Quick Tips for Successful Instagram Ads
Instagram runs supreme when it comes to social advertising. Six in ten online adults have Instagram accounts, while 72% of teens use Instagram. Without a doubt, advertising on this platform is imperative for your business.
So, what’s the secret sauce to advertising on Instagram? How do you go about advertising without wasting money on ads that simply just don’t convert? For this article, I will run through a few victories I had with advertising on the platform. It is my belief that showing you my home runs will help you figure out your own.
Do Your Homework
Instagram puts the user first. This means that Instagram favors content that users gravitate towards organically. They don’t force their users to see ads they don’t want to see. That being said, you should provide value to your target customer if you’re going to advertise on the platform. Step one- define what your customer finds valuable.
To uncover what your customer finds valuable, you can use tools like SEMRush to find what people are searching for within the niche you are serving. For instance, SEMRush will tell me what sort of topics are trending within the topic of Digital Marketing.
Testing
I’d like to give you some context before I get into how I came up with this method. I come from a Political Science background. In college, I took many classes on Public Opinion and how elections were decided. Back then, I wanted to run marketing campaigns for politicians. Fast forward to today, and I mostly work with Software companies. Believe it or not, both industries can benefit from the method that I’ve developed.
During my time studying Politics, I learned a lot about how political surveys were conducted. Political psychologists claimed that you needed at least a 1,000 person sample size for research to be relevant. For instance, if 57% of 1,000 random people believed XYZ, you could use it in a research paper. For some reason, this lesson always stuck with me.
I wanted to somehow utilize this theory when I got into social media marketing. I started boosting every single client IG post for $10. Why? These $10 assured me that at least 1,000 people would see my post. I’d have good data on whether or not my content would be a good fit for advertising without spending too much money (relatively speaking).
I recently applied this method to a client of mine. After a full 30 days of boosting every single post for $10, we noticed that there was one particular post that had a shockingly low cost per click (CPC). The client didn’t have a huge budget, but I urged them to gamble the rest of their monthly budget into that 1 post. They poured the rest of their $250 budget into their ad. Their CPC was $.09! This is significantly low for the industry.
Ultimately, you’d have to set aside a budget for incorporating this method. It’d also be good practice to retarget people who engage with your Instagram posts. I’ll save those details for another article.
In the meantime, feel free to reach out to me at contact@jarrell-chalmers.com for more advice.