Creating Instagram Ads

Instagram, for a long time has generously catered to its users by introducing new features, proposed by its users, diligently. Features such as instant messaging, direct image posting and more recently, the ability to spread awareness of your home business though ads.

Instagram is a great place to advertise your small home business since the ads are presented exactly like a regular Instagram post. Therefore, the ad does not interrupt the user’s browsing allowing you to show off your product without the bad bias that traditional ads have. This approach may have been inspired by users who originally posted pictures to their Instagram accounts solely to promote their home business.

Instagram also makes it super easy to create your own ads, but you will have to venture out of the Instagram app an onto the Facebook Business manager platform. For a while now Facebook has owned Instagram allowing the ad creating tool to be easily accessible for both Facebook and Instagram user alike. What does this mean for you? Now you can not only link your Facebook business page to your Instagram account but also have the ads you created displayed on both sites. Additionally, this localized platform lets you manage payment, duration and reach of your ad on both sites in one place, allowing you to manage your home business with ease.

Step 1: Getting Started

As mentioned earlier, since Facebook owns Instagram you must first create a Facebook page for your organization. After this, you may create a business profile on Instagram so you can start advertising. Before you try to put up any ads, here are some steps you need to follow.

1. Choose a format

There are four types of ad formats on Instagram: photos, videos, carousel sand stories. Videos and stories are harder to work with since they must show value quickly before users lose interest. Carousel ads require interaction and can be complicated to design. Overall, photo ads are the best form of advertising on Instagram because they are simple, cost effective and can easily capture the attention of users.

2. Create the ad

To create an ad, all you have to do is create a post within the Instagram app and promote it. However, you don’t have as much control when using this method in terms of targeting specific audiences. As such, it would be better to use Facebook’s Ads Manager or Power Editor since you would be able to do the same thing while having more advanced options at your disposal.

3. Select an audience

When creating an ad through the Ads Manager or Power Editor, it is also possible to customize the audience the ad will be exposed to. Targeting a smaller, more focused group is more effective in terms of making you more money because the ad will be more relevant that group. To achieve this, you can manually create an audience of potential customers you want to target by defining certain parameters for a variety of categories. These categories include location, demographics, interests and behaviors. You can also select the Lookalike Audience option, which will result in the ad automatically targeting people who are similar to your existing customers to make things more expedient for you if you don’t want to manually define a custom target audience.

4. Publish the ad

Once you are done with all of this, you need to figure out how much money you are willing to spend on advertising and the length of time you want your ad to run. Larger audiences, longer run-time and a more complicated ad format will result in higher costs. However, once you have this sorted out you can publish the ad on Instagram and wait for approval. Once this process is complete, Instagram will notify you that your ad is now in circulation.

In conclusion, now you should have a basic idea of how to create Instagram ads and use them somewhat effectively. To learn how to further maximize your ad’s effectiveness, you will need to learn more advanced techniques that are specified below.

Here is a short video that explains in detail the steps above.

Step 2: Tips for Getting Good: Maximizing Ads and Revenue

Once your ad is set up it’s time to optimize it and leverage Instagram‘s utility. Most organisations realize the potential in using Instagram as a marketing tool but may overlook the small little things that make a difference in maximizing ad reach and revenue. Below are a few tips that may help improve the outreach of ads and in turn generate more revenue.

1. Creative Ads

After ads have been created, their content and their captions substantially contribute to engagement. Having a caption that entices the target market to engage makes a large difference in how much engagement that ad is going to get. An example would be to have a caption that says, "Tag a friend who needs this the most". Undoubtedly, this leads to more people tagging friends and in turn increasing the number of people that get to see the ad. The very same could be said about the actual images used in the ad. Usually, lifestyle images tend to lead to greater engagement.

2. Instagram Analytics

Instagram analytics is a very special tool that allows you to see how your ad is doing and the demographics of the audience engaging with your ad. It also gives insight into the best times to post ads. This allows you to tweak your ads accordingly and post them at times where there are most likely to be seen. To access analytics all you have to do is to login into your Instagram, go to settings, choose campaign, select analytics and you will have access to all the stats

3. Third Party Plugins

Sometimes analytics might not be enough to get you quality engagement. This is where third-party plugins come in. They give you access to features beyond Instagram analytics. An example would be SocialBakers. It’s used to find out which topics are trending the most and how long they have been trending for. This allows you to catch the wave and make use of other user trends in order to beat your competition. The steps to using third-party plugins are usually pretty much the same. The first step would be to pick a plugin of your choice and go to their site. Choose the login with Instagram option on the plugin homepage, from there click the authorize app option, enter your details and boom. From there you have access to all these other features

Now that you know how to maximize your outreach with Creative Ads, Analytics and Third-Party plugins use them. They will definitely give your ads a boost.

Step 3: Final Notes

As shown above it is simple to set up an account, to create, distribute and manage Instagram ads on the Facebook business manager platform. Advertising your business is simple and easy. This method allows you to reach many different Instagram and Facebook users without the complexity of different mediums and the stigma of traditional ads.

If you are interested in additional features that the Facebook Business Manager offers follow this link to another Instructable on Instagram analytics.

Similarly, if you are looking to advertise your business on Twitter follow this link another Instructable on Twitter Ad Campaign.