With about one billion monthly users, Instagram is the social media platform where people go to watch and learn new interesting things and follow their favorite businesses and brands. About sixty percent of people who have used Instagram have discovered (and often purchased) new products, services, and brands.
In this article, we’ll discuss some of the best Instagram advertising tips for beginners. If you are a beginner who’s just starting out using Instagram as a marketing tool, keep on reading as you’re about to learn the most effective Instagram advertising strategies. Let’s dive in!
- Choose Your Objective
Does this point ring a bell? When you create your new campaign, you must first select a pre-determined objective, which is either a Consideration, Conversion, or Awareness.
A campaign can have only one objective, so make sure you select the one that is the best match for what you are striving to achieve.
- Define Your Audience
Now, you are on Instagram’s ‘Ads Manager’ section, and you have the opportunity to choose from various options and create a target audience for your advertisement (as seen on other different advertising tools and platforms such as Ads-Supply, Google AdWords, Bing Ads, etc.).
The first thing you should encounter is choosing from the ‘Lookalike’ and ‘Custom Audiences’ options. It is impossible to reach a particular group of people if you have no idea what to look for, right?
There are various ways you can define your target audience on Instagram. Reviewing your website and Instagram analytics are good ways to identify common threads between those who follow you and the buying decisions they make on your site.
- Campaign Budget Optimization
After you’ve selected your ad objective, it’s time to name your ad campaign. After naming it (keeping your prime purpose in mind), you can also opt for getting started on split-testing.
Through this, you can try different ad variations, as well as optimizing your budget across various ad sets.
An A/B test, or split-test, gives you the option to test different ad sets or ad variations against each other, allotting the greatest budget to the best-performing advertisement, and increasing your chances to achieve a good ROI.
- Test Different Ad Variations
As mentioned before, when using Instagram’s advertising platform as a beginner, you must definitely test different ad variations, as some ad formats work best for particular kinds of posts.
For example, a carousel ad might work well for a product launch as viewers can view multiple photos of your product, whereas an ad with ‘Get Directions’ might work effectively for a restaurant launch.
Keep in mind that various advertisements will have different results, depending on the content you promote and the specific audience you intend to target.
A ‘Collection’ is a type of ad format that allows you to include a photo or video and then highlight all the featured products. In a famous case-study, a company called Zattini wanted to discover if the collection or carousel format would work best on Instagram.
So, they tested both ad formats in order to find out which of them their audience preferred more and which of them had the most significant impact on sales. They carried out an A/B test between the collection and carousel formats. In the test, those who saw one format would not see the other one, and vice versa.
The test results showed that the collection format was the clear winner – with an increase in conversions (6.3%) at a much lower cost (41.9%) compared to other formats.
