Instagram Advertising: How to Create Successful Ad Campaigns

Updated October 6, 2023
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A large part of advertising on social media is about being visible to the right people at the right time. By advertising on Instagram, you have the opportunity to do just that.

Instagram has proven to be one of the largest and fastest-growing social networks. The rate at which it’s growing is astounding and in 2021, Instagram boasts of over 1.074 billion users worldwide.

Instagram promotion allows you to create unique audiences and by telling visual stories through various ad formats, it helps you grow your brand exposure, the website traffic and generate new leads.

In this guide, we discuss Instagram advertising and how to create successful ad campaigns.

Set Specific Objectives

When you’re about to create an Instagram ad campaign, first you need to choose the objective behind it. A campaign cannot obtain the proper promotion if you fail at setting clearly defined goals. This is essential and you need to match the budget, draw up the right plan to achieve campaign success.

Brand awareness: Perfect for reaching users who would like to engage with your ad and bring brand awareness.

Reach: This is ideal for brands that are doing their best to get ads before more people.

Engagement: If you wish to see users like, comment, or chare your ad, setting your objective to engagement is important.

App installs: This is used by brands to direct users to the app store to download and purchase apps.

Video views: Ads play in feeds of users and show product launches, footage, production to visually entice users into watching.

Lead Generation: By setting a lead generation objective, you will have an easier time finding people curious about your brand.

Messages: This will serve as a way to encourage users to interact with your brand to answer questions about the product, offer support, or complete purchases.

Conversions: If you want to achieve direct sales actions on your ads, conversions are an excellent objective for you.

Catalog sales: This will promote sales from your online store catalog.

Traffic: For those who promote multiple business locations, this is an excellent choice for driving in-store visits and supports all Instagram ad types.

Be wise when picking your objectives as they’re crucial when developing a good plan.

If, for instance, you create a messages ad for an Instagram placement, chances are that your ad will be denied. In addition, you don’t want to waste your ad budget by choosing one that makes no sense with the ad’s content.

Name Your Instagram Ad Campaign

After selecting your ad objective, go to the campaign’s name section and name your campaign with an intention as the best way to keep track of your ads within the Instagram ads manager. There’s also an option to use the default name that appears.

You can include elements such as target location, or creative type, as it will make it easier to identify different campaigns and track their performance.

Choose Your Ad Placements

Choose Your Ad Placements

Image: forbes.com

Two options for placing ads are provided by the Facebook Ads Manager. The first is the automatic one where ads are displayed across multiple properties whereas the second one is the manual option which allows the properties to be chosen individually where they’ll appear. Regarding Instagram ads, the Instagram-only properties ought to be checked in the manual placement sections.

Set A Reasonable Budget

At first, it’s difficult to know exactly how much you need to spend on an Instagram ad campaign. You learn gradually, but it is best to move carefully. Run a few less expensive ads in the beginning to get a feel for what works for your business. You can always spend more in the future while benefiting from your past lessons.

You can set a specific cost for each ad and not exceed the amount. This makes it the most accessible advertising platform, no matter how small or large your budget is.

Test Campaign and Measure

Choose Your Ad Placements

Unsplash

Test how effective your Instagram ad is before running it. Conduct a test and observe one element at a time as it can be costly, time-consuming, and confusing if you try to run too many tests at once.

As with everything, the key to long-term success is to analyze the results. Identify measurement points for the Instagram campaign, start measuring, and then evaluate how the advertisement presents based on the purpose of the campaign.

Final Thoughts

Today, it’s more important than ever to be seen on social media. It’s not enough to regularly post status updates to reach your target group – the organic spread needs to be supplemented with proper advertising to achieve full effect.

Instagram is therefore perfect for advertising as it holds great potential and helps brands and businesses reach new heights.

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