Make Sure Your Instagram Advertising Strategy is ON-POINT!
You know the saying, “There’s no time like the present!” Well, this could not be more true. ESPECIALLY when it comes to leveling up your advertising game on Insta. Now is a GREAT time to test out the waters. But, make sure you have these things outlined first.
Let me start out by saying it is SO easy to waste money on Instagram adverting. Facebook owns Instagram. And as a business, they want and NEED to make money on advertisers. So, they’ve set up a platform that walks you through how to advertise on Instagram, but remember, they’ve set up that platform. Is it surprising that the way they walk you through setting up ads makes it so they can easily make money? Obviously not. In an attempt to get the best bang-for-your-buck, here are five key areas to focus on: Objective, audience, ad types, copy/messaging/your offer and your creative.
Objective: So before doing anything in marketing you need to establish your objective. That may look a little different for everyone. Some good examples are to drive online traffic, gain followers, increase sales, re-engage past customers, gain email addresses, etc. My personal favorite two are increase sales and re-engage past customers (because if they’ve bought from you before, they’ll buy from you again!)
Establish your audience: You could advertise to your past/current customers. (Which is a great audience.) You can also upload lists of email addresses of folks you want to advertise to. You’re going to want to tie in that audience obviously with your objective. For example, if your goal is to increase sales, you probably are going to want to do past customers AND a new targeted audience. Instagram has some great targeting options. You can get really specific here, but I always like to advise folks to target based off of other big brands comparable to yours that you know your clients probably like or shop at, OR based off of publications they read. This works well for older audiences IF they are reading trending publications. It’s really going to vary, but you want to try to keep it broad but also very specific and unique to your audience, helpful I know. You can also create a look alike audience. This is great to use in combination with your customer list. You can target your customers and “look a like audience” which is other folks who have profiles comparable to your current customers.
Ad types: As you know, if you’ve been on Instagram there are a lot of different ad types. For example, there are in feed ads, story ads, marketplace ads, message ads, carousel ads, etc. You’re going to pick your ad type based off of your objective and your audience. Consider this: Where is your audience more likely to see your ad based off of how they interact with the platform? & Where are they likely to take the action you’re asking them to do?
Copy & Offer: You want to be a couple things here: concise, clear, action oriented, enticing, comical, & have a CLEAR call to action (ex: buy now, discount, free shipping, etc.)
Your Creative: Showcase product vs lifestyle, user generated content. There are so many ways to get creative with this. For example, use carousel for breaking up the picture or doing multiple products, videos like mini tv ads, or flashing through products. I want to stress something here: Now a days you don’t have to have something high production, can shoot on your phone or use templates in Canva! (We LOVE Canva here at Local 44 North.)
These are five areas to focus on for leveling up your Instagram ad game! But, like everything we do in marketing…..make sure you stay analyzing, and optimizing what is working versus what isn’t. By doing this, you can make necessary changes needed to stay on-point!
