How to Advertise on Instagram Like a Pro: 11 Effective Tactics for eCommerce

As a marketer, you know that Instagram is one of the most powerful social media platforms available. With over 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram provides an unparalleled opportunity to reach potential customers. However, in order to truly capitalize on this opportunity and maximize your return on investment (ROI), you need to understand how to advertise on the platform effectively. Fortunately, with the right strategies and tactics in place, it’s not difficult to master the art of advertising on Instagram. Let’s dive in!

Why Choose Instagram to Advertise Your Business?

Instagram is now the second most popular social media platform, behind only Facebook. The number of active Instagram users was equal to 1.28 billion and is predicted to be 1.44 billion, which would account for 31.2 percent of global internet users.

Source: www.statista.com

This makes it an ideal medium for businesses to advertise their products and services. And here’s why.

1. Larger Audience Reach

   Instagram gives you access to a huge audience you can reach quickly and easily. It also offers various targeting options that allow you to narrow down your audience by age, interests, location, and more. This makes it much easier for you to target specific customers interested in your product or service.

2. Easy-to-Use Interface

   Instagram’s user-friendly interface makes it easy for anyone with minimal digital marketing experience to create effective ads. The platform also offers a variety of tools such as analytics, insights, and reporting that make it easy for you to track the performance of your ads in real time so you can adjust them accordingly.

3. Highly Engaging Content

   Engagement is key when advertising on any platform, and Instagram has some of the highest levels of engagement among all social media platforms. With features like stories, live videos, polls, and more, businesses can create unique and engaging content that will help them stand out from their competitors and attract new customers. Additionally, users can comment on posts and share them with friends, allowing businesses to build relationships with potential customers easily and quickly.

As you can see, advertising on Instagram can be an effective way for businesses to reach a large audience quickly while still remaining cost-effective. The user-friendly interface makes it easy for anyone with minimal digital marketing experience to create engaging and effective ads to build relationships with potential customers. By taking advantage of all the features available on the platform—such as stories, live videos, and polls—businesses can create content that stands out from their competitors while still reaching their desired audience quickly and easily. Therefore if you’re looking for an efficient way to promote your business online, then advertising on Instagram is something worth considering.

We have already created several helpful articles on Instagram advertising. You can check them here:

eCommerce: 5 Hacks to Increase Your Instagram Post Engagement

Create Highly Engaging Instagram Stories

How Much Does It Cost to Advertise on Instagram?

The answer isn’t so straightforward, as the cost of an ad depends on a few different factors. According to Revealbot, the average cost of running Instagram ad campaigns are:

• $8.83 CPM (cost per one thousand impressions)
• $1.28 CPC (cost per click)

Source: revealbot.com

Now let’s explore what you need to know about setting up an effective and cost-efficient ad campaign on Instagram.

Cost Factors for Ads on Instagram

Several key factors come into play when determining the cost of advertising on Instagram. These include:

• Ad Type

  With several ad types available, including photo ads, video ads, story ads, carousel ads, and stories ads with shoppable tags, one factor that influences the cost of your ad is which type you choose. Some ad types may be more expensive depending on their complexity or format.

• Target Audience

  Another important factor in determining the cost of your Instagram ad is who you are targeting with your campaign. If your audience is more niche or has more specific criteria (like location or age range), it may be more expensive than a general audience target.

• Budget

  Obviously, one of the most important factors when it comes to pricing for any advertisement is budget. How much you’re willing to spend will determine how large or small your ad campaign can be.

• Duration

  The duration also influences how much you will pay for an advertisement. If you plan to run an ad over a longer period (months or even years), this could also impact the overall cost.

• Placement

  Lastly, placement matters when it comes to figuring out pricing for advertising on Instagram. Different placements may have different costs associated with them (e.g., newsfeed vs. stories).

Overall, there isn’t one simple answer as to how much it costs to advertise on Instagram — the answer really depends on what kind of advertisement you’re looking to create and who you are targeting with it. Digital marketing specialists must consider all these factors before launching any campaigns if they want maximum efficiency from their budget and return from their investment in advertising through Instagram.

