Most businesses and marketers think that social media should be all about using organic marketing methods to help generate more engagement and sales for free. This can work great especially on Instagram where engagement rate and reach are far higher when compared to networks like Facebook and Twitter.
But what they fail to realize is that when they only use free methods they are losing time. When you use ads you get results much more quickly. You will achieve something in a short duration when compared with someone who only uses free methods.
On Instagram, you can generate 2.5 to 3X ROI for every $1 you spend. So, you will end up with all this money you can reinvest into your ads and grow quickly. Instagram also lets you create a variety of ads such as Instagram story ads, in-feed ads, and carousel ads. This gives you the opportunity to get creative and have fun.
If you are interested in using ads, check out this step-by-step process below.
Understand the audience
One of the keys to getting people to buy on Instagram is to target a very specific audience. Make sure you do a ton of research to understand your audience and what makes them tick. You should conduct surveys and interviews to understand their interests. Then use this information to build empathy maps, market maps, and personas.
Once you understand this audience, you can create ads that speak to them. The ads will resonate with them so well that they will click on them and take all the other actions that will lead to a sale.
You can do this process by yourself or hire a research expert to help you out.
Create a mobile-optimized funnel
The ad isn’t the only component that will generate the sale. There are other components of the funnel such as the sales page, thank-you page, and emails that play an important role too.
Therefore, you need to create a powerful funnel based on the persona and other audience data. Make sure that the funnel is mobile-optimized too as a lot of Instagram’s users prefer the mobile version. They will access the funnel with a mobile device and will be more likely to follow through with the entire process if everything is easy to see on their mobile phone or tablet.
If you have the budget, I recommend that you create a separate mobile funnel and a separate web funnel and target people with separate ads for mobile and web.
Create videos and images
The creative is one of the most important parts of the ad as it is what will attract attention. So, make sure you spend an ample amount of time creating it. For best results use more video ads. They stand out because they move in the feed. They attract more clicks. Furthermore, they can also attract sales as 31% of people who watch video ads buy something.
Make sure you make images and videos for both Instagram stories ads and in-feed ads.
You might also want to come up with thumbnails for the ads as they can help generate more views and engagement from people who have autoplay turned off.
Come up with the copy
Visuals will attract attention, but the copy is where they will lead people to afterwards. So, make sure you write a really good caption that explains the contents of the videos and provides a call-to-action with steps on what to do next. This content should be very persuasive without any outrageous claims as Instagram will block your ad if it finds that you are including outrageous click-bait information.
Think about your audience’s persona and their needs and desires while coming up with the copy.
Set up the ads
After you have the content for the ads, you can set them up on Instagram directly or by using an ad automation tool. In the beginning, you should create multiple versions of the ads with different video content, images, and copy. You can experiment with the different versions to see what drives the best ROI as all ads won’t work.
Start with small budgets
When experimenting, start with small budgets of $5 to $10 per day for each ad. Run the experiment for 5 to 10 days and track everything to confirm which one generates the highest ROI.
Scale
Once you know which ad works best, you can scale up the budget for it and pause the rest.
But after you know the winner, you should continue experimenting with new versions of the winner to see if you can find one that does even better.
Conclusion
This is the step-by-step process you should follow while creating ads. It is a lot of work and takes time, but after you set up a successful ad, you can scale results and continue generating sales for months and sometimes even years. It is worth the effort. If you still feel that this isn’t worth the time, you can get yourself an ad automation software that will quicken things up and automate certain tasks you don’t want to execute.
