Instagram advertising is easily one of the most effective and profitable forms
of online advertising available today. Which is why in this video I'm sharing
some of my agency's top tips and tricks to help you immediately up level your
Instagram advertising game so you can get more leads, customers and sales. Let's get to it.
Hey there my name is Adam Earhart,
marketing strategist and welcome to The Marketing Show, where we help you grow
your business and generate more leads, customers and sales. So if you're
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I've been running Instagram ads for almost as long as they've been available.
In that time, I´ve managed to dial in some very, very profitable and incredibly
effective campaigns for my clients, but one thing that stood out time and time
again is that what used to work last year and even last month isn't
necessarily what's working today. A lot has changed, continues to change quickly.
This is why when it comes to creating profitable Instagram advertising
campaigns or any advertising campaign or in fact pretty much any marketing
campaign in general, well, it's really important to not only stay current and
up-to-date on trends and all the tactics that are working today, but also to apply
proven marketing principles and fundamentals that have stood the test of
time and that's why in this episode I'm going to be sharing some of my agency's
most proven and effective Instagram advertising strategies available. We're
gonna be taking a look at not only the tactics and the tools and the things
that are really working today, but we're also going to be grounding those
improving marketing fundamentals, so that you can not only use these strategies
and these principles to get sort of better results and have more success
with your current Instagram ads but you can also leverage these across pretty
much every other marketing platform you're going to be involved with. Also,
right at the end, because it wouldn't be a video without some kind of cliffhanger,
well, I'm gonna be revealing what I believe is the single most important
element to Instagram advertising success. So, make sure to stick around all the way
to the end to capture that little nugget. Ok, let's get started and it all starts
with Facebook. Wit, Facebook Adam? I thought we're
talking about Instagram. Well, yes we are. But what's really important to
understand is that Instagram is owned by Facebook, so we have to start there. You
see, when it comes to running Instagram advertising, the entire dashboard is set
up through the Facebook Ads manager. Meaning, if you want to run an Instagram
ad you need to create it through the Facebook Ads manager. This is why it's
incredibly important to get friendly with Facebook. Basically, every single
part of the Instagram ad is done inside that ads manager including targeting,
campaign objectives, like traffic or video views or engagement or conversions,
the budget you set, the schedule you want, even placement options like deciding
whether you're gonna run a feed ad or a story ad or you may even want to run
some Facebook ads on the side. Also, a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to
running effective Instagram advertising campaigns is making sure that you've got
the Facebook pixel installed across all of your online properties like your
website or your landing pages or each step of your online funnel. The reason
this is so incredibly important is because it's the Facebook pixel that's
going to enable you to sort of decide which Instagram ads are giving you the
best results when it comes to generating those leads and generating those sales.
Let me clear this up because it's really important.
There is no Instagram pixel, rather it's a Facebook pixel that you're going to
use for your Instagram campaigns. I know it sounds a little confusing, but it's
actually pretty straightforward when you understand and appreciate that Instagram
is owned by Facebook and therefore all of the top level scheduling and budget
and everything we just talked about, well, it's run through the Facebook Ads
manager. Alright, so now that we've got that covered and essentially understood
that Instagram ads are run through the Facebook Ads manager, well, the next most
important thing to get, is that if you're going to be running Instagram ads it's
really important to go in there and manually select where the placements of
the ads you want to appear are going to appear. Basically, if you pick all
placements through the Facebook Ads manager, it's going to show your ad
across pretty much everything that Facebook has available. But if you only
want to dial in on exactly Instagram, you need to go in there and you need to
manually select just Instagram and from there you also need to choose whether
it's just the feed or just the story. Now, this part is important. Now, if you're
just getting started you really have no idea all placements can work fine and
Facebook's gonna prioritize whether to show your ads on Facebook or Instagram,
but if you know for a fact that your market is on Instagram and you really
want to double down on Instagram ads, it's really important to go in there and
manually select that, because the creative is going to be significantly
different for a Facebook Ad vs. an Instagram Ad
and then again, within Instagram feed Ad vs. a story Ad. See, every
different placement is going to have a different style and a different design
and different formatting. I'm gonna make sure to link up two links in the
descriptions below that'll take you to the specifications and the sizes for
each different ads so you know exactly what kind of content you're gonna need
to create. Alright, so let's say that we've now decided we're just going to
run Instagram ads, well, the decisions aren't over yet we still need to decide
whether we want to run just a feed ad or just a story ad and obviously they're
going to have different designs and different specifications. One of the
biggest mistakes I see novice advertisers make, is simply creating one
ad and just plastering it across all different placements and really not
changing it at all, which means it's gonna come out kind of looking funny or
part of the image is gonna be cropped off or it's just gonna seem out of place
and incongruent with what you're trying to get across. Now, of course
feed ads and story ads are going to have different dimensions but they also have
a very different style and tone and the way that people interact with their feed
and with their stories so you want to make sure that you're understanding this
and incorporating those specifications and those design ideas and the tone and
the way in which the user engages with these different modalities of feed or
story, well, you need to bake that right into the ad if you want it to be
successful. One tip that's incredibly important to know, however, is that
regardless of whether you're using Facebook or Instagram or the feed or the
story ads, is that you want your ad to take up as much real estate as possible.
