Instagram is a great marketing tool, but obviously, there are millions of people using the platform, and not all of them have the same interests.
To succeed in using the platform to sell a product, you need to find the right people to target.
This depends on what you're selling.
You might be marketing to female college students, or to 30-something men and women who work in tech, or to boys in the 14-18 age range.
Finding your audience is essential to getting a good ROI on your Instagram ad spend.
When you use Instagram's paid advertising platform, you'll be able to select an objective for each campaign.
You'll need to decide whether you're trying to build brand awareness, make product sales, drive traffic to a landing page, or achieve some other business goal.
Then, you can use Instagram's sophisticated audience targeting features — many of which it shares with its parent company, Facebook — to send your marketing messages to the right people.
A recent blog post from AdEspresso explains the process in detail.
Start with Audience Targeting
The first step in any social ad campaign is to first select your objective.
That’s poignant because there are some things that stand the test of time, no matter what year it is or what platform we’re talkin’.
The two biggest drivers of your conversion rate include:
Instagram ads feature the same interest-based targeting you’d use on Facebook to reach new audiences who’ve never been to your website or even engaged with your profile before.
So you’d take a similar approach, layering in different demographics and interests and exclusionsuntil you arrive at an audience size that fits within your budget.
You save the winning audiences and build out closely related lookalike audiences to scale your top of the funnel results.
BUT.
There’s a common pitfall if you’re not careful. It’s like a hidden landmine that’s out of sight, out of mind.
And fortunately, Johnathan Dane from KlientBoost is helpful enough to point it out before it’s too late:
“This is going to sound a bit complex, but it’s the blueprint we use at KlientBoost and continues to work very well:
For lookalike and saved audiences (not custom ones),always consider that what you’re asking your target audience to do is not going to get a conversion on the first impression.
You’re much better off asking for a smaller request first, and then use your thank you page, email, and new custom audiences to push those converters on to the next step towards your core conversion goal.”
He’s referring to the potential threat people feel when you use a bottom of the funnel offer (like a product sale) to a brand new, cold audience who lacks that intent.
So instead of leading with the new $100 pair of jeans to cold, top of the funnel audiences, go with a newsletter opt-in first.
If you sell product subscriptions, your first step is to simply get the app install.
Then once you’ve got them on the hook, come back later when they’re ready to reel them in with a purchase (seamlessly switching over to custom audience targeting and updating the offers you’re sending them).
Not exactly sure exactly what’s going to work best?
No problem.
Test your potential creative organically first, before coming back to double down with your ad budget.
You can read more about creating an Instagram marketing strategy for your business over at AdEspresso.
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