The Facebook-owned Instagram image service has exploded in popularity in recent years, which is why Instagram marketing has also been rearing its head more and more. At the beginning of 2018, Instagram was the fastest growing social media platform.. Instagram already has more than 500 million daily users on its service. This means that the relevant target audience for your business is most likely to be found on Instagram. Thanks to the new tools of the service (both organic and paid advertising) – stories and IGTV, posts and advertising – there are no potential platforms.
Instagram is already popular with youth and young adults, but as has been the case with Facebook in the past, older generations are coming after younger ones. Now the growth is happening especially in the 50+ age group.
WHY START INSTAGRAM MARKETING?
Instagram is growing at a fast pace and its users are very active: 500 million users a day! While Facebook remains one of the most profitable advertising platforms, Instagram marketing is catching up at a fast pace.
On the Instagram stories platform, video consumption is substantial. The Instagram stories platform alone has grown its daily user base from 150 million last spring to 400 million in early fall.
The increase in the number of users is also reflected in the fact that the free visibility for companies has begun to decline rapidly. Organic visibility of course supports paid advertising, so organic content production should not be forgotten. Your potential customers need to see that your business is “alive” and active if they end up on your site through paid advertising. Content production must be regular and systematic for users to interact with your profile and brand.
HOW TO ORGANICALLY REACH THE RIGHT PEOPLE ON INSTAGRAM?
To get started with Instagram marketing, it’s important that you carefully define the target audience your Instagram marketing intends to reach. Think about your target audience for your product and/or service: What kind of people are your potential customers? What are they interested in and what kind of photos and videos do they post? So, you’ll take a little look at what your target audience is doing on Instagram and how you might be able to reach them.
Therefore, organic content should be in line with your company’s vision and mission. What do you want to communicate to your customers? Therefore, communication needs to look good and doesn’t always have to be fine-tuned and finished perfectly. In Instagram stories, the video can be recorded on your own phone. It is also important that the video often has someone from your company. From a consumer perspective, this will give your business a face and make it appear approachable.
Therefore, the content must match what you stand for as a company. Videos and photos should be uploaded to your profile an average of three times a week. In stories, videos and images should be posted every day. Content on the Stories platform can be lighter and more human, so short descriptions of what happened on your business day, for example, may be more suitable for consumers. Learn more about how a business can make an impact on Instagram.
Ways to make your Instagram profile organically viewable:
- You are following profiles that are interesting for your industry.
- You will be able to chat and comment on other people’s photos on your channel.
- You post content consistently and regularly, and you don’t let your channel go idle.
- Post interesting material for your target audience three to four times a week on your profile and stories once a day.
- Use 30 hashtags that interest your audience and support your images and videos.
- You post photos and videos to many platforms on Instagram: My Profile, Stories, Live, and IGTV.
- You promote your Instagram account on other channels you use, such as Facebook (Twitter, TV, magazines, etc.)
- Cooperation with famous people.
The list above is a comprehensive way to reach your target audience organically. However, everything should be based on creating a look for your channel that differentiates you from your competitors and gives your followers an idea of what type of content you are going to publish there. This will make it easier for consumers to engage with your Instagram profile.
However, I would like to emphasize that In both Instagram and Facebook marketing, paid advertising always overlooks organic visibility. Instagram followers or Facebook page fans do not matter at all in this case. Paid advertising always reaches your relevant consumers, even if you only have 50 followers on Instagram and 900 fans on Facebook. Followers and Likes are in no way a relevant metric for the success or performance of paid advertising.
So is organic visibility enough? If you want to get results and increase the sales of your business, then the answer is No. Organic visibility alone and organically posted videos and images are not enough if your goal is to reach more of your target audience on social media and increase your revenue. As I mentioned earlier, paid advertising always bypasses organic visibility. If your competitors are doing paid advertising and your business is posting content organically, unfortunately you won’t be reaching your target audience. You won’t reach new customers organically, and not all of your secondary fans: with organic posts you only reach 2-6% of your secondary fans. Post sponsorship is also not enough, as it is not allowed to target as much as paid advertising.
