Dec 22, 2019
Social media advertising is an integral part of a well-schemed strategy. And if you run it, good for you. And what about Instagram Story ads? With over 500 million people watching Stories daily, it definitely makes sense including this feature in your marketing campaign, doesn’t it?
Being integrated between ordinary Stories, Story ads look normal. However, people tend to swipe through them. Hence, if the Story ad you make doesn’t grab attention at first sight, it won’t convert. How to get someone interested in your ad in just a few seconds? This sounds challenging, doesn’t it? InstaBF, a leading Instagram and IGTV provider, is going to provide you with an ultimate guide right away.
How You Can Create Instagram Story Ads
If you have made up your mind to start a new campaign for a Story ad, great! Here is how you can do that:
- Instagram Story ads are created through Ads Manager similar to Facebook ads. Get there and tap Campaign. Then click Create.
- Now distinguish between several options depending on your objective: Brand Awareness, App Installs, Reach, Traffic, Conversions, Lead Generation. If you aren’t sure which is appropriate for your case, make use of the special link that serves as a guide in choosing the objective. Tapping on your objective, you will see another box appear. Name your campaign and switch on the Split test and Campaign Budget Optimization if you need it. Tap Continue.
- Now it’s turn to give a title to your ad set and select the audience. Here you can either use a saved audience or create a new one. To create the profile that best matches your ideal customer, set age, interests, locations, and gender.
- Once the audience is set, pass to selecting the placement. For this, go to the Placement section and choose either Automatic or Edit Placements. In the first case, the ads will run on all platforms and Stories, as well. However, if you want your ad to run only as a Story ad, choose Edit placement and give the necessary settings. Mark the boxes you would like your ad to appear in.
- The next section to check is the Budget & Schedule. Here you can set a cost control and set a precise budget on a per-click basis. If you plan to run your ads for a limited time (the ads are promotional, for instance), set the schedule.
- After all the points are completed, you can create the ad. Give it a name and choose both Facebook and Instagram accounts it should run on.
- Set the right format for your ads. Here you can choose a video format or a carousel post format. In the second case, mention whether you need a Native Stories Carousel that automatically displays three cards with full-screen creative (must be bought exceptionally as a standalone Gram Stories placement), or Expandable Stories Carousel displaying up to ten cards.
- To track the performance of the Story ads, switch on the Facebook pixel. To give it a start, press Confirm and your ads will get to work!
If you want your Instagram Story Ads to be effective, here are a few tips:
- Try the video format;
- Keep the ad simple and short;
- Make certain you have included the logo;
- Incorporate a meaningful CTA;
- Add sound and music;
- Draw eyes away from the word “Sponsored” on the top left corner.
Dec 12, 2019
In one of our previous posts, we started such a useful topic for startups and small business owners as to how to start an Instagram ad campaign for the first time. We introduced the first step and everything concerning the preparation. And now it’s high time to see how a simple ad campaign can work efficiently by the example of Jenny McCoy. This is how she started.
McCoy’s simple strategy started with two campaign goals – site traffic & load generation, and conversions. She assigned a 60-40 split ratio of the budget between the two objectives. She started the campaign with qualified audiences including site visitors and subscribers while also using lookalike audiences in order to get to the site traffic. The expert tested only two options in terms of the creative. Such an ad campaign is a wonderful starting point for most startups and small businesses.
#3: Instagram Ads Make a Full-Funnel Impact
Social media ad specialist Jenny McCoy finalizes everything by the statement that Instagram ads (and social media ads in general, too) are capable of making a full-funnel impact. However, social media shouldn’t be acquired as an all-mighty platform. And if you can’t detect any impact on your sales after having run an Instagram ad campaign, look for other impacts. Social media ads can make it really valuable and at the same time easy to amplify impacts.
Nevertheless, it’s also recommended to look far beyond metrics related to Instagram such as likes, follows and post engagement, and reach to site visits, email leads, etc. so that to find the best way an Instagram ad can work for improving your business.
