the ads when your audience is the most active. For instance, studies suggest that the ads posted during the weekend receive more interaction than during weekdays.

While there are several ad scheduling tools available in the market, it requires strategic insights and adequate experience to schedule ads. You better consider engaging professional PPC services as the experts run ads after analyzing the optimal time.

Use a CTA Button

Instagram allows you to include a call-to-action button at the bottom of the image. We suggest you customize the statement according to the campaign to appeal to the audience.

For instance, if you are promoting a mobile app, you can use a CTA button “Install Now” in your campaign. It will help the users to instantly take an action and convert.

Shoppable Ads

We are sure you know it already. Shoppable Instagram posts allow people to check out the price and directly shop it from the posts.

If you seek to increase sales, it’s better to leverage this feature. If a post displays multiple products, you can make each of them shoppable.

Give an Offer

If you want to drive the most impactful advertisements, consider featuring an offer. These are found to drive the most traffic.

From giveaway to contest and coupons – there are several elements to enhance the engagement and impact of your ads. Trust us, people cannot resist these!

Following the above-outlined steps will help you to get started with an Instagram advertisement. Implement these and share your thoughts with us.