It is now easier than ever to advertise. If you spend a lot of time online, particularly on social media platforms such as Instagram, any business’s message can be delivered to you. Of course, not all those shown online will interest you. In fact, Instagram Ads, when displayed improperly, can be irritating to viewers.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to choose the best content for Instagram Ads or Instagram promoted posts. We’ll show you how to make your Instagram Ads blend in without appearing too much like an ad.
Choosing The Best Existing Content Instead Of Creating New Content
“Choosing the best content” — you read that correctly. We have covered a guide on how to create new content for social media ads in the article, Create the Best Social Media Ads Marketing in 2020.
Sometimes, it can be hard to create something new. You want your ad to appear less like an ad, and more like an organic post. Additionally, you want it to blend with your collection of posts, signature to your brand. How do you create advertisements without making it appear too much like one?
The simple answer is to repurpose your best-performing organic social media content into social media ads. Not only will you save time, you can also trust that your ad will perform well, as long as you target the same kind of audience as the people who liked your organic content.
This requires analyzing the demographic who liked your content. With Instagram’s very own analytics tool, Instagram Insight, you can easily discover basic information about the age, gender, and location of your audience, as well as the time of day and week that they are most active.
Of course, that is only one piece of the puzzle. To be extra sure about your targeting decision, you’ll need to use a third-party analytics tool to manage your ads creative, targeting, and bidding strategy more easily.
Various Formats Of Instagram Ads
Instagram offers several formats for your ads content — stories, photo, video, and carousel.
Instagram Ads with Instagram Stories (Instastory)
Instastory content only lasts up to 24 hours before disappearing, and this form of ephemeral content creates a scarcity factor that prompts your audience to seek it before it is gone. You can make use of this space to advertise when Instagram users are at their most attentive.
Lots of businesses use organic Instastories to post small updates, treating them as a nota bene, good to note. Oftentimes, this means showing off testimonies of happy customers or user generated content. Therefore, if you discover one of your customers tagged your business in their Instastory, you can ask their permission to repost their experience with your business. This is a common and good practice, so make sure to leverage this.
Instagram Ads with Photos and Images
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, users use Instagram primarily to share images. It’ll be a little strange for an individual to post an “image of a text”, or text with an image in the background. A bad practice that businesses often fall for is to put a lot of words on top of images, especially contact details and price. This clearly looks like an ad, and users will likely scroll away before giving the content a proper look.
A good Instagram ad is one that evokes curiosity, and oftentimes this can be done without using over the top promotional words. Think about how influencers softly promote certain products. Try to learn from them, or better still, choose your “bestseller organic content” that has proven itself to make audiences feel curious enough to convert — to visit your profile, and even your website, on their own.
Instagram Ads with Videos
Video ads on Instagram and stories can be up to a minute long. On Instastory, the first 5 seconds of a snippet is usually shown, and users have the choice to continue watching on IGTV or the post itself.
Video content varies with length, and although it has been said that shorter videos are more effective, especially to introduce the brand, we believe that longer videos can also provide engaged audiences more value in one sitting to describe the problems and solutions that the business can offer.
Overall, video content tends to have better engagement compared to image content because of high production value; viewers would very much appreciate a well-made video.
Instagram Ads with Carousel
Carousel can offer the best of both the world of images and videos. It lets users swipe through a series of images or videos in a single post. Your first image or video in the carousel should be as attention-grabbing as possible, and curious viewers can then scroll through the carousel to begin engaging with your content.
With the carousel, you can feature multiple products, or dive deep into a single product or service. Remember what we wrote just now about avoiding to put text on images to prevent the content from looking like advertisement. Well, the carousel is a slightly different case. If you have an infographic type of content, a carousel format is fitting because you don’t need to cram so much information into one image (consider users’ phone screen size and even smaller image viewing space). Instead you can “chop” the infographic into individual images that make up one whole.
You Can Get Everything Right In One Go
Instagram Ads is paid advertising, and whenever money is involved, there is a level of risk that your ads will not be effective as you hoped for. Tools such Instagram Insight and Hootsuite are just supplementary tools to help you target and bid for ad space. You’ll also need the expertise to leverage these tools to your advantage.
Juicebox Management can help you lower that risk. Our social media marketing specialists can work with you to turn your photos and videos into amazing content that you can also promote on Instagram.
Contact us, and start growing your social media now.
