The Benefits of Instagram Ads
There are more than 800 million users on Instagram and 500 million of them are active. 60 percent of those active users discover brands and products through Instagram, and 75 percent of them take action due to it. Here are are the benefits of turning that brand awareness into a potential sale through Instagram ads!
Did you know that 65% of top-performing Instagram posts feature products? With more than half of the most engaging posts being product features, what’s the harm in adding a CTA? Instagram ads allow you to benefit from a potential sale using a method that doesn’t disrupt your feed. The ad is planted on your timeline and between images/videos of those accounts you follow. There have been times where I’ve scrolled right past an ad and mistook it for a person I follow’s post. If the ad is aesthetically pleasing enough and falls in line with the images your target audience is interested in, then it will not disrupt the flow of their feed and will most likely draw them in to engage with your ad.
You have the option of a photo ad, video ad, carousel ad, or an Instastory ad. A photo ad uses one photo, one caption and one call-to-action. A video ad is up to 60 seconds of video content, one caption and a call-to action. Carousel ads include a swipe-through feature of photos or videos, which can make for a storytelling feel. Instastory ads appear between the user’s stories and are full-screen video/photo ads.
We recommend using creative and eye-catching video content for your ads that run no longer than 30 seconds! When it comes to any social media platform, it’s no secret that videos have a higher performance rate than single photos. According to Sprout Social, “Video ads are most effective at getting higher engagement rates but tend to cost a bit more than photo ads.” We advise you to use aesthetically pleasing and creative videos in your ads to ensure engagement.
Since Facebook got a hold of Instagram, they have made it a point to crossover many of their features. One being choosing a target audience for your Instagram ads. This feature allows you to pinpoint the audience that your ad is intended for. You can specify by demographic, location, behaviors, interests, and more. Further guaranteeing your sale and a successful promotion. This is basically the cheat code to sales. Picking exactly who you want to get your product in front of will take away from the used car salesman feeling that we get from most other methods of advertisement.
Here’s the fun part, paying for your promotion. You can choose to run your Instagram ad on an impression basis (CPM) or pay-per-engagement (CPC). A CPM stands for cost per thousand. The minimum to run on a CPM is $5 to $6, which means you are guaranteed 1,000 impressions. To run a CPC (cost per click) ad, the average cost is between $0.56 and $0.72. This benefit allows you to know what you are getting for your money. If you’ve narrowed your target audience down to exactly who will engage with your product, the cost of the ad will eventually pay for itself.
Instagram offers low minimum budgets which make their ads affordable to small businesses. They also offer a slough of ad formats and types of content to push. The ideal target audience for this platform are millennials, but your ad can travel further than that demographic (as we mentioned before with 75% of users telling someone they know about the brand/product). If your brand can produce visually appealing content with a niche in aesthetic, you’re more than halfway through to a successful Instagram ad. Be sure to make the caption interesting enough to draw the consumer in without making them feel like you’re trying to win them over. LET THE IMAGES SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES, you just sprinkle in the details in the caption.
Good luck!
Fun fact: Pizza is considered the most Instagrammed food globally so be sure to incorporate that somewhere in your promo. Just kidding. Ok, not really.
