As one of the leading social media platforms, Instagram has evolved into a viable marketing platform for businesses to successfully promote their brand. Advertising on Instagram couldn?t be easier, and with reasonable costs, Instagram has become an efficient marketing channel that has the ability to reach an extensive audience.

There are several campaign objectives that businesses look to achieve when advertising on Instagram. These often include building brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation and conversions. By selecting the specific goals and target audience, businesses can tailor their ads to whatever they wish to achieve. With Instagram boasting nearly 500 million daily active users to target, the benefits offer tremendous growth potential.

In terms of target audience, Instagram offers an automatic or manual target audience selection process. Automatic audience selection targets users similar to your followers, as well as people who have engaged with your content and may be interested in more of your posts. On the other hand, you have the option to manually build your own audience based on location, interest, age and gender.

How much should I spend on Instagram paid promotion?

There are many elements that can determine your Instagram advertising spend. After selecting your advertising objective and target audience, you can control how long your ads will run for and what budget you’re comfortable with spending.

Your budget is affected by how many people see your promotion: as you spend more, the number of people you can reach increases. Creating an accurate target audience will improve the efficiency of your marketing focus, which will result in your promotion budget being more cost effective. See below for an example of how the paid promotion process works.

Example promotion, budget and duration:

Firstly, you will need to select a post you would like to promote and then select a destination to send people when they come across your ad. You have three options to choose from:

Your Profile: this destination provides an action button that reads ‘visit Instagram profile’ and links people to your profile to see more of your content.

Your Website: this destination will link people to your website in Instagram’s in-app browser. You can add a URL and choose an action button from the following list: learn more, shop now, watch more, contact us, book now and sign up.

Your Shop Front: this destination enables users to call, email or get directions to your business.

Secondly, you will need to select your target audience. This can be done by using the automatic Instagram targeting process or manually creating your own.

Finally, you will need to finalise your budget and how long you want the promotion to run for. Here are some examples of different ways this can be done:

Instagram automatically puts these reaches together for you in correlation with your choice of target audience and budget, allowing you to get an estimate of your reach through the promotion. This estimation is based on your defined audience and advertising budget. The figures are an approximate guide, designed to help you decide on how much you want to spend on your promotions.

With Instagram campaigns playing such an integral role in the current landscape of UK marketing, a strong grasp of paid campaigns is essential to your business communications strategy. Get in touch for advice from the thirty30media team on how to get the most out of Instagram for your brand or go one better and let us help you plan your campaign for guaranteed success!