A Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Instagram

If you’re reading this article about Instagram chances are you don’t have a business manager.

Before getting started with the creation and set up of your ad, you will first need to set up a Facebook business page, this is because Instagram ads are created using Facebook’s Ad Manager tool.

Set your objective

Your ad set up starts with you setting the objective of your advertising campaign, allowing you to decide what you want people to do when they see your ad. The Facebook Ad manager tool offers numerous advertising objectives to help you reach your business goals.

• Awareness – Raising awareness of your Brand
• Consideration – Finding Potential Customers
• Conversions – Sales Driven

TARGET AUDIENCE

If you’re brand new to Instagram advertising, you might not know who your target audience is just yet. That’s okay—you’ll learn more about your audience over time. However, the last thing you want to do is blow your budget on ads that aren’t relevant to the people seeing them.

It’s smart to plan your Instagram ad campaigns with a clearly-defined audience in mind. Begin with your core marketing persona. There’s no need to add nuance yet—that will come once you begin digging into your Instagram insights and analytics. For now, keep your marketing persona simple.

If you’ve been on Instagram a while, you can check your analytics to find out who your audience is. You can also create a Custom Audience based on people who have been interacting with your business already.

BUDGET

Instagram budgeting works similarly to Facebook and Google advertising, so if you’re familiar with those platforms this should not be overly challenging for you!

You can also choose between setting either a daily or lifetime budget.

CREATIVE WITH AD

You can select where you want your ad to appear, on either Facebook, Instagram or even both!

• Photo Ads: Photos can be in square or landscape format and will appear as a sponsored post when a user is scrolling through their image feed.
• Video Ads: Videos can be up to 60 seconds long and can be in square or landscape format, the video ad will appear as a sponsored post when a user is scrolling through their image feed.
• Carousel Ads: Similarly to photo ads, but this feature allows you to choose multiple photos to add a layer of depth to your campaign.
• Stories ads: Ads appear seamlessly a sponsored story when a user is viewing their follower’s story.

HASHTAG

For your next Instagram ad campaign, you could develop your very own hashtag.

The purpose of a hashtag is typical to improve content discovery. By developing your own hashtag, you build a community and a trend around your campaign that generates extra buzz.

PLACE YOUR ORDER

Once your ad is ready, you can review your formation, preview the ad, and publish it!

PERFORMANCE TRACKING: Once your ad is live, you’ll need to keep checking in on its performance. If it’s not performing as well as you’d hoped, you can make tweaks as you go along.

You’ve just created your first Instagram Ads campaign using Facebook Ads! You can now view and check it from your Facebook Ads Manager.

If you have questions on how you can use Instagram ads for your business, CONTACT ME