Instagram Advertising

The leading advantage of Instagram over Facebook is higher levels of engagement.  This may seem surprising, given Facebook’s reputation as the market leader in social media.  However, a study reported that on average and across all industries, Instagram has a 1.60% median engagement rate per post, whereas Facebook has a median rate of only 0.09%; that means that the average person spends a little longer on each post on Instagram, be that viewing, or sharing and interacting. This may seem like a tiny fraction, but remember that your advertising success is built upon increments; tiny fractions of huge numbers make significant differences to reach and conversion rates over time. 

Now, before you make any immediate decision and move all your ad spend to Instagram, let’s also have a look at how each social media platform is used.

Facebook is very much informational, text and detail driven. You will tend to read articles from links, or watch news item videos, participate in fundraising events, play games, engage with social groups and communities, find out about events, or find information about business hours or addresses.  

Instagram, on the other hand is more about capturing moments and sharing them in the easiest and fastest digestible format, specifically, photos and videos. The immediacy of the media is how Instagram grew so rapidly and have such a high engagement rate. While that immediacy may seem like attention spans are more limited, what counts is the time spent actively engaging with the content.  Here, Instagram has the edge.

So what does this all mean for your business?  Do not be fooled in thinking that this higher Instagram engagement is limited to sharing moments with friends and family.   The stats show that 200 million Instagram users visit at least one business profile daily too.  130 million Instagram accounts per month tap on an Instagram shopping post to learn more about products.  In fact, Instagram is now the most popular social media platform for following consumer brands. This creates endless opportunities for selling your products on Instagram and also to engage with your customers by directly communicating with them, providing information and support and importantly, warming your audience to who you are and what you offer.  It’s all about your capacity to build digital relationships that ripen into real world sales.

Instagram offers a simplified version of ‘Ads Manager’, providing an easier interface for you to create and manage your ads in just a few taps.  Instagram allows you to easily launch a campaign by following a few simple steps:

• boost an existing post or story
• select a goal
• choose your preferred demographic audience segments
• set your budget

Then you are off!  If you don’t have the benefit of a large budget and are not after enhanced setup or advanced data, advertising on Instagram might be the best choice for you to get familiar with social media marketing. 

If, on the other hand, you are after a more sophisticated and advanced setup, AdsRunner seriously recommend sticking with Facebook’s Ads Manager. You can read more about how to set Facebook marketing up, your available options and our recommendations on the correct campaign structure on our Facebook Advertising page.

You can also manage both Instagram and Facebook ads, if that is the route you choose, from your business account’s ‘Ads Manager’, of course. It’s also a great way to split test different strategies and formats.  Select from a variety of campaign objectives in your ‘back office flight deck’.   Access your saved and custom audiences and choose from numerous buying, placement and optimisation tools and strategies to give you the best possible marketing setup.

When it comes to costs, advertising on Instagram tends to be more expensive compared to Facebook, when measured in cost-per-click (CPC).   Sometimes Instagram advertising is up to 3 times higher than Facebook advertising. However, both platforms seem to have similar costs when it comes to bulk ‘impressions’ advertising, i.e. via ‘cost-per-thousand impressions’ (CPM), whereby you pay for your ad to show up 1,000 times. These are just average ad costs, but so much depends on the specifics of your campaign and business.

A higher initial advertising investment cost is not always a bad thing.  With correct campaign setups and campaign testing, you might get a lot more value from a more expensive click, or impression, than a lot of apparently ‘cheap’ advertising elsewhere, even on Facebook!  Experience with each platform teaches you over time how to get the best return on ad spend (ROAS).  It is this key consideration which advertisers agonise over most and is often a deciding factor in outsourcing this vital element of business operations.

When it comes to digital marketing, so much depends on identifying the right audience and finding the correct medium to communicate with them.  Depending on what you are trying to advertise and the nature of your brand, whether it’s direct to customer (D2C or B2C) or business to business (B2B), IG offers different routes to get you closer to your destination.

