Have You Grown Your Audience Enough?
The biggest problem people encounter when making Instagram ads and why they do not result in anything is because they do not realize the one component that makes these viable.
Your existing audience.
So, if you are trying to use these ads to grow your audience because you only have 50 followers, you will most likely spend a lot of cash on little results.
The best targeting method for Instagram ads is going to be targeting people like your current audience. Remember, people want to follow pages who others are already following. Therefore, it is best to try to find people to follow you first before making and ad.
Ok, now that we have that out of the way, here is how to create your first ad.
Step 1: Select The Post To Promote
Instagram is different in that you must first make a post and it be seen on your feed before you can promote it.
The good thing about this is that the more likes and comments you have on the post prior to making it into an ad, the more likely your ad will succeed.
Why?
There needs to be proof that something is worth investing time to look at.
A product claiming to be the best must have been at least liked and commented 100 times right? If not 1000 times!
Get some attention on your post and get those likes and comments in before promoting it and you will see it becomes easier to grab the attention of others.
Hit the blue promote button to get started.
P.S. Before running the promotion, make sure to remove all hashtags or only leave 1-2. It has been shown that ads with high hashtag counts perform poorly compared to those that do not have them.
Step 2: What Is The Objective?
When people click the ad's button, where do you want them to go?
Your Profile - more potential followers
A Website - more traffic and leads
Your Messages - more interaction
Some frequently asked questions I get that I am going to answer now are:
Can I make a button to have people like my page? No
Will these go out to Facebook as well? No
Can I send these just to the stories on Instagram and not the feed? No.
You see, Instagram ads are limited in capabilities. They work well if you have a great following and if your page has been active for sometime.
If you would like more control on the ads and placements, the best thing to do is to run your ads through Facebook ads.
Step 3: Choose Your Audience or Automatic Audience
In this section you have the option of creating your new audience or targeting automatically people like your followers.
This is powerful on the algorithm if you have a blog page for travel, food or electronics.
Instagram would know the people who have those similar interests and are likely to follow you as a result of it.
The second option is to create your own audience, which I will be guiding you on.
Hit the create your own section and it will guide you then to create a new audience based on location and
interests of the Instagram user.
Step 4: Select the Area
The first part of your new audience is based on the locations you pick for the ad to be shown in.
You can either go with local results or regional. In local, you will select an address is it will go to your location and then you set up a radius.
This option is best to be used when trying to gain local business. Just keep in mind, people are not really on Instagram to buy.
So with that in mind, if you are selling fencing services around the house, don't show the wood. Show a beautiful house with an incredible fence and maybe add some idea as to what it would cost.
Make the ad and the words attractive. People are looking for attractive things on Instagram.
For regional results, you can select multiple states or cities to show the ad. Great for manufacturers or product placement ads.
Step 5: Customer Interests
As you can see in the picture to the left, we have selected some general interests for a business group,
As you select some interests, Instagram will recommend other ones. It can be difficult to choose the correct ones, because little is known about how Instagram categorizes each interest based on the person.
For example, the top two we have chosen have been great. As anyone interested in business or entrepreneurship is general responsive to our ads. However, small business and home business could mean the person is interested in buying from these types of business, but has no interest in start one themselves.
Take a little extra time on this section. Once your ad goes live on Instagram, you cannot go back an change the audience.
Step 6: Age and Gender
Pretty self explanatory right?
Here is what we have found with age. The more you market to a younger crowd, the more likely you are to get engagement.
However, the young generation does not typically buy right away.
If you are selling a product for home owners, you might not want to skip over this part and be marketing to the 13 - 18 year old crowd.
Similar, should you be selling women's clothing, it would not do you that much well to market your ad to men.
Step 7: Budget
I actually prefer the way that Instagram does their ads budget.
One thing that they do not do is allow you to run a continuous promotion. Which is a shame, because if an ad is doing really well, you will need to continue to re-promote every time your ad ends.
To set your budget, select the slider for the dollar amount to a daily amount you are looking to spend and then adjust the duration slider below.
It will give you the estimated reach it believes you will get based on the dollar amount and time you put.
Once you have set a budget that fits with your monthly marketing allowance, move to the next step.
Step 8: Final Review
Now you have to ask yourself, is this the ad I want to put out?
Sometimes you will need to pull the trigger and see the results.
You wont play the piano beautifully on the first try. Similarly, you need to craft this skill on ads.
Consider that people might not login Instagram daily, so running an ad for two days might not reach your potential audience.
The longer people are exposed to the same ad, the more the are likely to click on it.
We may be sparked in curiosity, but not click. However, by the fourth time seeing the same ad, we need to know why it keeps showing up and why so many people have liked and commented.
Final Words: Instagram Ads For Business
These can be extremely powerful and easy to use. Once you have a dedicated following of people who are loyal to you, these ads can push you to the next level.
We have seen companies who have a following of people who constantly comment and interact with their posts put out and ad and have it reach millions due to the popularity of the original post.
Learn to leverage these properly and your competitors will be left wondering why they keep wasting their money on ads while every single one of yours brings in new customers.
Questions? Send us an email to themarketinghunters@gmail.com.
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