Instagram Ads is paid social media marketing method where businesses pay for a post or content so that it can appear throughout the platform, especially in their target market’s Stories, feeds, and more. These paid posts will look normal but always have a “Sponsored” label, indicating that they’re ads.
In short, Instagram Ads is a function that you can use to create and display ads to your potential clients. It’s a marketing edge for your business as it allows sponsored content to reach a more targeted and larger audience.
It may be a paid ad, but the benefits of the ads outweigh the cost when done right.
Instagram advertising can help you generate leads and move them down the funnel up to a conversion. It can also increase website traffic and grow your brand exposure because the platform offers ad tools to make your posts eye-catching and engaging.
You can choose from videos, reels, images, or a set of images to visually present your campaign. Instagram is all about visuals, so text ads aren’t a thing here.
The exciting part? Well-designed visual ads can encourage Instagram users to directly message, email, call a business, or visit the latter’s website.
Let Instagrammers discover your brand and inspire them to take action by using the different types of ads.
Learn more about Instagram Ads’ benefits to your business by reading the following sections.
Instagram Ads Benefits
- Facebook Ads Manager
- Versatility
- Advanced Targeting
- Brand Awareness
- Build an Audience
- Compliment Digital Marketing Strategies
- Boost Sales and Leads
- Cost
- Performance Tracking
- Ad Type Variety
Facebook Ads Manager
While you can advertise on Instagram without using Facebook Ads Manager, using such a tool is still recommended because it can help you analyze, manage, and create more manageable ads.
It’s a tool that offers all a marketer needs to optimize Instagram ads, making them more successful. And that’s because Instagram ads and Facebook Ads Manager work seamlessly since Facebook owns Instagram.
Thus, using Facebook Ads Manager when creating ad campaigns is one of Instagram ads’ best benefits. Especially if you already have an existing Facebook page for your business, Facebook Ads Manager allows you to expand your reach on Instagram.
All you need is to connect your business account on Instagram to Facebook Ads Manager. Using such a tool allows you to make your ads appear on Instagram and Facebook or only one of them. You can also choose whether the ads will appear on the user’s mobile or desktop feed. Or pick them both.
Versatility and Low Barrier For Entry
Instagram ads can be the first step for many businesses to get into the world of social media marketing.
You don’t have to be an ad expert or have a technical background when using Instagram advertising. It doesn’t have complex features so that you can create and design an ad campaign in minutes.
With such, you can save on hiring graphic designers, which is most beneficial when you’re a startup. You can run ad campaigns because you only need to upload videos or images onto Instagram.
However, It’s a good idea to ensure that your Instagram-sponsored posts have good-quality content. Doing this can boost brand recognition because your audience can associate themselves with your brand, creating higher engagement rates.
You can find suitable ad types that you can work with, as the platform supports many placements and styles of ads.
Advanced Targeting Options Of Instagram Ads
As Meta (Facebook) owns the platform, it enables Instagram Ads to access advanced targeting options for social media advertising.
Instagram for advertising can now be at par with Facebook’s capabilities. You can leverage such a feature to advertise to people by location, behavior, interests, and age—similar to what Facebook ads offer.
When you use such advanced targeting options, you can target specific audiences likely to purchase your products.
The targeting options also allow you to retarget audiences—another feature of Facebook ads. The people you’re retargeting have already heard or seen your business or brand. They may also be people who haven’t made a purchase yet but have visited your website.
Instagram ads can help you retarget audiences using the data collected from your account’s posts. You can analyze and use Instagram video views, customer email lists, Instagram post engagement, and others to create custom retargeting ads.
These advanced targeting options give Instagram ads an edge over other platforms. Especially when you develop and combine a specific sales funnel with your campaign, you can boost your advertising strategy and achieve more results.
Moreover, you can automatically create a Custom Audience by setting up the Facebook pixel —a part of the advanced targeting options. Using pixel allows you to create and show ads related to products or services they’ve previously viewed on your site.
Increase Brand Awareness
When it comes to growing an online brand and business, Instagram plays a crucial role for many companies. Even many influencers have started a new business just from their followers alone.
