In addition to building a strong Instagram profile and engaging followers through regular posts, brands can reach audiences through Instagram ads. And why not? With 800 million monthly active users, 60 percent of whom are under 30, Instagram is a massive platform for connecting with audiences and building your brand. Plus, eMarketer estimates that Instagram will bring in $6.84 billion in global mobile ad revenue in 2018—a rapidly increasing chunk of parent company Facebook’s global ad revenues.
More than two million companies use Instagram ads to reach audiences, engage followers, and promote their products. If your company is ready to join them and start advertising on Instagram, read on for everything you need to know.
Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps an adventure photographer used to grow from 0 to 110,000 followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.
Types of Instagram ads
Instagram offers five ad formats: photos, videos, carousels, canvas Story ads, and Story ads. All are seamlessly incorporated into Feeds and Stories for a smooth user experience.
Ads are also integrated with Facebook Ad Manager, so you can take advantage of Facebook’s wealth of user information for targeting your audience with laser precision.
To see how your content will appear in different formats, check out Facebook’s guide to choosing the best Instagram ad format for your content.
Photo ads
Photo ads allow businesses to tell their story and showcase their products through compelling images. If you’re already crafting top-notch visual content, Instagram photo ads give you the platform to share it with even more people.
For example, Parachute Home used photo ads to promote a 60-night trial of their bedding with a Shop Now call-to-action button. Parachute’s Instagram posts have a distinctive look and feel, often displaying their products in authentic, beautiful bedroom spaces, and their photo ads were consistent with this style. The result was an ad campaign that reinforced their brand identity and leveraged their dreamy images.
The ads were targeted to men and women aged 18-54, with audience profiles based on their core customers’ profiles. The result? A 3.7 times return on advertising spend, and a click-through rate that was twice as high as their ads on other platforms. Businesses can borrow Parachute Homes’ strategy by creating Custom and Lookalike Audiences on Facebook Ads Manager.
Just in time for fall, say hello to the newest member of our Linen family — Indigo. #MyParachuteHome
A post shared by PARACHUTE (@parachutehome) on Sep 28, 2017 at 1:34pm PDT
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Video ads
There’s no question that Instagram users are crazy about video. Time spent watching video on Instagram is up more than 80 percent year-over-year. Four times as many videos were posted in 2017 compared to 2016. It’s the perfect time for brands to capitalize on the popular format to capture users’ attention.
An example of a successful video ad campaign is OGX, a global hair care brand. Their mobile-first video campaign used the key message “Rock What You’ve Got” and featured women celebrating their diverse hair textures and styles. Ads were targeted to Millennial women (ages 18 to 34), and the campaign reached an impressive 61 percent of the target audience in the US, and 60 percent in Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia combined. The campaign led to a 5-point increase in brand awareness among Australian women, and an 8 percent sales lift in the US.
One important thing to note is that OGX features the brand in the first few seconds of the video to improve audience recall and use time wisely. Video ads can be up to 60 seconds, but OGX shows a solid video doesn’t need to be long (their ads were only 15 seconds!).
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Carousel ads
Carousel ads let users swipe through a series of images or videos, with a call-to-action button to connect them directly to your website. They offer the creative space to tell a longer story about your brand, allowing you to highlight multiple products, share a multi-part story, or dive deep into a single service in up to 10 images or videos.
Kayla Itsines, the founder of fitness empire Bikini Body Guide, used a series of video carousel ads to drive awareness and downloads of the workout app Sweat: Kayla Itsines Fitness. The carousel format allowed her to showcase short fitness sequences demonstrating how users could exercise anywhere (and anytime) with the app. The campaign was targeted to women ages 18 to 42, reaching 6.4 million people and leading to an incredible 21-point lift in brand awareness.
Carousel ads were a perfect fit for a brand that wanted to show the versatility of its content, and would be a good fit for other brands with diverse creative assets, like food and fashion companies.
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Stories ads
Instagram Stories Ads are full-screen ads that appear to users between Stories they are already viewing from people they follow. 300 million Instagram users view Stories every day, representing a huge audience that you can reach with your ad!
As with other Instagram ad formats, you can target your audience and choose how often they see your Stories ad. Because Stories expire after 24 hours, they’re the ideal format for sharing limited-time offers and promotions. And advertisers can take advantage of all the features of Instagram Stories, adding face filters, video effects, and text to create fun and creative promotions.
These options allow you to create Instagram Stories ads that look and feel like your normal posts—in video or image form. The call-to-action takes the form of a swipe-up feature that takes audiences directly to your website from your Stories ad.
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Canvas Story Ads
Advertisers can also use Facebook Canvas to create immersive videos for Instagram Stories that are optimized for mobile and load quickly for a smooth viewing experience. Facebook has an array of Canvas templates that make it fast and easy to build a Canvas ad for Instagram, or companies can choose to create a custom Canvas for a truly unique ad experience.
Birchbox, a mail-order subscription service for beauty products, created an ad campaign using Facebook Canvas to build awareness and reach new customers in France. Their Canvas ads featured videos of Birchbox products, inviting users to swipe up for a special promotional offer.
The Stories campaign generated a click-through rate that was four times as high as other formats, and with excellent value too: the cost-per-click rate was 50 percent lower than ads on other platforms.
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Now that you’re an expert in your Instagram advertising options, you’re ready to put the theory into practice. Set up your business to advertise on Instagram and learn how to place your ads below.
How to advertise on Instagram
To create ads on Instagram, you first need to connect your account to a Facebook Business Page, which allows you to use Facebook Ad Manager. Ad Manager lets you create ads that run on both Facebook and Instagram. You can also customize audiences and other features, and monitor how your ads are…
