With a staggering 1.3 billion global users, Instagram is currently the most popular social media platform. Are you looking to advertise on IG but unsure where to start? No worries! After reading this article, you will learn how to advertise on Instagram and master five practical IG advertising techniques to maximize the effectiveness of your ads!
Why advertise on IG? Benefits of IG advertising
With many social media platforms available today, why advertise on IG? Can’t I advertise on Facebook, X (Twitter), or TikTok instead? Let me tell you the three major benefits of advertising on IG!
Large active user base
Founded in 2010, Instagram currently has an impressive 1.3 billion active users. Among them, users under 30 years old account for about 70%. For brands and businesses, this presents a great opportunity to increase brand exposure. In addition to having a vast potential customer base, the younger demographic represents a market with broader acceptance of new things and higher inclusivity, making it a market full of opportunities.
Diverse advertising placements on IG
If you’ve used Instagram, you’ll know that besides viewing the home feed, IG also offers features like Stories, Explore, Reels, and the Shop tab. The diverse advertising formats can attract different audiences, with each page having its own characteristics and advantages. So, if you want to advertise on IG, businesses can choose the most suitable advertising placements based on their brand attributes.
Image source: Instagram official website
Shopping features
Instagram has shopping features, allowing ads to be placed on shopping pages to attract users with shopping needs. Users can directly purchase products through the Instagram platform, simplifying the shopping process and increasing conversion rates. Additionally, product tags can be added to posts, Stories, Reels, etc., allowing viewers to shop directly from the posts.
Image source: Instagram official website
Beautiful Visual Presentation
Instagram excels in visual presentation, with its emphasis on images supported by text. This feature captures users’ attention effectively, providing businesses with more opportunities to showcase and promote their brands, thus shaping their own brand image.
Precise Advertising Targeting
The advertising platform on Instagram allows for precise targeting. We can set detailed advertising goals based on factors such as users’ gender, age, location, preferences, etc., ensuring that ads are displayed to the most relevant audience.
What should you do before advertising on IG? Preliminary steps before advertising on IG.
Any advertising campaign incurs costs. To prevent advertising expenses from going to waste, before launching an ad, it’s worth asking yourself: “What do I hope to achieve through this advertising?” “Which demographics do I want to attract?” “What kind of results do I anticipate from this budget allocation?” … and so on. Here are a few things you should do before launching your ad to ensure a smoother process:
- Determine the advertising objectives
- Identify the target audience
- Set an advertising budget
- Evaluate advertising effectiveness
- Create advertising materials
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How to advertise on IG? Learn IG advertising in one go
Now that you understand the advantages of advertising on IG, you can start running your first IG ad. IG advertising can be done through either “Promote” or “Facebook Ads Manager,” each with its own set of steps.
IG Promote
IG Promote is a quick and simple way to advertise. Besides promoting posts, you can also promote Stories and Reels. The process is generally the same, but the downside is that there are fewer options for ad targeting, resulting in limited effectiveness. It is suitable for advertising novices, small businesses, personal brands, or businesses looking for short-term promotions.
Below are the steps to promote a post on IG:
- Open the Instagram app and convert your personal profile to a business account for Promote mode.
- If you want to promote a new post created on Instagram, open the “Promote Post” option.
- If you want to promote an existing post or Story on Instagram, simply click “Promote Post” at the bottom right of the post.
- Set up the advertising objectives, target audience, budget, and duration.
- Once you’ve confirmed the settings, submit the ad for review. After approval, it will begin running.
Ads Manager
You can also choose to use the Ads Manager in the Facebook backend for IG advertising. The Ads Manager offers more detailed features, supports a wider range of ad formats, and provides richer performance data. Through the Ads Manager, businesses can handle the details of their ads more comprehensively. Even without an Instagram account, ads can be published on IG, making it suitable for large advertising campaigns or enterprises with more complex advertising needs.
Here is the process for using the Ads Manager:
- Go to the Facebook fan page, find the Meta Business Suite, and click on Ads Manager to create IG ads.
- Enter the campaign name, set objectives, budget limits, target audience, and other campaign details.
- Choose options that support Instagram ad placements.
- Select the desired IG ad placements.
- Add ad identity, formats, etc., and upload materials.
- Preview the ad and submit it for review once confirmed. After approval, it will begin running.
Additionally, the Ads Manager offers A/B testing and efficient campaign budgeting features, allowing users to decide whether to use these functions based on their needs.
IG Advertising Tips: Increasing IG Ad Effectiveness
A successful advertisement doesn’t solely rely on having good ad materials or pouring in a large budget to attract endless customers. Whether an advertisement can be successfully promoted and achieve certain results depends on various factors. Therefore, here are some IG advertising tips to help you achieve the best results with minimal spending:
Identify Target Audience
As mentioned above, before placing IG ads, it’s crucial to determine the target audience. However, the target audience isn’t just randomly chosen; many people make mistakes at this step without realizing it’s the key to IG ad placement.
To determine the target audience, one must understand the characteristics and advantages of the product and also analyze the target audience of competitors. Additionally, analyzing information about existing customers, including age, geographical location, interests, purchase history, etc., is essential.
If you’re looking to find potential customers, you must gather audience thoughts and needs through surveys or by observing topics and products frequently discussed on social media.
Advertise on Different Placements
IG advertising offers various placements. If you can choose the advertising format based on the characteristics and advantages of IG placements, your ads will definitely yield certain benefits. For example, Stories have high exposure rates but limited time, so ads must quickly capture the audience’s attention, and adding dynamics and sound effects can enhance the viewing experience. Post story ads can integrate ads into the user interface, increase audience familiarity with brand logos or colors, thereby enhancing brand recognition. There are also features like Explore Ads, which have a high acceptance rate for new things, high user demand for shopping functions, and Reels Ads, suitable for creative and humorous presentations, etc. Whether to use single images, carousels, videos, etc., is worth our further study.
Call to Action (CTA)
CTA guides users to take the next step after viewing the ad, so the call-to-action buttons in ad placements must be clear and attractive to encourage users to click, download, purchase products, etc.
Regularly Track IG Ad Performance
After the ad is placed, it’s essential to regularly track its performance to ensure that the funds invested achieve certain advertising effects. We can check ad performance indicators such as reach, click-through rate, conversion rate, etc., through the backend. If using the Ads Manager, you can access more detailed data. We should observe whether the overall effectiveness meets the expected goals. If not, adjustments or optimizations to the ads are necessary.
Struggling to Craft IG Ad Copy? Let GenApe Handle It
Having read this far, have you mastered how to operate IG ad placements? Don’t worry, I still have a tip for you when it comes to placing ads, and that’s GenApe’s ad copy feature. GenApe is an AI text generation tool that offers templates for various topics including article writing, advertising, multimedia creation, e-commerce, and social media. Among them is the function to generate ad copy. Simply input the post topic, target audience, and other personalized options, and GenApe can automatically generate ad copy for you. It can even create images. Whether it’s for IG ad placement, Facebook, Google, or YouTube, give it a try!