This means getting familiar with the specification sizes, like I'll link up
in the descriptions below, and then really maximizing the screen real estate
that your ad is going to take up. Basically, if you have the option for a
vertical post, well, go with that one, if not, well, then use square and if you
can't do that, well, then obviously stick with landscape, but the point here is you
want to chew up as much of the real estate as they're giving you as humanly
possible. After all, you're paying for it. Alright,
so the next tip that I want to share with you is to really use and leverage
more video content and we're talking about whether this is organic or whether
we're talking about paid ads. Regardless, you want to use more video and certainly
test it out to see what's going to get you better results. You see, one of the
key factors and one of the deciding triggers behind the Instagram algorithm
and behind most algorithms in general, is what kind of content is going to keep
people on the platform the longest and the most engaged
and what video does a pretty good job of this because it often takes a lot
longer to consume. Now, with video, you're definitely going to want to test it
across feed and across story ads and see which one works better for you. An
important point to remember here though, is that if you can you do want to
include some kind of captions or text on the screen so that you can get to the
people that aren't necessarily watching or listening with the sound on. If you've
never created a video ad, well, then a great piece of software that I use
inside the agency is called "In video" and I'll make sure to link it up in the
descriptions below, full disclosure, this will be an affiliate link. But that
doesn't take away from the fact that I use it in the agency pretty much every
day. The next tip and one that's going to be key to your success, whether we're
talking about Instagram advertising or pretty much any advertising, is that you
need to be split testing multiple different ads, multiple different images,
different audiences and different placements, in order to find that ideal
combination that's going to give you the best bang for your buck. Also, when you're
split testing, a couple really important points is that you really only want a
split test one element at a time. Meaning, maybe a different caption or maybe a
different image or a different video, but you don't want to cram everything in all
at one split test a million different things because you really won't have any
good data about why one ad perform better than the other because you tested
too many variables. Also, make sure to give your split test a sufficient amount
of time. The last thing you want to do is split test it, give it a few hours find
out that one got a couple more clicks and declared a winner, because it's
simply not enough data or not enough time for the algorithm to properly
optimize in order to give you relevant and accurate feedback. When it comes to
split testing, I've got a pretty strong philosophy here that you should always
be testing. Really, there's never an excuse to not be coming up with new
creative and new images and new audiences to test because things could
pretty much always be getting better. Or let's say you happen to knock it out of
the park right off the bat, well, it's fantastic, you still want to be testing a
back-up plan just in case this ad gets saturated or starts to lose
effectiveness over time. Alright, and now what I believe is probably the single
most important element, when it comes to Instagram advertising success, which is
you really need to respect the funnel. You see, when it comes to generating
leads or generating sales online, well, the ad is really just one part of the
entire customer journey or the entire sales process and this is where
so many people go wrong. They fail to recognize about what's going to happen
next and what's gonna happen after that and after that and after that as the
customer continues through your funnel and through their journey.
Well, this journey is called a marketing funnel and essentially it's everything
that's going to happen right from that initial ad view and ad click right
through to where they're gonna end up after that and what they're gonna do if
they take action there or if they don't take action, how you're gonna follow up
with them, maybe you'll show them retargeting ads or send them email
follow-up, whatever the case, this entire process is incredibly important, because
you can't expect your ad to do all of the heavy lifting for you in just one
simple ad. Now, if you're brand new to marketing funnels, here's a really simple
sample funnel that I can lay out for you. You'll start things off by having the
customer click that ad, that's really step one and the goal of your ad is
really just to get the click. From there, they're gonna move on to step two, which
is the landing page, this is where they'll enter their name or their email
address in exchange for whatever you were promising in the ad, maybe a
download or a cheat sheet or a blueprint or some kind of free guide. From there,
they'll move on to the Thank You page, which is where you deliver on your
promise by delivering the free guide or the free training or whatever it is that
they signed up for in that landing page or when they turn over their name in
their email. And then after the thank-you page, well, this is where the nurturing is
going to continue with perhaps retargeting ads or an email sequence or
anything else that's going to enable you to continue to build value and to
continue giving more information and building that know like and trust factor
even more. Also, this part is incredibly important but when it comes to your
funnel especially when we're talking about Instagram advertising, well, you
need to make sure that your entire funnel is mobile optimized, meaning, it's
designed for the mobile experience because this is where people are going
to be originating from. So, it simply doesn't make sense to have a landing
page and a thank-you page and all your retargeting well it doesn't make any
sense to have that optimized for a desktop where text is going to be too
small or things are gonna get cut off or you get the picture. The power of the
funnel cannot be understated here, it's incredibly important and in fact, it's
pretty much crucial because we simply can't expect the ad to do all of the
heavy lifting for us and there's really no need for it to do it anyways when we
have all these other tools available for us. Alright, so the next thing you're
going to want to do is check out the video I have linked up right here when
it's released next week which is part of this Instagram
marketing series. It's going to walk you through even more proven and effective
Instagram marketing strategies. Thanks so much for watching and I'll catch you
next time on The Marketing Show. The best product and the best service are not the
ones that win, rather it's the ones with the best marketing. You can disagree with
this statement, you can think it's unfair and in many ways it is unfair...