As one of the social media giants today, Instagram offers its users the opportunity to run advertising campaigns through its platform to reach their target audience and meet their business objectives. Online advertising, and especially running campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, has become the norm nowadays for any business that is building its online presence and is looking to raise brand awareness, increase conversions or generate leads for their business.
If you only want to start testing out some campaigns on one platform and millennials or zoomers are within your target audience, Instagram might be the perfect platform to explore. It offers the chance to increase your reach globally and advertise your products or services via a wide range of formats.
While we wish there was a magic recipe to list out the ideal format ratio for Instagram ads, we haven’t found it (YET). There are, however, some strategic steps that you can take to ensure you are activating campaigns that convert and bring you the desired results.
First of all, you have two options in terms of placement: the IG feed and the IG stories. This doesn’t mean you can’t create different ad sets within the same campaign to benefit from both types of placements, but you are free to choose just one if you think you have a winner.
What is great about Instagram story ads is that they are integrated seamlessly into the user’s stories and acts as any other story on the platform, meaning that you don’t have to do anything to get to it, it will simply pop up on the screen between other stories that the users are sharing. It’s short, subtle and unlike the feed, you’d have their undivided attention, with no other assets on the screen. Similar to the different feed posts formats, Instagram stories can be images or videos and benefit from features such as the carousel layout or adding links to the story ads to redirect users to a landing page or website.
When it comes to the feed ad, most of us are already familiar with the sponsored content we see while scrolling through Instagram’s feed. They can even be of different sizes, from landscape to vertical, although the square format seems to be the most effective one of all.
Here are some tips on how to have great results with ads on Instagram:
Use high-quality images and videos
It would be a shame to invest financial resources, creativity and time into your assets and not convert users because they lack great image or video quality. Always keep in mind that you have a few seconds to make an impression on your audience through the ads on IG Stories and it’s essential to use high-resolution images and videos of great quality.
Try the carousel format
If you thought the carousel is only possible for the feed posts and ads, you’re in for a treat! On the story, you can upload up to three different clips of 15 seconds each that you can have as a carousel for your story ads. It allows you to share more information, bring in different elements of your brand, as well as promote creatives that are more interactive and engaging.
The same goes for your Feed ads as the carousel format is more engaging, grabs more attention and encourages the users to swipe left to learn more about your brand.
Call-To-Action (CTA)
Grabbing the attention of your audience is always the first step, however, you ideally want to redirect them to a website, a landing page or an app where they can either interact with more of your brand’s content, register for a webinar, sign up for your services or browse through your products.
Both your IG Story and Feed ads should always have a CTA at the bottom that people can click on, but keep in mind that with your Story ads, users need to be made aware of the swipe up before the end of the story, otherwise they won’t have enough time to react to your CTA so make sure you allow them enough time to read/listen to what they need to do.
More audio, less text
You may be tempted to add as much information as you can in your ads, but it’s ideal to avoid ending up with text-heavy visual assets. Not only are they harder to keep up with, but will also feel too salesy and complicated.
With the Feed ads, you have the ability to add more details and any essential information in the caption to avoid having all of it in the visual and with Stories, you can use IG’s audio captioning feature to add bits of text that you feel are necessary and that way, they won’t show up all at once in the ad.
There are many other ways to activate campaigns that convert, either through creatives, text, formats or targeting and we have all the tools you need to achieve your business goals using digital marketing. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at hello@socialgamma.com.