Free Checklist: Is Your Business Future-Proof for the Rising Cost of Digital Advertising?

Further Reading: How Much Do Google Ads Cost in 2023?

Advertising on Instagram: 11 Effective Tactics

You may have scrolled through many articles describing how to advertise on Instagram effectively. Most of them focus on basic recommendations like using high-quality images or videos that grab your target audience’s attention, crafting creative descriptions with catchy words or phrases, using strategically placed hashtags, or reaching out to influencers who will share your content if it aligns with their messages. In this section, we won’t repeat these tips. Instead, we’d like to give you some techniques we practiced multiple times.

1. Make sure that your tracking is correct and conversion API is enabled to have reliable data necessary for FB’s algorithm.
2. Simplify your remarketing campaign structure unless you have big audience sizes. It is tempting to separate remarketing audiences by adding them to different ad sets and having more visibility and control over their performance. However, if, for example, your audience size is as small as a few thousand users, FB will charge very high CPMs in these ad sets, and the lower the audience size, the higher the CPM becomes. Combining these audiences in as few ad sets as possible (potentially even one) makes sense.
3. Past purchasers audience: unless you have huge amounts of traffic and conversions, it works best to switch it on during promotions, when new products launch, and when some time has passed since the last time it was on. A good rule of thumb is to use it for a few weeks once every couple of months. When run on an ongoing basis, even with a low budget, the audience often gets overexposed very quickly.
4. Test early. When new features or placements become available, testing them early will make you stand out from the rest of the advertisers. Regarding placements, the competition is generally much less extreme, with much cheaper traffic. For example, when Reels were introduced, CPMs were quite low compared to other core placements, traffic quality was good, and early adopters could achieve great results.
5. Simplify your account structure to the point where there’s enough data or spend for each ad set to exit the learning phase. When you have less than 50 conversions a week, it makes sense to keep your campaign structure as simple as possible to maximize the number of conversions in each ad set.
6. Embrace Facebook’s automation:
   • Use (or at least test) campaign budget optimization. The successful CBO structures we use are two ad sets (broad targeting – no interest selected and a mix of best-performing interests) and lookalike CBO – ad sets with different lookalikes (e.g., purchase pixel-based, engagers, initiate checkout pixel-based, video viewers).
   • Don’t apply too many audiences or placements exclusions unless you have a good reason; it limits the algorithm, and such ad sets are very likely to underperform.
   • Use broad interests with an audience size of over a million users.
7. Test Advantage + Shopping campaign type. According to multiple FB case studies, this campaign type works much better than regular campaigns, and we also had very positive results from it. Consider testing your catalog sales ads there and using the website and shop destination, not only the website. A huge portion of sales comes from the FB/IG shop in these campaigns where this destination is enabled.
8. Run catalog sales ads (if it applies to you). It’s a must for remarketing, but you also may find huge success running them in prospecting. Experiment with product sets and creative elements (frames, price/discount add-ons). Pair with very broad interests or no interest selected. Generally, it’s not recommended to pair these ads with lookalikes.
9. Don’t rely on pixel data alone; set up an email list integration with FB Ads to import & refresh customer lists regularly (and use them for lookalike audiences too).
10. Good creative is your most powerful tool when advertising on FB. It’s absolutely necessary to test various formats, angles, and tones continuously to understand what works best and to be able to scale. With so much competition on the platform, you need to stand out. You can find more tips on good creatives in the following article.
11. Advertising on Meta won’t work without a good LP experience. Making sure the page communicates information clearly, is optimized, and works smoothly is crucial, but it’s not enough. You should constantly research and test new things and features that make you stand out from the competition.

Wrapping up

Advertising on Instagram can be incredibly effective for marketing professionals to reach their target audience – but only if done correctly! By following these tips, however, marketers can easily optimize their campaigns and maximize their ROI by mastering the art of advertising like a pro. With these strategies in place, advertisers cannot limit what campaigns can achieve – so start experimenting today! And if you need additional help running successful Instagram campaigns, we are here to help you.

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