With an Instagram business account, you can create advertisements and share them with your audience in a highly targeted way. The adverts are paid messages that are displayed in your audience’s feed and stories. Advertising on Instagram is a great way to achieve your goals. You can select a very specific audience for your adverts and approach that audience with a relevant advert. Within Instagram, you can categorise your audience by:
- Location: users in specific countries, towns and cities or provinces.
- Demographic data: users with certain characteristics such as age, gender or language.
- Interests: users with certain interests, determined by whether or not they use certain apps and which accounts they follow.
- Behaviour: users displaying selected activity on Instagram, Facebook and in other apps.
- Custom audiences: users for whom you have an email address or phone number.
- Similar audiences: find and reach new audiences that are similar to your existing customers.
- Automatic audiences: suggestions from Instagram for audiences based on analysis of users who are already interested in your business.
Types of Instagram ads.
With Instagram, you decide can what you want to achieve with your ads. You might you want to increase your brand awareness or conversion, or perhaps the findability of your brand or the engagement of your audience. It’s entirely up to you, and you can also decide how you’re going to advertise. Instagram offers you the following advertising options:
- Instagram Stories ads
Instagram Stories ads supplement the content of your feed and other stories. With Instagram Stories, you can advertise using images and videos that fill the user’s entire screen. That way, the audience is not distracted from your ad. This makes it a great place to advertise!
- Photo ads
With a photo ad on Instagram, you draw the attention of your selected audience to a photo you’ve previously posted in your content feed. These photo ads are just like photos you post in your content feed, except you can add a call-to-action button.
- Video ads
Just like photo ads, video ads promote videos that you have posted in your content feed. You can also add a call-to-action button. Video ads can last up to 60 seconds.
- Carousel ads
Carousel ads allow you to combine multiple posts (photos and videos) and draw more attention to them. Users can swipe to view the posts.
- Collection ads
Collection ads allow you to present your brand and your various products and services to your audience. You can select a main image or video that you want to draw the audience’s attention to. You then select the images you want to display underneath or let Instagram select the images dynamically. Collection ads allow you to let the audience discover, view and buy your products in a visual way.
Creating your Instagram ad.
1. Create a business account and profile
To create Instagram ads, you need a Facebook page and an Instagram business profile. We explain how to convert your account to an Instagram business profile in this blog.
2. Setting up an advert
To set up an ad within Instagram, select an advertising objective, audience and format in Facebook Ads Manager or choose to promote a photo or video that you have previously shared on Instagram through Instagram itself.
- Through the Instagram app
In the Instagram app, you can promote photos and videos that you have previously posted. All you have to do is select a post that you want to draw extra attention to and click the Promote button underneath. You then have to make several decisions. For example, you need to decide on the purpose of your ad, such as to generate more profile visits or website visits or to reach more people near an address. Once you have created your ad, the statistics help you keep track of how many users you reach with your message and how engaged users are.
- Through Facebook Ads Manager
If you create an Instagram ad through Facebook Ads Manager you have more options than if you create the ad through the Instagram app itself. In Facebook Ads Manager, you can configure all the settings for your ads. It also allows you to change your settings and view the results. In Facebook Ads Manager, you can configure the:
Campaign level: here you can set the purpose of the campaign here. You can select one of the following aims:
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App installations
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Chat messages
- Conversions
- Sales from catalogue
- Shop traffic
Your ad set: here you can configure your audience, ad placement and budget.
- Audience: You can see that there are many more options for defining your audience here than within Instagram itself. This means you can define your audience based on age, gender, location, language, demographics, behaviour, interests and connections. When you select an audience, you can immediately view the size of the audience and the estimated daily reach.
- Ad placement: When you create an ad in Facebook Ads Manager, the ad will be placed on Instagram and Facebook. If you want to change this setting, select ‘Edit placements’ in the ‘Placements’ section and make sure that only Instagram is selected. If you would like to place your photo ad, video ad or carousel in the content feed that users see, go to ‘Instagram summary’. If you want to advertise within Instagram Stories, you need to select ‘Instagram Stories’.
- Budget and schedule: Here, you specify how much money you want to spend and when and for how long you want your ads to be displayed.
De ad: this is where you create your ad! First of all, think carefully about what your audience wants to see and what you will use to achieve your goals. Once you’ve finished creating your ad, you’re ready to start advertising! Remember to keep track of your ads once they have gone live – we recommend that you monitor and analyse the statistics and use them for your next ads. That way, you learn about your audience’s preferences and how to achieve the best results in the future.
Watch the video below to find out how to create ads within Facebook Ads Manager for your Instagram account!