How Much an Instagram Ad Costs
Now, when you have a clear image of how to start an Instagram ad campaign for your new small business, most probably you’d like to find out how that will cost you. Generally, different ads have different prices. Yet, there are average costs set you can orientate on. For instance, the cost-per-click price for an ad on Gram is about $0.70 – $0.80 on average based on the analyses of around $300 million of ad spend. This price can appear higher or lower depending on a number of aspects including the ad placement, the age of the target audience, and the time of the year. Ads are always the cheapest at the beginning of the year and the most expensive in the last quarter.
Types of Ads
Instagram has become a fertile platform for all businesses whether small or mega-popular giant ones. Here you can choose various types of ads to promote your business including Stories ads, photo, video, carousel, and collection ads. No matter which ad format you choose as a creative to include in your ad campaign, it will be woven into your users’ Stories and Feeds so a non-disruptive user experience can be expected. Don’t forget to include an appropriate call-to-action to collect more leads. Here are a few examples of CTAs to use:
- Apply Now;
- Book Now;
- Get Directions;
- Get Showtimes;
- Contact Us;
- Learn More, etc.
Dec 11, 2019
Are you a beginner in the sphere of Instagram advertising and can’t make out how to start? We agree that Instagram advertising is an intimidating thing especially if your budget is limited and you have no experience. But, on the other hand, a well-schemed ad campaign can drive impressive results. So, you see that it’s important to learn how to draw an efficient ad strategy for an Instagram account. And InstaBF, a popular Instagram and IGTV provider will share with you three crucial takeaways that promise to be effective irrespective of your budget and business size.
Take Small Tests
Those who are going to run a social campaign for the first time are recommended to implement a small upfront test campaign. Working out around $500 on it you will get a ton of learning to use on bigger campaigns with larger budgets. Besides, you will see if your current assets work or you need to think of others. Let’s see what specialists imply by saying a small test.
- Determine the goals you pursue. Are they to drive purchases or to generate new leads? In the beginning, take up only one goal – the one that’s likely to have the biggest impact on your business.
- After this, pass on figuring out the necessary budget. The bigger your ambitions are, the more money you will to invest, remember this. For instance, such upper-to-mind objectives as video views, impressions, or link clicks, a minimal budget (around $100) and a couple of days will be totally enough. A purchase-focused campaign, meanwhile, will require at least 3x the cost of the product it’s designed for.
- Placements come next. Instagram should be your priority, yet other platforms can bring you the expected results, too. Feel free to test across all available platforms and see which works best for you around the current campaign.
- One of the most significant components of social advertisement campaigns is the audience. Actually, you can test only three types of audiences including custom audiences (site visitors, email list, your followers), lookalike audiences (those who look similar to your existing audience and are built automatically with the first-party data of your account), and interest-based audiences (created from your user data and activity on Instagram).
- And finally, there comes your creative. Specialists recommend testing at least two creative options (a carousel post against a video or image, etc.). You can always start with various copies of CTAs if you feel uncertain.
Simple but Profitable
As numerous tests show simple ad campaigns can be quite profitable if planned and implemented correctly. Surely, there are cases when a complicated media plan is required, but most of all, simple things can work well, too. Just focus on one most valuable goal at first.
If you own a small business or a startup and want to promote it through a social media ad campaign while your primary goal is the purchase, there is a bright example by the founder of social ad agency Good Help Jenny McCoy to follow. What does it include? We shall find out it in our next post. Just stay tuned to InstaBF, your true guide in the giant world called Instagram.
Jun 23, 2019
If you strive to get a bigger ROI on the influencer marketing that you are carrying out, it’s worth to consider Insta’s new branded content ads. According to the announcement made on the 4th of June, with this new feature businesses will have an opportunity to promote organic posts from influencers via feed advertisements yet only within the application. If this interested you as an Instagram brand owner, here we shall discuss everything you need to know about the feature. InstaBF is a leading Instagram and IGTV provider that has gained a good reputation and trust among multiple users. But besides providing its clients with likes, comments, views, and followers for their Instagram and IGTV accounts, the service also offers crucial recommendations on using this social media in its blog. And today you will learn about the new branded content ads on Instagram and how you can run your own campaign.