You shouldn’t hesitate to advertise on Instagram, even if you’re a startup. Take advantage of its many ad options and features to reach a vast audience and gain more Instagram followers, increasing brand awareness.
If you are thinking about which social media platform you should prioritize and invest in for your brand, Instagram for many brands is the ideal choice.
A brand that is highly visible on Instagram with a follower count to match greatly benefits the awareness and engagement a business can extract.
There are many goals that marketers can use when choosing to start Instagram Ad campaigns, but awareness should always stay on top, even when sales would be the desired outcome.
On Instagram, you can achieve global (and local) reach that keeps producing results even after a campaign ends. Outside of advertising, one can harness the power of their audience through further engagement and by using organic growth strategies to grow even more.
For example, high-quality content can also attract influencers who may want to try your products or services. Once they do, they’ll share their thoughts about them, which can also be a way to introduce your brand to the influencers’ followers.
Build an Audience and Community
As we have already mentioned, the core benefit of Instagram and ads within is the audience. Nowadays, a business can achieve much more from their marketing efforts when we gather audience data directly for the sole purpose of growing sales with ads or building an audience or a community that engages with our businesses and brands indefinitely.
It’s no secret that brands that have a following have a higher chance of succeeding, no matter the metrics we target when target audiences use Instagram.
On Instagram, this means you need to increase the number of your followers first. As a result, you can build your audience, which means you can have more Instagrammers engage with your content. The more engagement you receive can increase the chances of creating more buying customers since they become more familiar with your brand.
And as Instagram is part of Facebook, consider also enhancing your Instagram community and audience with growing Facebook Page likes that also have similar benefits to brand awareness, optimized audiences, and much more.
Instagram Ads Compliments Digital Marketing Strategies
Instagram Ads works well and complements all other available digital marketing strategies you could think of. It doesn’t mean it’s always the best choice for advertising when measured alone, but it has compounding effects on your brand in the long run.
For example, you can use Instagram to grow brand awareness and, at the same time, use Google shopping ads optimized for increasing sales. It all benefits each other.
As Instagram isn’t the only social media platform out there, advertising on Instagram and other platforms at the same increase your reach even further and faster.
For example, not every user on Instagram would use TikTok and vice versa, so when advertising on both, you maximize the output of your results.
But Instagram Ads doesn’t only help in strategies that use paid social media ads. Any strategy that uses a defined audience can significantly benefit from the ads on the platform. Whether organic or paid.
Instagram Ads Boost Sales and Leads
Whether you’re an ecommerce startup or in need of growing B2B leads, you can use Instagram ads to get what you need.
You can use Instagram to let users directly purchase products without leaving the platform. Or you can also use it to create traffic for your website since the ads can direct audiences to your site.
You can achieve this by adding a link associated with your website. Add the link to the call-to-action button of your ads, such as “Shop Now.” When users click on the button, it can direct them to your website, where they can learn more about your products.
But if you want to learn more on how to grow sales with Facebook Ads, check this guide we made here.
Instagram ads are also an excellent lead-generating method that can showcase your brand and services. You can add a “Sign Up For Weekly Insights” call-to-action on your ads so target audiences can receive emails from you, making them recognize your brand even more.
Instagram Ads Cost
There’s no benchmark or average price for Instagram Ads because it depends on various factors. Placement, time of year, the competitiveness of your industry, and your targeting are some of the factors that can affect the cost.
Although this is the case, you can start with just a few dollars per day, which offers businesses a great way to start online advertising as they won’t need to invest huge sums to get started. You can always start small and use it to gauge what type of ads yield results so you can scale up from there.
The best thing about it is that you can set lifetime spending limits or daily budgets to control your costs. When using Instagram ads, you can always be sure how well your ads did and how much they cost.
Trackability Of Instagram Ads Performance
Knowing your ad’s performance is essential so you’ll know whether to keep it or change your campaign. You can initially use the Instagram Insights or Facebook Insights feature to track ad performance. But eventually, you want to start using Facebook Ads manager to analyze and optimize your performance.
Instagram advertising also allows you to see clear ROI. You can check the cost per result on any campaign you’ve run, including link clicks to lead to conversions.
