How to Create Instagram Ads?

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HOW TO CREATE INSTAGRAM ADS ? A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

When Instagram was launched in 2005, it was just another social media network for sharing visual content. But with the passage of time, it became a network for promoting your business. With 1 billion users and around 50 million active daily users, posting approximately 95 million posts daily, Instagram has become the largest platform for sharing videos and photos. Instagram is a tremendous opportunity for digital marketers to promote their products and services by running ads on the app and thus reaching out to a larger number of audiences.

IMPORTANCE OF INSTAGRAM ADS

Instagram ads are without a doubt an integral part of any marketing strategy whether it is for yourself and your own products, or for your clients if you’re a marketing agent, or even as an individual who wants to grow the followership on Instagram. It does cost you some capital, but it is definitely worth it. According to the stats, 27% of users say they search for new products and brands on Instagram. In a recent survey in US conducted with young adults, it was revealed that 73% of the users said that Instagram is the best way for brands to reach them about their new products and promotions.

COST

If we talk about the cost of Instagram ads, there is no average or fix price. It depends on different factors such as

Target
Depends on how competitive is your product
In which time of year, you run an advertisement as costs usually go up during holidays such as Black Friday

Thus, a good way to evaluate your expected cost is to set up a draft ad campaign in Ads manager, set Audience Definition and Estimated Daily results, and see what the estimated cost will be. It will help you in setting up a sufficient budget for your campaign.

FORMATS

There are different formats of Instagram ads, which are as follows:

Image Ads: it is the most basic type of ad using a single static image, found in news feed and explore page feed. It appears as a square, landscape or vertical format.

Video Ads: video ads may appear in the square or landscape format. These also appear in the feeds along with image ads.
Carousel Ads: carousel ads will appear in the square format or vertical format on feed and stories carousel ads show is a swipe able set of ads that the user can peruse through for Instagram stories.
Instagram Stories: Instagram Stories ads support images and videos in a full-screen vertical format. Stories ads uses the same placement dimensions as used in other ad formats, which means you can single photo, or a video of around 120 seconds that has an aspect ratio of 9:16 and 16:9 up to 4:5.

Reels: Only full-screen vertical videos of maximum 60 seconds length can be used for Reels.
IGTV: IGTV and Reels are almost same, but it is used for longer discussions that are informative and educational. It allows you to post a 60 minutes long videos.

So far, we have talked about what Instagram ads are and how they benefit your business. Also, we have discussed different Ad formats of Instagram. Now the real thing is that how do we create and run an ad on Instagram. There are two different methods of creating an ad on Instagram. One way is that we directly do it through Instagram, and the other method, which is most recommended is, we use Facebook’s Ad Manager to create a successful ad for Instagram. Keeping in mind the fact that Instagram is owned by Facebook, Facebook allows users to conduct Instagram campaigning through its Ad Manager. Let’s discuss both methods in a little detail.

CREATING AD ON INSTAGRAM

This is the simplest way of creating an ad on Instagram. First of all, you need to create your business profile on Instagram or you can always convert your personal account to your business account. After completing this step, you get a ‘Promote Post’ button beneath every post you create. It’s up to you that which post you want to promote. It is recommended that you choose the one which already has generated the most engagement.

Running an ad through this ‘Promote Button” is not a very good idea if you have plans to really expand your business. It has very limited features, that allows you to reach to a fewer number of viewers. The professionals in this field do not favor to just “promote” your posts. They will suggest you to create an ad like a pro so that it generates more views and engagements, which is really good for you business. for this purpose, they recommend to use Facebook Ad Manager to create an ad for your business promotion.

CREATING AN AD THROUGH FACEBOOK AD MANAGAER

Since, we know that Facebook and Instagram are connected, we can use Facebook Ads Manager and create ads that run on Instagram. Ads Manager is a powerful tool that let’s the users to customize their ads and reach the targeted audiences. With this tool, you can just design your ad as you want and check the performance of your campaign.

Now, to design an ad, the first you need to have, is a Facebook account and access to Facebook Business Page. But most importantly, you must link your Instagram to your Facebook account. To do so you have to follow the following steps:

Login to your Facebook Business Page
Head over to Page Settings, scroll down to Instagram

Click the button that says “Connect Account”
Add your Instagram account details
And “Save” the settings.

After connecting your Instagram and Facebook accounts, you can now create and run ads. Let’s assume that you are beginner and have never used Facebook Ad Manager before, so, here is the step-by-step guide for you.

Go to Facebook Ads Manager, click on the “Create” button. This will give you two options; Guided Creation and Quick Creation. If you want a complete guide of how to create a perfect ad, then opt for Guided Creation. Ads Manager will then provide you with a list of objectives with different categories.

Choosing the correct objective for your ad is very important, as it helps Facebook to determine the appropriate bidding types and ad placements for your ad. For example, if you run an online store, your main objective will be to increase your sales. For this purpose, you should choose “Conversions”. Ads Manager lets you choose that where do you want to convert your audience; in other words where do you like to send the people who click on your ad.

Second step is to name your ad campaign. This tool gives an option to give a name to your campaign, rather than just naming it as “Campaign 1”, you can use some creative names. You can also test your campaign through an A/B test, which allows you to check different variations of a campaign to see which strategy works.
Next step is a very important one and it is to set your budget and schedule. Ad Manager has a new feature “Campaign Budget Optimization”. You can either turn this feature on and let the app allocate your budget or you can just manually set your budget and schedule that for how long you want this specific ad to run.

Choosing the audience is the real fun thing to do. You can select your ads to reach to certain interests and demographics.
Now select the placement for your ads. There are two options for this:
Automatic Placement, automatically displays your ads at the places where it might work best.

Manual Placement lets you to pick the places and properties where you want to display your ads.

Since, you are creating ads for Instagram, thus you should select Manual Placement.

How to Create Instagram Business Account?

The final step is to pick ad format, that is most relevant to you Instagram campaign, write your ad copy, upload relevant creative, choose the correct ad size, and your ad is just ready to be published. Instagram offers many apps which can be used to enhance your ad by choosing different layouts. For video ads, it has a feature ‘Hyper-lapse” which allows you to create time lapse videos.

CONCLUSION

So, we have tried our best to guide you about Instagram ads, their costs, their benefits and also how to create a successful ad campaign to promote and grow your business. Facebook Ads Manager has some self-analytical features which lets you keep track of your ad’s performances. By tracking your ad through these tools, you will be able to enhance your strategies to perform better which will ultimately help in the progress of your online business.

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