Instagram ads are a dynamic route to reach customers, translate views into sales, and boost traffic to your website. About 87% of Instagram users take action after watching a product or service on Instagram. So, ads can be used on Instagram to capture the target audience and build the relevance and popularity of brands.
Brands are gaining visibility with paid ads for their products. You have to customize your ads to target the right audience. Instagram gives many options to customize ads to get the most out of them.
What are Instagram Ads?
Instagram ads are content like posts or stories that promote brands’ products and services. Instagram runs these ads among its users to reach the maximum audience. Brands set up these ads from Facebook Business Manager and pay a certain amount according to their budget to Facebook for running these ads.
These ads look exactly like any other content on Instagram, but they are tagged ‘sponsored’ to mark transparency with Instagram users. These Instagram ads appear throughout the app, like in users’ feeds or on the explore page. In addition, ads have some added features like a ‘call to action’ button, website links, and catalogs.
Different Types of Instagram Ads
Image Ads
These ads use single images to promote products and services. You need compelling visuals to convey your message for image ads to work. Therefore, image ads include pictures or illustrations with keywords to attract your audience. Image ads are a great way to introduce your brand or product to users.
Carousel Ads
These ads include multiple pictures or videos that users can access at one go. The series of images or videos are capped at 10. Carousel ads are a great way to showcase the diverse products or services your brand offers. You can also tell a story through multiple pictures and videos.
Carousel ads can be placed in feed and Instagram stories to gain the maximum reach possible. They boost sales and can be further enhanced with ‘call to action’ buttons like ‘swipe up’ or ‘shop now.’
Video Ads
Video ads are the best way to advertise your products as audio-visual media engages the audience better. You can also show your face with video ads, strengthening brand-audience trust and loyalty. But with video ads, you need to consider that shorter videos perform better than lengthy ones.
Video ads can be implemented as IGTV ads or Reels. IGTV video ads are shown on the feed and the explore page. On the other hand, reel ads are gaining momentum, with most brands making fresh and trending content to promote their products. With reels, users are getting advertised content and entertainment, so Reel ads are becoming popular nowadays.
For best video ads, you should use an ad maker. So choose a template and start editing. The intuitive video editor makes creating video ads a breezy task, even if you start with video editing.
Story Ads
Instagram Story ads are those ads that appear on stories. They merge seamlessly with the stories of other users, and hence your ad does not disrupt the user experience. They are much more engaging as the stories cover the whole screen, and there are no other distractions present, unlike in-feed posts.
Your story ads should fit in organically like other stories and should not only have a product-mongering approach. You can make your story ads more engaging by adding filters, GIFs, or texts. Story ads are a potent type of Instagram ads as they prompt the users to take direct action and convert the audience to customers.
How To Set Up Instagram Ads?
Now that you know the various types of Instagram ads, it is time to choose one format and set up your first ad on Instagram. You can set up Instagram ads through Facebook Business Manager.
- Create a Facebook Business Manager account.
- Once your account is set up, click on +Create.
- Choose your campaign objective according to your business needs. You can choose the goal from a drop-down menu, and you get options like ‘traffic,’ ‘engagement,’ ‘video views,’ etc.
- Name your ad campaign.
- Turn on the ‘Campaign Budget Optimization’ to automate the process of allocating your budget to your ads. With this option selected, Facebook analyses which of your ads perform the best and gives your budget towards those ads.
- Select your daily budget depending on how much you want to spend on advertisement and how long your ads will run. You can also choose ‘lifetime budget,’ but you run the risk of exhausting your total budget in one day with this option.
- Under ‘Ad Scheduling,’ you can choose to run your ads throughout the day or schedule when you want Facebook to push out your ads.
- The next important step is to choose the correct audience for your ads. You have to create a target audience group according to their location, gender, age, and interests.
- For Instagram ads, select ‘manual placement’ and choose only Instagram. This makes sure that Instagram is the only platform where your ads are displayed.
- Other important placement options are ‘Instagram Feed,’ ‘Instagram Explore,’ ‘Instagram Stories,’ and ‘Instagram Reels.’ Choose your placement according to your ad type.
- Choose the Instagram account where you want to add your ads.
- Choose the format of your ad.
- Add your media for the ad.
- Fill out primary text for the ad.
- Select a payment option to pay for your ad.
- Review your ad.
- Depending on your objective, you can add ‘call to action’ buttons, like ‘swipe up.’ If you want to boost website traffic, add the corresponding Website URL.
- Once you are satisfied with the ad, click on ‘confirm,’ and your ad will be ready.
Cash In Your Creativity
Instagram ads are a great way to channelize your creativity and earn money. Choose one that suits your objective the best from the range of ads. Your ads should be designed to cater to mobile phone users as most people access social media platforms via mobile. Add graphics and animation to make your ads quirky.
Sound and visual elements can add depth to your ads. Therefore, video ads about 15 seconds long perform the best. You can grow on a versatile platform like Instagram, no matter your business. Instagram ads give you that added opportunity to flex your business to the world and attract the right audience to fuel your brand.
