Instagram has been one of the last social media platforms to hold out against showing ads to its users. Now that the function is available, the question becomes, “what can Instagram do and how can we leverage this new advertising platform to reach its community of more than 400 million users?”

The addition of Instagram expands the reach of your brand awareness campaigns to mobile users. Designed initially as a way to share photos, the platform works best from a mobile. Point, shoot, upload, filter and publish.

This focus is reflected in the pricing available. For a ‘Web Click Optimised’ campaign, targeting ages 18 – 65 from Australia, the suggested CPC bid from the platform is somewhere just south of $40 CPC! In comparison, the same targeting for a CPM campaign comes in with suggested pricing just below the $5 mark. Instagram knows that the click through on its Ads is poor. It’s not the primary purpose for using the platform and the prices above example about a 0.012% CTR show it.

The mobile focus of the platform is an important consideration when we’re working out whether to add it to your advertising strategy. Instagram provides a younger, more affluent and discerning audience to would-be advertisers. So our question becomes, is this an audience we need to target to meet our campaign goals for your client?

For campaigns which will benefit from adding Instagram, you can choose from four objectives, Impressions, Clicks to Your Website; Mobile App Installs; and Video Views. You might consider only using Instagram for brand awareness campaigns at the moment as it’s a social media platform with users who are unused to seeing adverts on their feeds (and the CPC Adverts are expensive!). In addition, the way users consume and post content on Instagram has an extremely visual focus and is different than on any other platform.

Apart from the above differences, the remainder of our options for advertising on Instagram are the same as our current Facebook offerings. There are three key ad units, Images, Video and Carousel ads. As with Facebook, image ads are standard photographs with a button driving users to click. Video ads simply replace the photograph with a video and carousel ads are a series of images that users can browse.

Targeting options are exactly the same as those we use for Facebook advertising. Considerations include location, demographics, interest and actions. The only options that are mandatory are location, age and gender, but using the other targeting options will give us more control over who sees the ads to target the right audience.

A major benefit that Instagram has over Facebook is its use of hashtags. Already commonly used on Instagram to reach a wide range of users and discover common interests, the hashtag will also benefit advertisers if used properly. Hashtags create opportunities to leverage popular or trending tags to reach users.

As the remarkable Gary Vaynerchuk writes in his article on Medium, “Instead of trying to own or establish a hashtag for a campaign, look at hashtags that are trending and very popular on the two main platforms already. Research your audience. See what they’re saying. What hashtags are they using? Try to figure out how to reverse into them by putting out your piece of content, storytelling.” He then goes on to discuss the downside of trying to invent your own hashtag for campaigns and examples of a few marketing disasters that you really should be aware of.

With the business model we’ve created at MyMediaTradingDesk and the tactical speed of service we offer, strategic use of Instagram is now a real possibility for you.

Considering adding Instagram to your strategy? Brief us on your plans here or give us a call on
07 3394 8434 for a no holds barred chat.