Instagram advertising is a method of paying to post sponsored content on the Instagram platform to reach a larger and more targeted audience. While there are enough reasons a business or individual might decide to advertise, Instagram advertising is often utilized to grow brand exposure, website traffic, generate new leads, and move current leads down the funnel (and hopefully towards converting).
Since Instagram is such a visual platform, text ads are nothing. however, you need an image or set of images, and video to reach your audience with Instagram ads.
Steps to Start Advertising on Instagram
Learning the ins and outs of a new advertising platform might seem overwhelming at first. But the good news here is that if you’re advertising on Facebook, there isn’t much to learn. In fact, Instagram ads can be configured right through the Facebook Ad Manager.
Advertisers who are more advanced or running a relatively large ad set can also choose to configure their ads through Facebook’s Marketing or API Power Editor. Instagram Partners are also available for businesses who want to buy and manage multiple ads, manage a large community, and deliver content at scale.
For this post, we’ll focus on creating ads through Facebook Ad Manager, which is the most common method due to its ease-of-use and the ability to customize these ads to a higher degree than what is possible within the app itself. also configuring Instagram ads is not overly complex, there are some steps to be aware of.
Navigate to Facebook’s Ad Manager
To navigate to ad manager within Facebook, simply follow this link, assuming you’re logged in to the appropriate Facebook account.
Set Your Marketing Objective
Now for the fun part, choosing your campaign goal. Luckily, the goals are named in a self-explanatory manner. Need more traffic? Select the traffic goal. Looking to increase brand awareness? Choose the brand awareness goal.
Brand awareness: The most standard goal that will show your ads to more potential people likely to be interested.
Traffic: If you’re looking to send more people to your website or app store to download your app, this is the appropriate goal for you. The only additional steps you’ll need to take is choosing between those two options, then enter the URL of choice, and let the traffic jam in!
Video Views: Videos are often an investment of time and money, so not promoting your video on Instagram would be like buying a plane ticket to Hawaii, and leaving it on your desk. Luckily, this goal is very straightforward and doesn’t require additional setup steps.
Lead Generation: Instagram currently only supports email, full name, phone number, and gender.
Conversions: This allows you to drive your leads to take action and convert on your website or within your app.
Configure Your Target Audience
Now that you’ve selected your objective, furthermore you need to target the appropriate audience.
Choose Your Placements
Now that you’re targeting your ideal demographic, consequently choose your placements! This is important if your goal for a campaign is to show ads on Instagram. If you choose to ignore this step, Facebook will allow your ads to appear on both platforms.
Set Your Budget and Ad Schedule
If you are familiar with how budgets work through Facebook. AdWords, and other digital advertising platforms, this step should not be overly challenging for you.
Create Your Instagram Ad
After taking the steps above you already have some content in mind for the ad you are looking to promote. This part of the set-up may look different depending upon your campaign objective.