Social Media Marketing Instagram Marketing

Tips for creating an Instagram advertising plan

By Tom Welbourne, Founder/director

The Good Marketer

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The Drum Network article

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August 5, 2022 | 6 min read

Many marketers use Instagram as part of their advertising strategy, adopting the social platform as another space for delivering campaigns and furthering reach. Tom Welbourne, founder and director at The Good Marketer, shares how marketers can make the best use of this medium.

The Good Marketer on optimizing Instagram and implementing an advertising strategy. Image: Solen Feyissa Kwza/Unsplash

The Good Marketer on optimizing Instagram and implementing an advertising strategy / Solen Feyissa Kwza via Unsplash

If you want to create an Instagram advertising plan, it’s important to know what type of ad format works best for your business. Instagram offers several options, including story ads and carousel ads. In this article, we’ll talk about how each ad format works and how they can help you reach your target audience on Instagram (from the scope of an Instagram advertising agency, of course).

Know your audience

Your Instagram audience is all of your followers, those who have liked your posts and any other users who have interacted with you in some way. They’re the people you want to reach and convert into customers. In order to create a successful advertising campaign that resonates with them, it’s essential that you know who they are: their demographics (age range, gender), interests, what they like/dislike and more.

Know your niche

You need to know the ins and outs of your niche so well that it’s second nature – or better yet, first nature. If you don’t feel confident about this information yet, then do some research before moving forward with any ad campaign creation efforts on Instagram (and beyond). Find out everything there is about your target market, which will help inform how much money should be spent on each type of ad or where the best places are located for maximum exposure.

Focus on your goals

Before you start creating your Instagram ad campaign, it’s important to define the specific goals you want to achieve. If you’re not sure what your goals are, take a few minutes and think about why you’re creating an ad in the first place. Is there a specific product or service that you’re trying to promote? Or maybe there’s an event coming up that will require more sales than usual?

Asking yourself these questions will help define what type of advertisement and strategy works best for reaching those particular goals.

But remember: don’t worry about other people’s goals. Be ambitious with your own marketing plans while staying realistic and influenced by data. This way if things go wrong (and they will go wrong sometimes), it’ll be easier to figure out why they didn’t work out.

Perfect your profile

  • Have a complete profile

  • Make sure your profile is up to date

  • Make sure your profile is professional and consistent across all platforms

  • Engage with your audience by creating a personalized tone for each platform you use – this will help establish a familiar voice that builds trust with followers, as well as potential customers who don’t know much about you yet

Create compelling content

Now that you’ve got the basics down, let’s move on to the fun part: creating content. There are a few things to keep in mind when creating your Instagram advertising plan, but they’re definitely doable.

First off, make sure your visual content is relevant to your audience. If you offer services for dogs and cats but post only food photos or pictures of kittens on Instagram and only use this type of creative for your ads, you might start to see barriers forming where your brand isn’t aligned.

Next up, copy. This needs to be aligned with your brand too – clear, concise and appealing to your audience. Try to step into their shoes and consider what their pain points are and how your product resolves them – that’s the key to a successful advertising strategy.

Mission accomplished?

Now that you’ve mastered the basics of Instagram ads, it’s time to create an actual advertising plan. Make sure you’re advertising to the right audience. Your ad will only be effective if it is reaching people who would actually be interested in buying from you. If your target audience isn’t seeing your ad and clicking on it, then it won’t result in sales or leads for your business. It’s crucial that you do some research about your ideal customer before creating an Instagram advertising plan; otherwise, how can you know what kind of content they like? Once you have a better idea of who they are (and aren’t), start creating custom audiences within Facebook Ads Manager based on those details – you may find that some demographics perform better than others.

You should also consider which tools will help grow engagement with specific groups; look into hashtags and geotags when finding new followers who share similar interests, as well as top influencers within each niche sector (this can help boost reach). This way, advertisers can tailor their messages more effectively toward large groups, instead of just throwing everything against a wall hoping something sticks.

Conclusion

Now that you have a few ideas for how to create an Instagram advertising plan, you can go off and use them effectively. It’s important to remember that there are no shortcuts when it comes to advertising on this platform, and that the best way is always the slowest one: take your time, experiment with different approaches and don’t be afraid of what doesn’t work. We hope these tips will help you get started on creating an Instagram advertising plan today.

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