With millions of new and active users joining every month, Instagram has become the biggest platform for doing brand promotion and building strong relations with its customer base. Instagram provides a robust foundation for advertisers to tell their brand stories in the virtual world using various ad formats. In recent years Instagram has given higher ROI to businesses as compared to other online channels.
There is no doubt that no matter how good a brand offers the products/services if it doesn’t have an online presence then it does not exist. There are so many people who keep checking their Instagram throughout the day to learn the latest happenings around the world, businesses and of course within their social network. This gives a bright opportunity to all the companies to make use of such a large pool of audience for promoting their brands and running successful businesses.
Just like Facebook ads services, a company can choose the right audience for its brand, the right type of ad format, clear brand message, the right location and the right time to run paid ad campaigns on Instagram.
As a business owner if you want to enhance brand awareness, build a new customer base, grow brand followers, and increase sales, then this blog is for you. In this blog, you will learn everything about doing paid promotions on Instagram.
What is meant by paid promotions on Instagram?
Instagram paid promotions to allow the advertisers to convert their normal insta stories, posts, or highlights into sponsored ones by paying fees. Such posts get a tag of sponsored at the left top corner to make it stand out among the organic posts.
By using Instagram paid promotion feature, advertisers can add a CTA button in their posts/stories that can be clicked or swiped. Today many companies are using this feature by selecting their budget, targeted audience, duration of the ad promotion, demographics, etc. to increase their brand visibility and audience size.
Key differentiators between Instagram paid ads and Instagram ads
Instagram ads and Instagram paid ads both work in a direction to promote a brand, strike a good engagement rate, and fetch business leads. But the key differences between both are given below.
1) Promoting post: Instagram promotions only boost the existing post’s visibility whereas Instagram ads require creating a post from the scratch and launching the same using ad manager.
2) Targeting audience: The promotion feature on Instagram allows advertisers to choose their audience based on demographics. Instagram ads give detailed selection options to target the audience based on their behaviour, demographics and interests.
How Instagram paid advertising work?
In this section, you will learn about promoting paid campaigns on Instagram. But the only thing to keep in mind is, only business account holders can use the promotion feature on Instagram. So if you have not yet opened your business account on Instagram then create one before further reading this section. To convert your existing account into a business account simply follow these steps.
- Login to your account and click on the profile icon at the bottom
- Click on the burger at the top right to go to settings
- In settings, click on ‘Account’ followed by ‘Business account’ at the bottom of the page
How to promote paid ads on Instagram?
To start promoting paid ads on your Instagram, first, find the best-performing post on your account for this trial run and follow the steps given below.
- Go to your Instagram profile by clicking on the profile icon at the bottom right. After this on your profile page click on ‘Promotions’
- Under ‘Promotions’ you will find best-performing posts of your, you can either choose one of them or any post of your choice by simply tapping on the post icon.
- After selecting the post, choose options like ‘More profile visit’. ‘More website visits’, and ‘More messages. You can choose any as per your goal. For ‘more website visits, you will be asked to give your business website’s URL. Once you select your option you will be directed to the next steps.
- In this step, you can choose your audience by selecting their demographics or the ‘Automatic’ option so that Instagram will find a newer audience for your brand with similar profiles to your current customer base.
- In this step, You can toggle the slider to select the budget amount and duration of the promotion before launching paid ad.
- Finally, before launching the ad, you can review it and then click on ‘Create promotion’. Once it is done your post will be tagged as ‘under review’, and you will be notified by Instagram once it reviews your post and promote the same on Instagram.
- After promoting the paid ad, you can click on the ‘insight’ option to know how your post is doing in terms of profile visits, engagement, likes, comments, shares, and savings.