INSTAGRAM PAID ADVERTISING AND ITS OBJECTIVES
According to our results Paid marketing on Instagram is sometimes even more profitable for acquiring new customers than advertising on Facebook. Instagram has become a very relevant marketing platform along with Facebook. The CPM (or cost per 1,000 impressions) is significantly cheaper on Instagram than on Facebook. The CPM of the Instagram feed has been on average four euros cheaper than that of Facebook (the average CPM of Facebook is around €7.2). In the best case scenario, the CPM of the Instagram stories platform has cost €1.38, which is significantly lower than the CPM price of an IG or FB feed.
On the other hand, the CTR (the percentage of people who saw the ad and clicked on the link to the website) is higher on Facebook, for example, the CTR of the same ad can be 1.27% on Facebook, while on Instagram it can be 0.21%. As a result, the cost of clicking a link is typically 10-30 cents more expensive on Instagram than it is on Facebook. The numbers are precisely because displaying ads on Instagram is really affordable right now. So I wouldn’t think too much about the price of that link click, because the ad revenue from Ad X has been very profitable, even though the price of the link click has been $0.30 more expensive on Instagram. There have also been more and cheaper Instagram purchases through Facebook than through Facebook.
The minimum target for ad revenue is in the 300% range, or €1 generates €4 in revenue, but you can expect even better results from Instagram, whether you’re an online retailer or an entrepreneur running campaigns on social media products. individual social. .
CASE: E-commerce customer
Together with our e-commerce client, we set out to make more effective use of Instagram as an advertising platform and to test how the differences with Facebook would come to light.
We did paid advertising for warm and cold audiences on Facebook and Instagram. We soon realized that purchases from both audiences are profitable from both platforms. Instagram was surprised by its efficiency, as in some campaigns, Instagram clearly outperformed Facebook.
Although the purchases still did not arrive in very high quantities, the advertising turnover of the warm audience in campaign A was 1568% (one euro invested represented €15.68). In that campaign, the cost of a purchase was €0.70 more expensive compared to Facebook and the price of clicking a link was only €0.09 more expensive.
In Campaign B, the advertising return reached 2987%, which means that one euro invested generated €29.87. The purchase cost in this case was €0.50 more expensive compared to Facebook and the price of clicking a link was €0.50 more expensive. In both cases, the CPM was 3-4 euros cheaper on Instagram.
From the successful campaigns, it was possible to conclude that the potential customers of company X are found just as profitably on Instagram as they are on Facebook.
This resulted in building separate ads on Facebook and Instagram to better fit Instagram’s image and video requirements and to invest financially in Instagram campaigns.
Ads for warm audiences continued to do well and ads for cold audiences began to attract attention with their good ad revenue. Ad revenue for a campaign targeting cold audiences was 860%. The purchase cost was €0.60 cheaper than on Facebook, but the price of clicking a link was €0.20 more expensive on Instagram. However, most of the purchases came unexpectedly from Instagram and not from Facebook. The difference was considerable.
We have also had good and very promising results from ads on this company’s Instagram stories platform, for example, Campaign C on IG stories has generated 610% ad revenue. However, this path is so incipient that you only have to write about it in the next blog.
Was Instagram marketing profitable for our client?
Instagram marketing ad revenue for our client has averaged 470% from cold audiences and average ad revenue from warm audiences has been 1765%. This means that our clients received an average of nearly five times the return on the dollars they spent on campaigns targeting new customers, and 17 times the return on campaigns targeting warm customers. It was important to keep in mind that our customers get new customers to shop profitably on Instagram. Attracting new clients is a pillar of sustainable development, very important for the growth of the company. Without new customers, the company’s operations will not last long.
It can no longer be said that Instagram marketing would be expensive compared to Facebook. From Instagram, you can get new customers to buy in the most profitable way possible from Facebook. Your ad revenue for cold audiences is profitable, not to mention warm customers.