Our team share the belief that neither Facebook nor Instagram are a replacement for one another.  In fact, combining their user base creates endless interconnected advertising opportunities and gives you a much bigger reach. It doesn’t matter if you are prospecting a new audience, acquiring new customers, or using Instagram or Facebook to remarket to your existing audience base, in combination – budget permitting – your returns could inject a huge boost into your business revenues. Marketing on both channels also offers great opportunities to find out more about what motivates buyers by tweaking campaigns and comparing what works best.

Either way, Instagram is certainly a powerful and key part of your marketing funnel for the majority of marketing campaigns, with or without Facebook complementary campaigns.

When it comes to remarketing, when a user has left a platform, such as your website, or after viewing an ad, Hootsuite statistics show that 92% of Instagram users are also on YouTube, where you can then retarget them.   86% of Instagrammers also use Facebook too, offering you multi-channel opportunities for attracting your audience’s attention where they are most receptive.  Interestingly, 43% of IG users also use TikTok. Running complementary campaigns and opportunities for testing marketing strategies abound when viewed in this wider, social media marketing light.

The real question you have to ask yourself, then, is how you can best use Instagram to grow your business.  Given the simplicity of the platform and intuitive tools, I am sure it won’t take you long to come up with a few ideas to build on and split test, improving your ROI over time! 

When it comes to digital marketing, your media and creative contents play a key role in your advertising success, especially on visual media, such as IG. How users prefer to engage with this platform is via immediately accessible, punchy formats. (You might say that ‘IG’ also stands for ‘instant gratification’, so here’s your chance to satisfy some of their need for infotainment with fun content that inspires and entertains…)

Although it’s commonly thought that Instagram is all about wowing your users with jaw-dropping, attractive visuals, it has to be said that high impact visual content could really make your social profile stand out.

When it comes to successful Instagram marketing that offers real returns, AdsRunner would strongly recommend keeping your content authentic, genuine and compelling. As much as you want to sell products, IG is also about branding YOU and your trustworthiness.  Your Images and Videos must be relatable, self-explanatory, and solve a problem for your targeted audience.  

Producing high-performing ads mean benefitting from a higher click-through-rate (CTR) and converting more customers.  This, in turn, lowers your cost per customer acquisition, (CPA), leading to a higher return on ad spend for the same advertising efforts and costs.

Given your IG audience’s visual-oriented behaviour, you next need to make sure your content is optimised for all placement types; Instagram Feed, Stories, Explore, Reels and of course Instagram Shop, where you want to showcase your product catalogue. Think of the Instagram Shop as your shop’s window, with each window dressed slightly differently, but sharing a common theme!

Depending on your ad placement and campaign objectives, you will be offered a choice final landing page experiences for your target audience. Essentially this means you choose what happens after the IG user clicks on your ad. You can take them to your website, to WhatsApp, or Messenger to contact you, to your app, or you could prompt them to install your app, so they are only a click or two away from shopping with you.

A favourite AdsRunner marketing strategy is to create an instant experience on Instagram and Facebook, without the viewer leaving whichever platform they are on at all.

Although you can choose and design your own ad template, we recommend sticking with one of the ready-made templates offered to you to begin with at least, while you gather insights on audience motivations.

You have a few IG ad design options to choose from.

• ‘Instant Storefront’ is great for showcasing your hand-picked products and collections;
• ‘Instant Storytelling’ or ‘Instant Lookbook’ are both great for brand awareness and showcasing fashion and e-commerce products.  
• ‘Instant Forms’ then makes it much easier to capture a lead and gather personal data without the need for the customer to visit your website.

Using Instant experience is an immediate solution to minimise bounce rates and eliminate the slow loading time of mobile user pages, but also it is to keep customers longer and more engaged.

While it is still not possible to make a purchase without leaving the ads and visiting your final destination product page, if set up correctly, you can expect to see much higher CTRs, engagements and conversions on IG.  Putting the time in, thinking through the process for the user and what their motivations are is vital planning time, well-spent.