How effective are paid promotions on Instagram?
Although Instagram doesn’t offer the ability to optimize for followers the way Facebook does, you still can use advertising to build a quality audience. Here are five steps that we recommend to help brands grow followers on Instagram through paid promotion.
Develop Your Target Audience: Remember to prioritize quality over quantity. You want to accrue Instagram followers who will engage with your brand, click through your stories, and follow the links to your website because, ultimately, they’re interested in your content.
Identify Your Top-Performing Organic Posts: The easiest way to launch your ad strategy is to evaluate what works well in organic. Identify the posts that have the most likes, shares, and comments, and use those as a starting point for your ad creative. You can even use them as ads themselves.
Create Your Campaign: Developing ads that can be optimized for traffic is the best way to drive user growth. You want users to click a link that drives them to your Instagram channel and encourages them to follow your content.
Match Your Messaging to Your Audience: Let’s say your brand is a restaurant, and you have identified an audience of health-conscious diners. Obviously, you’ll want to make sure that your ads speak to that audience and not the audience that prefers deep-fried food challenges.
Be sure to test multiple images and ad copy variations to find the right mix of creative to drive results from your selected audiences.
