Instagram Ads 101

Instagram Ads are fast becoming the number one choice for businesses that want to get the word out about their brand and their products and services.

There are a number of good reasons for this including the staggering growth of the social platform and its high levels of engagement.

How does an Instagram Ad look?

There are different types of Instagram Ads but the good thing is that they look a lot like regular posts. They will have the word “Sponsored” on them but apart from that they look and feel like a normal post.

With ordinary posts, it is not possible to add external links to your website. You can add direct links in Instagram Ads as well as a call to action button to persuade a user to take a specific action. The different types of ads have different call to action buttons available.

How do you create an Instagram Ad?

Facebook now owns Instagram and you can use the Facebook Ad tools when setting up your Instagram Ads. This is good because you can use the advanced tools on Facebook to target your specific audience based on demographics, interests, location and more.

You can satisfy a number of business objectives with Instagram Ads. These objectives are:

Brand awareness

If you want to increase the awareness of your brand then you need to select this option. When you do this you will maximize the number of impressions for your ad among the audience that you have specified.

Reach

If you want your ad to be seen by the largest number of people in your target audience then go with the “Reach” option.

Traffic

This is the best objective to choose if your goal is to increase the number of clickthroughs to your website or online store. You achieve this by using a persuasive call to action buttons.

App Installs

If you have an app and want to increase the number of installs then select this objectives option.

Engagement

Increasing your engagement levels is always a good thing to do on social media so choose this objective option if you want more comments, likes and shares or you want users to show up for a specific event.

Video

If you want to increase the number of views to your videos then this is the best objective option. You can use videos to put out brand messages or showcase your products. Do this in an inspiring and creative way and you will get great reach and high levels of engagement.

Conversions

This is the objective option to choose if you want to increase the level of conversions on your website.

Identify your Audience

Once you have chosen your desired objective you can now identify your target audience by selecting users based on their age, gender, interests, behaviours, location and more. Once you have created an audience you can save it for use with other ad campaigns.

This is a very important step. With 80% of the users on Instagram following a business, you want to make sure that you get this right and that your advertising message will resonate with your target audience.