Instagram Marketing
INSTAGRAM MARKETING
How to Create Captivating Visuals, Grow Your Following and Drive Engagement on Instagram
Instagram is the second most accessed network behind Facebook. The popular visual-first social medium sees over one billion active monthly users and 500 million daily Instagram Stories.
The increase in brands who've developed a presence on the platform has skyrocketed. Oberlo estimates that 71% of US businesses use Instagram. But is it worth their time, and should your business also be on the platform? The answer is yes, and here’s why:
- Instagram sees over one billion active monthly users and 500 million daily Instagram Stories.
- There are 140 million Instagram users in the U.S.
- Instagram is the second most accessed network behind Facebook. Users browse for an average of 53 minutes per day.
- About 71% of US businesses use Instagram.
- Nearly 45% of Instagram’s users are between the ages of 18 and 44.
What is Instagram marketing?
Instagram marketing is the practice of using Instagram to grow your brand awareness, audience, leads, and sales. As the favorite social media platform of people ages 16-34, Instagram is a highly effective marketing platform for brands, entrepreneurs, and creators.
Instagram marketing strategies include:
- Organic content: Photo, video, or carousel posts, Reels, Stories
- Paid content: Instagram ads, including Stories ads, Shopping ads, and more
- Influencer marketing
- Shopping tools: Shop tab, Product tags and catalog, Live shopping, Instagram Checkout, Shopping ads
How to set up Instagram for marketing
If you’re just starting out, here’s what you need to do to set your company’s Instagram account up for success.
Set up an Instagram Business profile
To use most of the marketing tips featured here, you need an Instagram Business account. It’s free, and you can create a new one or convert your existing Personal account.
If you have an existing Personal account, skip to Step 3.
Step 1: Download Instagram
You can only create an account using a mobile device.
- Get it for ios
- Get it for Andriod
Step 2: Create a Personal account
Tap Create new account. Follow the prompts to enter your email and phone number and choose a username and password. You don’t need to fill out the rest of your profile right now (more on how to optimize it later).
Step 3: Switch your new account to a Business one
Go to your profile and open the menu. Go to Settings and choose Switch to professional account near the bottom. Select Business as the account type and follow the prompts to convert your account.
Try Instagram ads
Expanding your marketing strategy with ads can have a big impact. Even simple ads can earn results, like coffee retailer Country Bean’s 3 week campaign which resulted in a 16% sales increase.
There are two ways to get started with Instagram ads:
The easy way: Boost a post
You can turn any existing Instagram post into an ad by clicking the Boost Post button. You need to have either a Business or Creator account, though.
As you probably guessed, this is exactly like Facebook’s “boost” feature. Now that Meta owns both companies, you’ll also need to connect your Instagram account to Meta Business Suite.
After clicking Boost Post, follow the quick prompts to set your budget, narrow your target audience, set a duration, and boom—you now have an Instagram ad.
You can customize the targeting options or have Instagram automatically target your ads. Boosted posts are a good way to dip your toe in the advertising pool, so if this is all new to you, stick to auto mode.
Go big: Launch a full Instagram ad campaign
Step 1: Log in to Meta Business Suite
Click on Ads in the left menu, then Create ad at the top right.
Step 2: Choose a goal
Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? It’s like that, but for marketing.
For a first campaign, Automated Ads are a good option. Instagram will try to get you the most results with the least budget possible, and they auto-adjust your targeting and bidding strategy as they learn more from your audience’s reactions. It’s like having a 24/7 robot assistant.
If you want to experiment with ad targeting yourself, or have a specific goal, try out one of the other options, like focusing on leads or traffic.
Step 3: Create your ads
The prompts to complete your ad vary depending on which goal you pick, but generally the next step is to create the ad creative. For example, this is what the next step is for the “Build your business” goal.
For a well-rounded campaign, you should have at least 2-3 ad groups, each containing 3 or more ads.
Most ad formats have an option to allow Instagram to switch out your creative assets automatically to optimize ad performance. It’s like having a real-time, built-in A/B testing process. Add multiple creative assets for each ad to take advantage of this.
Try to include a mix of photo, video, Stories ads, Reels ads, and Catalog and Shopping ads if you sell products online. Test out different ad copy and calls to action.
And, ensure you have ads for each stage of your buyer’s journey, from consideration all the way to conversion.
Step 4: Define your audience
Take a shot every time you read “define your audience” in a marketing blog.
Targeting is critical to your ad’s success. Meta Business Suite gives you five options:
You can target:
- An Advantage Audience (Recommended for newbies!): This is Meta’s AI-optimized audience based on your existing account audience, and updates itself automatically as your audience grows or changes. It analyzes what interests and demographics your followers share.
- People you choose: Create your own audience from scratch, including location, demographics, interests, and more.
- People who’ve previously engaged with posts or ads: Create a retargeting campaign to remind people who already know you about your offer.
- Page Likes: Targets your existing Facebook Page and Instagram followers.
- Page Likes and similar: In addition to your existing audience, this will also expand to target people the algorithm thinks are similar to them to bring in new leads.
If you’re new to ads, use the Advantage audience option. Want to learn more about perfecting your ad targeting? The info in our Facebook ad targeting guide works for your Instagram ads, too.
Step 5: Set your budget
Whichever targeting option you pick, you’ll need to set a budget and duration. You’ll see the predicted results of your choices on the right side in estimated reach and clicks.
Step 6: Launch
Lastly, choose if you want your ad to appear only on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger, or across all three platforms. We recommend running it across all.
Click Promote Now to save and launch your Instagram ad campaign. Woo!
Running a successful ad campaign is a huge undertaking. Check our in-depth Instagram ads guide for tips on creating great ads in 2023.
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