‘What am I trying to achieve with this campaign?’ This simple question is one of the first and most important factors to consider before advertising on Instagram. Defining concrete goals from the outset is key to creating a successful Instagram ad campaign.The chosen advertising format is ultimately targeted towards an audience and should therefore be appropriate for its intended purpose.
If you have previously used Facebook advertising, getting to grips with Instagram ads should be relatively intuitive. Conceptually, Instagram advertising borrows heavily from Facebook – especially with regard to the goal-oriented approach. To create a new campaign, you must follow a specific goal from the outset. For Instagram ads, the ads manager offers the following goals:
- User interactions: On Instagram, two of the central forms of user interactions are likes (signified by a heart) and comments. Compared to other leading social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, the rate of user engagement is very high on Instagram.
- Brand awareness: Brand awareness can be very difficult to measure in concrete figures, however, the number of followers, posts, and reactions are helpful key figures that give a good indication of a brand’s popularity. Expanding your outreach is therefore key to increasing brand awareness.
- Website clicks: One attribute that is unique to Instagram is the fact that backlinks do not feature in the organic posts. While personal Instagram accounts can only link to a website in the short biography at the top of their profile, with a business profile, companies can create links in their Instagram ads, which can then be placed and monitored.
- App installations and interaction: Rather than link to a website, it’s also possible to use the call to action to link to an app store and use adverts to push app installations. It’s also possible to use this action to subsequently promote more activity in the app.
- Video plays: If your primary aim is to expand the outreach of your videos, you should select ‘video views’ as your campaign goal.
- Website conversions: Using a conversion tracking pixel, you can monitor purchases, downloads, and newsletter registrations on your website. The ad manager allows you to select increasing conversions as your campaign aim.
Not all of the Facebook target definitions are available for or relevant to Instagram advertising, including the targeting of particular groups to increase your follower count. On Facebook, it’s also possible to promote the entire page, rather than just individual posts, whereas Instagram lacks this option. For many, this is an important difference – though a deliberate decision by the developers. The fact that it is not possible to push a page simply by increasing your budget suits Instagram’s dynamic and personal characters, which saw the app grow to a powerful platform with a strong fan base. The Instagram community is under the general understanding that users find new accounts to follow by themselves, which is why the search function and the explore tab are available, and why hashtags are a key element. To build a large following, you need a combination of a strategic approach, appealing images, and the right hashtags. Of course, an effective ad campaign of any kind will also result in new followers.