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Over the years, Instagram has seen a meteoric rise in popularity. To put this into context, as of 2022, Instagram has 2.9 billion visits per month.
As billions of people have the Instagram app on their smart phones and other devices, more and more businesses are choosing to invest in these social media ads.
If you’re interested in using Instagram ads as a business, it’s likely you’ll be looking for some tips to help you along your journey and to maximise engagement.
Below are 4 Instagram ad tips for businesses:
The first tip to consider when it comes to Instagram ads is to make sure that you’re promoting your best content.
You don’t want to post some of your least engaging content, so go back through your content and pick out a few posts that did well in terms of engagement.
Once you’ve found organic content that you know gained lots of attention in the past, you can repurpose these particular posts as ads to gain engagement from a wider audience.
While some ads are likely to be more successful than others, this doesn’t mean that you can’t start with something strong that you already know your audience has responded well to in the past.
This might sound like a simple tip, but it’s hugely important to avoid making your ads seem like ads.
Your audience is smart, and ads can feel forced if you don’t take the right approach. As a result, you need to be creating posts that feel as organic as possible.
This comes down to the fact that your audience is much more likely to engage with your ad if it seems natural, and not like you’re consistently shoving an ad in their face or trying to make them buy something.
You’ll want to ensure that your Instagram ads aren’t too dissimilar or too far of a departure from what you’d normally post.
This will ensure that your ad will appear seamlessly on your target audience’s feed, and provided it’s relevant to them, it won’t stick out too much as an ad.
This is why it’s crucial to carefully plan your ads, ensuring that you have other organic content that have a similar theme and seamlessly work in line with your ad that is also ready to post.
In addition to this, you should be sure to create both image and video content and remain consistent, as this will help to drive your engagement up.
It’s important to create authentic content that aligns with your brand regardless of what you choose to include in your posts. Provided you’re authentic and consistent, it won’t take long to see an increase in engagement.
Another tip is to ensure that your ad is targeting your audience specifically.
When it comes to ads on Instagram, the app has a potential reach of 1.48 billion. That’s a lot of people to potentially appeal to, so make sure that you really narrow down your target audience to appeal to them.
Instagram draws on data available within Facebook’s ad platform, making it easier for you to target your audience in the Instagram app.
There are features that can help this, including Remarketing and Custom and Lookalike Audiences.
Facebook features a pixel that can be used for both tracking visitor behaviour on your website as well as ad targeting. With this data, you have the ability to create a custom Instagram ad audience that consists solely of people who have previously visited your website.
This helps you to get your ads in front of people who have visited your website, but didn’t buy anything and potentially win them back.
The lookalike audience feature gives you the ability to create a custom audience for your ad that essentially replicates your existing followers. As a result, this can help to bring in new customers who are very similar to your current audience.
Last, but not least, is to use the image carousels to tell your audience a story.
Instagram allows you the option of multiple images on a carousel for your audience to browse. If your ad is trying to sell either a product or service to them, try to use the images to tell your audience a story.
This way, you’ll grab your audience’s attention and will retain their interest throughout the carousel.
In addition to this, provided that you select images that represent how the product or service can impact their lives in some way, people are more likely to connect with the content.
In turn, this will make them more likely to buy into your business and brand, as well as your products.
Hopefully these tips are useful and will help you in creating your first Instagram ad as a business.
We are Aura Ads, an ecommerce ad service designed for D2C eCommerce brands. We help clients sell more online and grow at scale with our bespoke video and static creative delivered on a monthly basis. For more tips and tricks from our experts, head over to our blog page.
Written by Jemima Thomas for Aura Ads.
With up to 70% of campaign performance rooted in ad creative, we believe in the power of a creative-led growth strategy for your digital channels.
