Instagram Promotion: Developing the Best Paid Strategy for Your Business
Effective Instagram promotion is all about location, location, location. You want your content to land a prime location on the news feeds of your target audience; a prominent spot in the Explore page; and a high rank in Instagram search results. Instagram promotion is an aggressively competitive game — one which requires a multi-faceted strategy to help you make the grade. From do-it-yourself best practices to third-party partnerships, here are surefire tactics for leveraging paid Instagram promotion services to get you all the way to the top.
What is Instagram Promotion?
Instagram promotion is sponsored or paid content promotion that’s algorithmically designed to boost brand awareness, follower numbers, and engagement rates and to achieve other business goals on the platform.
Through Instagram’s native promotion tools, business accounts can convert regular posts and Stories into ads through boosting, or access Ads Manager to create more advanced advertising campaigns on Instagram and other platforms. Paid Instagram promotion can also be done through influencer marketing or outsourced to third-party companies that specialize in Instagram growth strategy.
Businesses, both big and small, need paid Instagram promotion to more effectively seek out and reach their target audience among the more than 1 billion monthly active users on the platform. In addition to advanced and intelligent audience targeting, Instagram promotion helps businesses derive valuable and actionable performance insights to help them improve their Instagram strategy, build a highly engaged community, and stay competitive within their industry.
Investing in Instagram promotion is a must for businesses if they want to thrive on the fiercely busy and packed platform. All the tools you need to devise the right ecommerce marketing strategy for your brand are right at your fingertips. Of course, you must know how to use these tools to your advantage. Let’s take a closer look at the hows of Instagram promotion.
Sell directly on Instagram
How Does Instagram Promotion Work?
Currently, Instagram business accounts have two options for Instagram promotion: boosting, which can be done with regular posts and Stories, and using Ads Manager.
Boosting Regular Posts and Stories for Instagram Promotion
Boosting regular posts is the most direct method for paid Instagram promotion. You can turn any post you shared on Instagram into an ad by boosting it, and it only takes a few clicks. You can boost an image, video, or carousel post, as well as posts with product tags. When you boost a post, you need to identify your goal, or the destination where people who click your ad will be directed. You will also define your target audience. You can specify certain demographics or choose look-alike audiences. And then you’ll set a budget and duration. The cost of your boosted post depends on how much you’re willing to spend and how long you want the ad to run.
Simple and flexible tools to meet your goals
You can boost Stories that are active, as well as any Story in your Highlights or archive. When you boost a Story for Instagram promotion, you can only use up to five interactive elements which are limited to the following:
- Location sticker
- Hashtag sticker
- Tappable text
- @mention sticker (to tag the content creator for UGC, or your business partner’s profile)
- A countdown sticker
- Polling sticker (only available for ads that are created without a pre-existing post)
- Swipe UP CTA sticker (only available for ads that are created without a pre-existing post)
Boosted Stories run for as long as the duration you have set, i.e., an active Story you have boosted will not expire after 24 hours and will continue running as an ad.
Boosting Regular Posts and Stories for Instagram Promotion
Ads Manager provides businesses with advanced tools to build multi-platform ad campaigns. When you use Ads Manager for Instagram promotion, you can create and edit ads; manage ad budgets, schedules, and placements; and keep track of their performance from a single dashboard. Below are the key features of Ads Manager:
- Create an ad campaign with specific parameters, such as an advertising objective that fits your business goals.
- Smarter ad targeting which allows you to define a broad or exclusive audience.