Some of you might have noticed that recently Instagram allowed its users to advertise. It is great opportunity for businesses that are present in social media, as Insta has over 400 million users, and therefore become one of the world’s biggest mobile advertising platforms.
Here are a few things you should know if you are interested in advertising on Instagram:
1.You can create ads by Facebook Power Editor tool or through Instagram’s Ads API partners, eg. Hootsuite.
In Power Editor you can create ad for Instagram even if you don’t have account there, however:
– ad on Instagram will show your Facebook’s fanpage name and profile photo as your Insta user name, but it’ll be grayed out and won’t be clickable,
– you have no option to answer for comments on your ad.
2. There are three types of ads you can create: Image Ads, Video Ads and Carousel Ads.
Image Ads can have 1:1 or 1.9:1 (landscape) image ratio. The caption length is up to 300 characters, however 125 characters are recommended.
There is also Call-to-action button so you can drive traffic directly to your website, not only IG account. You can choose between: Book Now, Contact Us, Download, Learn More, Shop Now, Sign Up and Watch More.
Video Ads also can have square or landscape format, and can last up to 30 seconds! I believe it is great option. I felt like in 15 seconds you can’t say/show too much, but 30 seconds are decent.
Carousel Ads are like Image Ads, but you can have several photos and swipe to see them.
3. As Instagram is Facebook-owned company it has the same targeting options – meaning very specific!
You can target by age, gender, localization, interests or even create your own Custom Audience. Custom Audience is list of people you already know, for example your clients. Facebook matches list of your customers emails with IG accounts and makes your audience. Then you can also make audience that is similar to your clients.
I would also like to show you example of Instagram ad by Maybelline and their results. Maybelline wanted to “raise the profile of eyebrow cosmetics in Australia, increase brand awareness, message association and product sales.”
As Aurelie de Cremiers, Marketing Director of Maybelline New York, said “Women are already using Instagram for beauty advice and inspiration, especially when it comes to new looks and trends. As a visual and creative platform, Instagram allows us to engage authentically with our customers while also profiling our products. It’s a great match for us.”
What were the results? Check it out.
“By inspiring women to consider eyebrows as part of their daily makeup routine, the campaign drove a 16-point lift in brand awareness of Maybelline Brow Drama, a lift in message association and as part of the brand’s overall media mix, achieved a 2.4x uplift on Maybelline Brow product sales.”
What do you think about advertising on Instagram? Would you give it a try for your business? Maybe you have already tried it?
I will definitely try it for my future business purposes, as Instagram has 400 million highly engaged users (this number is constantly growing), and mobile marketing is one of the most important marketing channels.
Sources of information and photos:
https://business.instagram.com/advertising/
https://business.instagram.com/?section=casestudies#caseStudies
http://instagram-static.s3.amazonaws.com/case_studies/Instagram%20Maybelline%20Case%20Study%20FINAL.pdf
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/976240832426180
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251651
Video Ads on service dedicated to photo-sharing?
it’s still all about visual experience, but there is motion and sound additionally. i believe u can convey more with video than with one photo. it of course depends on concept of the campaign, but i like the possibility of posting video. for example it can be great for story-telling. also video’s are becoming more and more popular among Insta users, so I think its important way of communication with them as well.
Form the user’s side – don’t u think it is annoying? Moreover, eventually they will offer u a relief from ads for “small fee” 🙂
so far, for me, it’s not annoying, you can easily skip it, it does not pop-out etc. but of course it’s only my perception 😉
i also don’t think they’ll want ‘small fee’ from users when they can have ‘huge fee’ from advertisers (they are taking money for possibility of targeting ad to specific audience in huge community, so they don’t want to decrease number of potential target audience – hope i am clear ;)). at least Facebook has not given such possibility so far, and Instagram is FB-owned company, using the same advertising tools.
Wow, I did not know, that I can switch it off – need to do it 🙂
Instagram? great tool for advertising. I use it also for my work and it’s a really useful and powerful tool. For instance on Instagram, you can sell a “Lifestyle”, make people following you because they like what you do in your everyday life. The way you advertise is different, more personal. We as a duo, advertise our activity in music production, djing etc. Simply thanks to Hashtags we have access to thousands of people with the same interests in music, production and so on. It’s a really fast process and it’s not for me something surprising that companies use it too.
I think it is great for advertisers, however so annoying for users. It’s ok if they use hashtags so that when someone is particularly interested in that notion they can find your picture. But I really hate the fact that they are spamming my wall 🙁 is it going to become a second spam space like Facebook?
Instagram ads are absolutely annoying. I will never pay attention to the advertisers’ pages.