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Instagram Ads – the complete guide to get you started!
To maximise your visibility on Instagram, you need a solid advertising strategy. Find out in this guide how to launch your first Instagram Ads campaign.
How does it work?
Instagram,
what is it used for?
2 billion users use the Instagram app every month to share content, discover new products, or follow their favourite influencers. Making the most of the power of this social network requires an effective Instagram strategy, but also the diffusion of Instagram Ads campaigns.
With both organic and paid reach, your visibility grows, along with knowledge of your products and services, making it easy to boost your sales.
What are the objectives of Instagram Ads?
Instagram campaigns have three main kinds of objective: awareness, consideration, and conversions, each with its own sub-objectives. For an awareness campaign, you’ll have the choice of building brand awareness or maximising the reach of your posts.
With a consideration campaign, you can drive traffic to your website, increase interactions, encourage app downloads, maximise video views, generate leads via forms, or connect with potential customers via direct messages. In a conversion campaign, you can make sales through your catalogue, build traffic at the point of sale, or simply encourage users to purchase your product.
Which CTA for Instagram Ads?
Instagram offers various CTAs to prompt users to take action when they see your ads. There are a total of 17 different buttons available, including: ‘contact us’, ‘download’, ‘order’, or ‘buy and book’.
Depending on your business and your objectives, you may want to encourage the user to buy using the ‘Buy’ button or to discover more about your business with the ‘Learn More’ button.
Where should you run your Instagram ads?
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Home Feed
One of the key placements for your ads. As the user scrolls, they will see your ad (in photo, carousel, or video format) appear natively.
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Stories
A great place to display more creative and interactive ads. As the user scrolls through stories, they will see your ads appear through Instagram Ads.
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Explore
Allows users to discover posts that may be of interest to them. This tab utilises the user’s browsing habits to offer relevant content.
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Reels
The trendy format that now has its own dedicated tab. This playful format, which is based on a number of trends, makes it easier to showcase products.
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Instagram Shop
Allows users to purchase products with the Shopping tag. You can promote a specific product or your entire shop with ease.
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Over 500M
active accounts
every day -
61%
of users
are between 16 and 34 years old -
Over 1Bn
users per month
are reached by Instagram Ads through Stories
What are the advantages of Instagram Ads?
Engaged communities
Instagram Ads gives you the opportunity to create a strong bond with your customers and thus develop an authentic community. Through this, your customers gradually become spokespersons for your company and can be used as free ambassadors.
By partnering with influencers, you’ll also be able to reach specific and dedicated communities, who are likely to trust a specialist in fields such as fashion, beauty, or interior design.
Boosted visibility
Running ads on Instagram allows you to reach new people who do not necessarily know your brand or your products. This gives you an additional acquisition channel which, depending on your objectives, allows you to boost web traffic, maximise interactions, and even generate sales.
Thanks to the numerous targeting options, you can target a specific audience or introduce your brand to a larger number of people.
Creative formats
Instagram Ads allows you to be creative using a variety of different formats. Whether it’s a carousel explaining the history of your brand or a punchy story to announce an exclusive offer, there are countless options at your disposal to engage users.
A conversion lever
Instagram is a great lever for your marketing strategy, boasting a strong presence when it comes to product discovery and recommendation. It helps 81% of users decide to buy a product or service.
An influencer promoting your product following a set strategy will allow you to increase your sales and, in turn, your ROI.
Instagram Ads: how to create your strategy
Growing your Instagram page includes posting regularly on your account, as well also posting ads. To make your Instagram marketing strategy effective, you’ll need to clearly set out the different steps of your strategy.
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Step 1
Define your goals
You need to start by thinking about what you want to get out of Instagram. New followers, post interactions, increased visibility, or more purchases on your website? Awareness, acquisition, or loyalty, the choice is yours.
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Step 2
Target your audience
Your Instagram strategy will only be successful if you know who you are targeting. You should define your main audience as well as those you wish to develop. This means identifying your targets and creating your personas. This will allow you to know how well-adapted your content is to your target audience.
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Step 3
Adapt the format to your objective
Instagram Ads offers different advertising formats. Depending on your objectives, a video may be more effective than a simple photo. You should always think about the impact your content will have on the user, varying the formats used and identifying which are the most impactful.
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Step 4
Tell stories
On Instagram, engaging content and storytelling are the order of the day. Allowing you to bring users into your world. Your values, teams, passion, or inspirations can be presented in a unique way, creating an attachment to your brand.
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Step 5
Be creative
Whether you want to make photo montages, funny or playful videos, or follow the latest trends on Reels, Instagram highlights creative and original content. By carefully defining your editorial line, you can stand out from the competition and bring your own style to the table.
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Step 6
Experiment and learn
As you go through your advertising campaigns, it is important to analyse the different results in order to learn from them. If a certain ad performs much better than others and has reasonable acquisition costs, consider reusing this model for other products and services.
Advertising:
Instagram or Facebook Ads?
Instagram Ads
- Sleek visuals
- Impact of images over text
- Younger target audience, notable Millenials
- Audience looking for inspiration
- Limitations of some ad formats
VS
Facebook Ads
- Visuals must be direct
- Editorialisation of ads is essential
- Older target audience, ideal for seniors
- Audience wants to be informed and have information quickly
- More ad formats available
Our Commitment
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Expertise
Since 2010, we have worked with over 2000 clients across 90 countries.
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Passion
We are a team of passionate, industry-focused individuals who are committed to your success.
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Performance
We’re committed to implementing a data-driven strategy, making a real impact on your bottom line by providing avenues for growth.
Any questions?
Instagram Ads is easy to learn. Before starting to create and optimise ads, it’s important to think about your advertising strategy.
What’s your goal? What’s your budget? What visuals and descriptions should you use? It’s important to think about these things beforehand.
The target audience must also be specific: is it for new customers, remarketing, or people who visited your site two days ago? The advantage is that any company anywhere in the world can use Instagram Ads.
To create and distribute your Instagram Ads campaigns, you must go through Facebook’s Ads Manager. You will then need to link your Instagram Ads account to your Facebook Ads account, and it’s from the latter that you will choose your objectives, formats, and be able to test different combinations of visuals and texts to fine-tune your audience.
If you have a professional Instagram account, you’ll be able to set up your ad campaigns directly through the app. While this is a convenient option, it is limited in terms of formats and audiences.
Instagram relies on a variety of formats to meet the needs of advertisers and engage users.
- Photo: Displayed in square, landscape, or vertical format, an image allows you to showcase your products and services.
- Video: With a minimum resolution of 1080 x 1080 pixels, videos allow you to capture users’ attention quickly with striking visuals and sound!
- Carousel: To show off the benefits of a product or a collection of products, the carousel format displays up to 10 images and videos, each with its own link.
- Collection: This format is available in the Home Feed and Stories and allows for immersive discovery and purchasing of products. It features a cover image followed by three product images.
- Stories: These are displayed without time limits and appear in between the various organic stories viewed by the user.
- Reels: This creative format is displayed in the Home Feed as a post or in a dedicated tab.
- Instagram Shop: This shopping feature allows users to explore, discover, and purchase directly from the advertisers’ page. These ads appear in the Home Feed and the Shop tab.