What Branded Content Ads on Instagram Are
Partnering with influencers in order to create branded content is an amazing way to get to new audiences quickly since almost 70% of people state they search ways of interactions with creators when they come to Instagram. If Instagram branded content was thoroughly organic before with no business able to advertise posts they had sponsored, now the rules of this game have changed. From now on, brands have the opportunity to promote influencer posts as advertisements on Gram using Facebook Ads Manager. All this is sure to result in a much higher ROI for businesses.
So, Instagram brands can now target specific audiences with the content they have sponsored, measure their performance with Facebook’s ads platform tools.
How You Can Run Your Branded Content Ads on Instagram
So that to create branded content ads, you need to perform three steps. First of all, brands allow influencers to tag them in branded content posts after which influencers enable business partners to promote their posts as advertisements. And finally, the business will see that post in Ads Manager within the Existing Posts and select to run it as a feed ad or not. To settle all that, access to the advanced settings.
The Benefits of Instagram Branded Content Ads for Businesses
Perhaps the major advantage of this new feature is Reach. If before this feature businesses had to hope for attracting only the influencer’s audience, now there are no borders. It’s also possible to leverage FB’s optimization tools, thus driving even more specific goals with the sponsored content, no matter whether it’s engagement, traffic, brand awareness, etc. Basically, this new feature gives businesses more control over their sponsored posts, on who sees that content. This, in its turn, takes the control away from the partnering influencers.
However, influencers benefit from this not less than brands. Besides getting paid for the services, the branded content ad becomes kind of free exposure for the influencer. So, you see this new feature is beneficial for both sides, as well as possible customers who get more chances to see a product that might be useful.
Mar 21, 2019
One of the most efficient ways of gaining advanced audience targeting options, as well as trustworthy conversion tracking is making use of social media advertisements. Despite the fact that Facebook is the oldest media market with the biggest number of users, Instagram is a fresher and more modern platform, which offers far not worse conditions. And if you have business accounts on both platforms, you’d better make use of both in your ad campaigns. But once you have a limited ad budget, you have to limit your actions and think even more wisely. So, you should find out which platform can bring you the most revenue and only then invest in the campaign. To identify which platform is better for you, three major objectives are to be taken into consideration:
- Engagement
- Reach
- Demographics
InstaBF, your true IG and IGTV provider, is going to address each point separately.
Engagement
Did you know that over 70% of businesses worldwide have accounts on Instagram?! And this number increases rapidly promising to reach even higher numbers in the upcoming year. The reason for such a flocking is engagement. Over 80% of all Instagram users follow at least one brand, visit their websites through Instagram, contact them and even make purchases through this service. This statistic makes Instagram a great platform for running business ad campaigns.
Facebook engagement received from organic posts, meanwhile, change drastically yet the ad opportunities here are multiple, too.
Reach
The number of monthly active users on Instagram reaches up to one billion! This number definitely makes the social platform a perfect place for brand promotion. Besides, the organic reach of Instagram is impressively strong. There are certain features, such as “Suggestions for You” section, for instance, that significantly raise Instagram’s popularity and convenience of use.
What concerns Facebook, this oldest social platform has even a bigger number of active monthly users reaching up to 2 billion! Hence, if your primary purpose is the reach to target customers, Facebook might score higher than Instagram.
Demographics
According to the statistics presented by Pew Research, the greatest part of Instagram users are females. Over 30% of women and around 24% of men use this social media on a daily basis. Besides, Gram is especially popular among young adults between 18 and 29. The number of Insta users on the background of total Internet users is 55%. Therefore, if your brand is targeted mostly at the youth, running an ad campaign particularly on Instagram is the right decision.
According to the same study conducted by Pew Research, Facebook is mostly chosen by adult users. In fact, around 80% of Internet adult users between 30 and 50 have accounts on Facebook. Like in the case of Gram, Facebook has more feminine users than male ones.
So, before investing in an ad campaign, it’s important to determine your brand’s primary goals and expectations. Facebook and Instagram each offer users unique benefits and features. And the right social media for running ad campaigns will be that which suite your brand’s requirements the most.
