Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users and more than two million companies use Instagram ads to reach audiences. Should you be using them too?
Instagram Ads are great because they are just there when users scroll down their news feed, so it is an easy way to target your audience. There are five different types of Instagram adverts that you could use to make the most of Instagram and we will talk about them below:
Image Ads
Firstly, let’s look at image ads. This is the easiest and most commonly used ad on Instagram, and it is probably the ad you will see the most when scrolling through your personal account. Image ads feature one image and don’t look like ads when you scroll past which is a good thing as some people don’t like to think they are being targeted with ads constantly. They just look like normal Instagram posts but will feature a call to action to take potential customers to your website.
Video Ads
25% of Instagram ads are videos. This statistic proves that you should be using promotional videos to target customers on Instagram. Video ads can be up to 60 seconds long, but you want whatever you are posting to be engaging and educating so that people will watch the full video. Grab the audience’s attention within the first 20 seconds and they should watch the whole video. You can talk about so much in a short 60 second video, but just remember that you want the content to be engaging, you want it to be relevant and you want it to be educating about the services of products that you offer.
Video Story Ads
This is probably the best place to put your video ads as when consumers click on stories, they expect to see videos. It is best to feature live videos rather than videos with graphics introduced, but there is nothing to say that graphic videos aren’t as effective. Consumers don’t always want to think they are being targeted, they will click through ads quickly when viewing stories if they are standard videos, they need to be eye catching. Again, make sure all content posted on your stories are engaging and entertaining, keep the audience interested with new content.
Carousel Ads
Carousel ads allow you to show various images that you can scroll through. Within this format you can choose up to 10 images and have different call to actions and links with each image. Instagram introduced this type of ad because they want you to share a complete image of what you are advertising, but by doing this you have to include multiple images in your ad. Make the most out of your carousel ad by using different call to actions on each image, taking the audience to different pages of your website.
Canvas Story Ads
Canvas story ads introduce a 360-degree virtual reality experience for your audience. One down side to this ad is it only works on mobile devices, that isn’t a problem however because the number of mobile Instagram users is increasing. This is a great opportunity to show off some of your beautiful branding assets and give people that connection to your brand. More millennial’s use Instagram than the older generation, with a staggering 59% of users being between the ages of 18 and 29, and only 8% of users are aged 65 and above.
Brands on Instagram regularly see engagement from around 4% of its total followers. Now this doesn’t exactly sound like it is very successful but that is 10X more engagement than brands get on Facebook. Over 80% of users on Instagram follow a brand because they want to know what your brand is up to. Instagram is seen as the best social media platform to be able to keep up to date with products or services that your brand offers. With all this information I want you to ask yourself a very important question, are you making the most out of Instagram?
