If you are a small business owner and start considering to advertise on social media, this article is made for you – a complete guide of Instagram advertising for beginners in 2018.
Instagram is an enticing marketing channel for SMEs
As a business owner, Instagram is definitely a great tool to spread your product or service out to a wide range of potential customers.
Unlike other social media channels, you always get at least a few likes and comments when you post something on Instagram, no matter how small your business is. Especially when you have appealing photos and use relevant hashtags.
However, even with more than 500 million daily active users, not every brand is heading for this social media channel.
You may also aware of Instagram’s link problem. All links placed in organic posts are unclickable. Hence, brands have to lead their followers to the link in their bio instead. This starts to become a problem as you have to change the URL as soon as you want to launch a new product or service.
As a result, it’s where Instagram advertising comes into the process.
Shopping on Instagram – The best reason to advertise on this channel
And yes, links can be included in your posts if you advertise on Instagram.
You probably have seen some kind of advertisements with a “Shop Now” button on Instagram News Feed. That button takes audience directly to a product page.
Instagram advertising
Since 2015, anyone can create Instagrams ads by themselves through Facebook’s advertising platform. If you just get started on advertising on Instagram, have a good understanding of Instagram Insights will help you have a smooth takeoff!
Instagram Types Of Ads
- Photo Ads: This is the simplest Instagram ad type with a single photo in landscape or square format.
- Video Ads: Your videos can be up to 60 seconds in landscape or square format.
- Carousel Ads: You can create a carousel ad from two to ten images and/or videos that audience can view by swiping through.
- Slideshow Ads: Similar to video ads, slideshow ads appear as a video in users’ feeds. However, the video is made up by a series of images. You can also add text and audio to your Slideshow Ads.
- Stories Ads: Instagram Stories allow users to share and advertise self-destructing photos and videos.
Instagram Ads Objectives
- Brand awareness: Choose this objective if you want to raise brand awareness. your ad will be shown to people who are more likely to recall your brand.
- Reach: This objective is similar to ‘Brand Awareness’. The only difference is that you can reach a larger group of audience with the same budget spent.
- Traffic: The name says it all. This objective helps driving visitors to your website. Normally, you would need an incentive to encourage your potential customers to click through.
- App installs: If you’re trying to get people to download your app, this objective is perfect!
- Engagement: This objective can be used to promote your page, offers and posts.
- Video views: If you want to promote your business under video format, ‘Video Views’ is ideal as it’s proved to be an effective objective to drive awareness.
- Lead generation: This objective is great for collecting information from your desired audience such as name, email, phone numbers, etc. without having to change the interface.
- Conversions: eCommerce businesses wouldn’t want to miss this opportunity to boost their sales! This objective is optimised for users that have completed some specific actions on your app and are more likely to convert.
Different from Facebook, not all types of ads objectives are available for Instagram.
Instagram Ads Creation
- Link Instagram account to Facebook page: This step is very easy and straightforward. You only need to do it once. Get into your Facebook Page Setting. Then, You will find an Instagram icon on the left sidebar. Click on ‘Log in’ and follow the instruction.
- Create ad campaign: Next, if you have had experience with Facebook Ad, from this step onward should be very familiar to you. Now, you can go to ‘Ads Manager’ and create your first campaign with a desired ‘Ad Objective’.
- Create ad set: At this level, you will be able to select the target audience, schedule and budget for your campaign.
- Create ads: Then, you can go on with creative and graphics for your ad. That’s it! Your campaign is ready to launch. However, your job is not done yet!
- Monitor, analyze and optimize: Remember to keep track of your ad performance because the ad is in real-time. You should be able to fix as soon as possible if anything goes wrong.
Hope this ‘Instagram advertising for beginners’ guide helps you start a great journey of your business!
If you are looking for a local support on Instagram advertising to grow your business, contact Xugar today! We are a leading web design & digital agency in generating leads for business!