Knowing these data points will help you measure your success since you can see how much the cost is to achieve such results.
What’s more, is that you can break down the results to know where or who they came from: which device, which region, which age range, which gender, etc.
As a result, you can better understand where you should put your money when creating or tweaking your Instagram ads.
Various Types Of Instagram Ads
Instagram ads allow you to choose a suitable type of advertising, from section-based ads to format-based ads. Each variety helps you reach Instagram users differently. You can select one or combine various ad types to make your post unique, compelling, and wide-reaching.
Section-based Ads
Section-based Instagram ads may be more powerful than format-based ones because you can reach your target market using different methods. Instead of being content-based, you can deliver your post through different sections of the platform other than the standard feed on Instagram.
Here are some of them:
- Reels Ads
- Feed Ads
- Explore Ads
- Stories Ads
Reels Ads
Instagram reels ads are the most recent feature of the platform. It allows you to create and share short videos similar to Instagram Stories, but the reels will stay live for more than 24 hours.
Although you can only use video ads in this section, you can make it seem like an organic reel post by adding music or audio to a 30-second-long video.
Feed Ads
The most fundamental section of Instagram ads is the feed ads.
It allows you to use all ad types such as Shopping, Collection, Carousell, Video, and Image Ads. Thus, most marketers use this well-known ad section.
The best thing about this ad is that Instagrammers will only know that a post is an ad when they see the word “Sponsored.” That’s because feed ads appear within the platform’s organic feed.
Explore Ads
The ad types appearing in the Explore Ads are video and image ads only.
Because Instagram curates the content for each user, Explore, ads are highly-targeted. Your content will appear on the users’ Explore section who are within your target demographic and similar interests.
Stories Ads
As its name sounds, these ads appear on the Instagram Stories section, allowing you to use video, photos, carousel, and collection ads.
Since Stories only lasts for 24 hours, the Stories Ads is popular for businesses offering exclusive marketing strategies. You can also use such ads to give your target market a sense of urgency.
For instance, you can post Stories Ads when launching a limited-time offer. When customers or followers see the ads, they’ll act quickly so they can avail of your promo.
Format-based Ads
Unlike section-based Instagram ads, format-based ads generally appear on the normal Instagram feed. The ads’ categories also depend on their format and may appear in other sections.
Check out how they mainly vary:
- Shopping Ads
- Video Ads
- Collection Ads
- Carousel Ads
- Image ads
Shopping Ads
The Shopping Ads may be limited to brands with Instagram Checkout enabled, but this newest e-commerce feature is famous for giving more convenience to users. They no longer have to leave the Instagram app to view and buy your products.
Instead, you can direct the users to your business’ product description page within the Instagram app. However, you must set up your Instagram Shopping catalog before running Shopping ads.
Video Ads
Videos have a higher viewer rate than other mediums, which makes Instagram video ads popular for many brands.
You can direct viewers to another video platform using Instagram ads that can act as teasers of full-fledged ads. These videos typically last from 30-60 seconds, so it’s best to alter your ad’s content to fit the purpose.
Your views can scale in minutes when the promotion is done right because audiences will love captivating and creative video content.
Collection Ads
You can also use your product catalog to showcase your brand via collection ads. Here, the user will be directed to an Instagram Instant Experience Storefront, allowing them to buy products directly from the ad.
Carousel Ads
Promoting multiple photo posts is possible with carousel ads. You can keep users engaged on the same ad since they can swipe and look through 2 or more images.
Using this ad can be a more practical alternative if one video or photo is insufficient.
Image Ads
Instagram is known for images, so image ads are the most common. It allows you to market your services, products, or brand using a single image.
Conclusion
Social media marketing is essential these days. That’s why using Instagram ads can strengthen your organic digital marketing efforts.
You can use it to target a specific audience, engage with them, and increase brand awareness.
Especially when you create relevant, high-quality ad content, you can achieve your desired results.
You don’t need a large budget to start with Instagram ads. Start with a low budget, track the ads’ performance, and invest in the type of audience that engages more with your ads.
Doing such will allow you to enjoy the Instagram ads benefits.