Advertising on Instagram – what is it and how to create it?

Instagram is growing in popularity every year. Currently, this platform boasts more than two billion monthly active users. As a result, many brands are starting to see more and more potential in promoting their business through this application. 

Ads on Instagram – for whom?

Many people ask themselves whether their business is suitable for them to advertise on Instagram. Wanting to answer this question, it is worth noting at the outset what audience primarily uses this platform. After all, young users dominate on Instagram. These are primarily people between the ages of 18 and 34, and this group now accounts for more than 60% of the total audience on Instagram. People between the ages of 35 and 55 will also be found on the platform. Users over 55 are rather few, but this does not mean that targeting ads to this audience is never profitable. On the contrary. Instagram is growing more and more each year and attracting more and more new users, including those older in age. Interestingly, in terms of gender, the gentle advantage has been men for some time, but it is so small that the advertising message is worth targeting both men and women. 

It is said that one picture is worth more than a thousand words. And it is on this principle that the entire Instagram is based – on visual messages in the form of photos or short videos. In view of this, this platform will work perfectly for brands for which the visual sphere is extremely important. Therefore, advertising on Instagram can be a good solution in artistic industries – for photographers or artists, but also for clothing brands, cosmetics, automotive or architects. 

Why should you advertise on Instagram?

The reasons why it’s really worth advertising on Instagram are many. Some of the biggest advantages that make it worth considering investing in such promotion of your business include:

• Widespread reach – a huge number of users spend time on Instagram every day. In addition, they are mostly there as part of relaxation or entertainment, so the ads blend in with the rest of the posts and are viewed in passing. 
• Substantially low cost  – advertising on Instagram does not require investing large amounts of money. Exactly how much you spend is, of course, up to you, but on average you can get a click from an Internet user for as little as a dozen-something pennies.
• The format of ads – they are really a big advantage of this platform. First of all, they appear in places that are almost impossible to miss. On Instagram, the effect of so-called banner blindness is practically non-existent – because the ads appear wherever the viewer is looking for content, plus they look identical to other users’ posts or testimonials. The ads themselves can appear, for example, between posts on the main board or profile, or between Instagram Stories.  
• Building Recognition – to the main advantages of Instagram we can also include their beneficial effect on building brand recognition among users of the app, where the ad itself plants the thought of buying a particular product/service. This can take place both locally and nationally.

Creating advertising on Instagram

Wanting to advertise on Instagram, we need to remember one condition, and that is to have a business account and a professional profile on this portal. We can create the campaigns themselves in two ways. The first is to design it directly in the application itself, while the second requires us to use Facebook’s Ad Manager. 

Setting up an ad in the app is very simple and extremely intuitive, but we must keep in mind that we can only promote existing posts on our profile. What we need to do is click the “Promote post” button next to the post of our choice. We will then be taken to the panel for creating an ad. 

The first step is to indicate the goal of our campaign. It should reflect what we care most about in our campaign. Here we have a choice: more profile visits, more site visits or more messages. It is also worth remembering that the goal of our campaign will also determine where our recipient will be taken after clicking on the ad. Once we select “More site visits,” we must additionally indicate what CTA button we want to use and add the URL of our site. 

The next step is to define the audience. However, before we get down to it, it’s worth bearing in mind that if we want to promote a post about loans, employment opportunities, real estate or social issues, elections or politics, the first step is to select the appropriate advertising category from the special requirements. After selecting the appropriate option (or skipping this step if it doesn’t apply to us), we move on to determining the audience. 

We have two options here: automatic selection or creating our own audience group. By selecting the automated option, Instagram itself will target ads to audiences similar to the people who follow us. However, if we prefer to specify our audience more precisely, the platform also gives us this option. We can configure such information as location, age and gender, as well as interests.

The final step in creating our campaign is to specify the budget and duration of the campaign. And you’re done – that’s how you can create your first, very simple campaign.

The last step is to specify the budget and duration of the campaign.

If, however, you would like to go a step further and learn how to create even more effective ads on Instagram then Facebook Ad Manager will come to your aid. It’s a slightly more time-consuming process, but it will allow us to take full advantage of the platform’s capabilities, as well as reach a more specific audience. In this case, we will create our campaigns analogously to creating campaigns on Facebook. However, before starting the activities, it is necessary to connect your Instagram account with your company profile on Facebook. 

The main, and only, difference between a Facebook and Instagram campaign is the selection of target location, where it will be displayed. In short, we need to uncheck all options related to Facebook and leave only those related to Instagram. 

Creating a campaign, we start, as standard, by selecting its target. Compared to creating an ad using an app, here we have a much larger selection of them. Next, we need to configure the ad set, and in it our audience group in addition to features such as location, age, gender or interests, here we also have the option to choose to target custom audiences or similar audiences. The next step is to plan the budget (we can add daily or total) and the ad schedule. The most important element we need to set in the ad set is the aforementioned placements. To do this, we click manual placements and select only the Instagram option. 

The final step in creating a campaign is, of course, setting up the ad itself. Adding an image or video to it, the headline and text of the ad, and other necessary elements like the URL or CTA button.

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Types of advertising on Instagram

Similar to Facebook ads, you have a number of different formats to choose from. Unfortunately, many of them are not available from the mobile app, and we can only add them using the Ad Manager.

• Graphic ads — the most popular format for this type of creative is the square. Instagram also accepts ads in horizontal and vertical formats.
• Video ads — Instagram is increasingly betting on this very format. If you include video footage in your ads on Instagram, it can be in square or horizontal format (except for Instagram Stories, where you can include video ads vertically) 
• Carousel ads — they consist of 2-10 graphics or videos. Advertising on Instagram will be displayed in square or vertical format in News and coverage.
• Instagram Stories — advertisements in relationships support images and videos with dimensions matching News, which means we can add a single image or video with a maximum length of 120 seconds, which has an aspect ratio of 9:16 and from 4:5 to 1.91:1. However, it is recommended to add ads in a vertical format of 9:16.
• Reels — for Reels ads, we can only use full-screen assets with a 9:16 vertical aspect ratio.
• Store on Instagram — it displays as a combination of one main graphic or video and three additional photos. All ads are displayed in a 1:1 square format

Summary

Advertisements on Instagram are really a great solution for companies that care about strengthening their position in social media channels. They help to quickly gain new customers, but also observers. For many industries, it can also be an extremely profitable investment due to less competition on this platform.

If you’re not sure how to create an ad on Instagram or don’t have the time to run one, you can enlist the help of marketing agency. They will prepare well-tailored advertising materials for you and take care of the hardest task for you, which is selecting the right target audience that will bring in the most conversions.