Features and cost of advertising on Instagram

Instagram is a social network, one of the most popular among advertisement platforms, in which people share their impressions and events. Therefore, Polus.media is sure that advertising on Instagram should be emotional and beautiful. There must be bright and colorful posts, otherwise, users will simply not notice it. If advertising is not interesting, it is not suitable for everyone on Instagram. For example, if you have some complicated business and you produce and sell complex technology and are focused on the B2B market, then it will be very difficult for you to find such an audience on Instagram. You can, of course, keep a profile in order to be present on Instagram but it is worth considering whether you should spend your strength on it. Instagram-targeted advertising is an advertisement where you can choose which audience you'll show it to. It is suitable for goods and services mainly for the B2C market – various handicraft goods, online stores, cafes, various services . . .

The cost of advertising on Instagram

First of all, the price of advertising depends on the subject and quality of the account and audience (but it is assigned by the site owners, so you need to be able to determine the quality). The quality of the account and audience includes the number of likes to posts and comments, the quality of the content, and the quality of the comments themselves (in relation to the total number of subscribers). But prices change and the criteria for selecting the account for each case are different. Therefore, in order to find out how much advertising in Instagram costs, it is better to see the actual information personally and by the required parameters.

What are the targeting settings?

Here are some of them:

• Sex
• Age
• Place of residence
• Demography (education, marital status, etc.)
• Interests (sports, finance, business, fashion, decoration, etc.)
• Behavior etc.

For instance, you can display ads to people between the ages of 25 and 55 years old living in New York who are interested in kitchen furniture to be very accurate in targeting.

Where does Instagram get targeting data?

Instagram is owned by Facebook, which tracks the behavior of all users in both social networks, looks at what they read, like, write, what they subscribe to, etc. In addition, it tracks the movement of people and knows, for example, when somebody moves abroad. Therefore, it accurately determines which of the users are suitable for the selected targeting parameters and shows ads to these people.

What does an ad look like and where is it displayed?

Instagram advertising is displayed in the feed or in stories. It can be one image, several images, videos, etc. The difference from ordinary posts is that there is an inscription above the advertisement and there is a call to action.

Types of Instagram Ads

Let's start with the promotion of the post through the Instagram profile. The advantage of this promotion is that Facebook becomes more and more intuitively clear. But it is important that your account should be a business profile and linked to the company's Facebook page. There are drawbacks to this method: there are fewer targeting options for the audience. For example, you cannot filter out people who have already subscribed to your Facebook page. Therefore, try the promo of the post in the Instagram application first and then use the advertising cabinet on Facebook. To transfer your Instagram to a business profile, go to the Instagram application – settings – select ‘Switch to company profile' in the menu.

Next, link your profile to your Facebook business page. Select a post in your Instagram account to promote. Select the post you want to promote. If necessary, edit the text (the first line is the most important, plus, there should be a call to action). Remember that the edited post can start promoting only after 15-30 minutes. You can also promote only the last 15 posts from your feed. You will be prompted to select a target for this promotion. You can choose any goal of the promotion because you can change things in the settings.

You need to choose the purpose of advertising – what you want to get as a result of an advertising campaign. Instagram offers two options:

• Stimulate profile traffic
• Increase website traffic – this goal should be chosen if you need to lead people to your website or landing page.

To summarize, let's list the ways to advertise on Instagram:

• Promotion of posts inside Instagram to increase the coverage of the publication and quickly launch an advertising campaign
• Launching an advertising campaign through the Ads Manager account on Facebook to fine-tune the audience for the ad
• Advertising in profiles with popular bloggers to promote your product or service with the help of recommendations.