Instagram advertising is the creation and distribution of paid, sponsored content to be seen by a wider target audience beyond your existing follower count. Many businesses will take advantage of the Instagram platform to build a community behind their brand using highly aesthetic imagery and videos, but this can take time. By allocating a budget behind Instagram ads, you can select an audience comprising of your ideal customers, and exponentially improve the exposure of your brand.

Instagram is a platform with hundreds of millions of monthly users (and growing) spending hours each day reviewing content. Studies show that over a third of these users have engaged with a business over this platform. By creating a campaign that is engaging, well-targeted, and partnered with a desirable product or service offering, Instagram Advertising often proves to be one of the most rewarding platforms within a wider digital marketing strategy.

Organic Instagram posting refers to all of the activity from your business account that doesn’t include any paid promotion behind it. This is the content you post consistently to build value and grow your follower account, yet still only with limited reach. Instagram advertising is the paid alternative to this, where you can still create strong, branded imagery and videos to be distributed, but with more refined audience targeting and an allocated budget behind it for greater exposure. These sponsored posts or advertisements can then redirect potential customers to your business Instagram account, or directly to a website or landing page to promote engagement and conversions.

A variety of Instagram Ad formats are available for businesses to utilise in order to engage their target audience. These include:

• Photo Ads: Either square or landscape, this format is the most common used on the platform and is great for objectives ranging from building reach and traffic to generating leads and conversions.
• Video Ads: Again, this format is available in a square or landscape format and can run up to 60 seconds in length. Video is incredibly popular on the Instagram platform as it holds users’ attention for longer (when done correctly), and so is excellent in building brand awareness, interest and engagement.
• Carousel Ads: Showing between 2 and 10 images or videos in direct succession gives users a quick, comprehensive insight into your range of offerings. This is an ideal format for demonstrating versatility within your brand.
• Collection Ads: A direct display of products that are both cohesive and engaging, promoting better reactions from users further down the funnel, ready to convert or visit your store.

When including Instagram Advertising into your overall digital marketing strategy, you need to appreciate what draws users to the platform: highly aesthetic, highly engaging content. The Instagram specialists at Clearwater have enjoyed so much success with our clients’ campaigns because we take the time to understand their businesses, create bespoke strategies to achieve their goals, and develop winning creatives that perfectly attract target audiences. We are proud to have an unbeatable 5.0 Google review score, cultivated by delivering countless campaigns with maximum return on investment with no added stress to our clients.

Instagram advertising is similar to organic posting in terms of creating branded images, images sets, or videos to attract and convert audiences. Rather than relying on the social sharing element, however, Instagram ads will appear in feeds with a sponsored label to indicate they are advertisements. They are created through a business account, where users are able to select their target audience based on several key demographics and behaviours. It will then follow an auctioning system where bids are placed to get in front of these audiences, and should your ad prove relevant, high quality and set to deliver good actions from audiences, the platform will allow it to be shown.

Instagram Advertising is a flexible tool used to grow the exposure of your brand within your target audience on the platform. One of the key benefits is that it costs as much or as little as you like. Our specialists at Clearwater tell our clients it is more important to be concerned with your goals and the timeframes you wish to achieve them in. By creating a well-structured campaign that utilises the depth of audience targeting capabilities means you can receive incredible return on investment with only minimal investment. The average expectation of costs can range anywhere between 20 cents to $5 for a click, but what really matters is the amount of engagement and conversions generated from that budget.

Every business will have different goals, competition, and strategies within their digital marketing, and will therefore have a different experience in building an Instagram advertising campaign. The greatest differentiator will be whether you are trying to create these campaigns yourself, or whether you are working with an agency. Doing it yourself can be a stressful, confusing time as you do not have the experience or insights available to know what works well in your industry.

Partnering with an agency can save you time, money and distress as specialists guide you on how best to build a target audience, develop appropriate and engaging creatives, and be smart on how to allocate the right budgets for healthy return on investment. Working with us can see your campaign up and running in no time at all.

Instagram Advertising is used to increase the exposure of your brands to achieve your objectives. This isn’t necessarily limited to direct conversions. Ads can be structured with engaging formats to build brand awareness and interest into your offerings, and when you target the appropriate audiences, there are good chances they will choose to follow your account for new information helping them along their buyer journey.