If you’re familiar with Instagram ads, then you might have heard about Instagram promotions. These are the posts on your feed marked as “Sponsored” ones — regular Insta posts chosen for page visits, likes, or general traffic growth. Seems like they’re similar to the ordinary targeted ads, but the IG algorithm treats this kind of posts differently — up to different positioning in timelines and the quantity of them in user’s feed.
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Promotions have the same business goals as ads — engagement and visibility growth. The principle is simple: the algorithm uses the most popular post from your business profile to promote it and take it to your target audience’s feed. It’s great for these times when you don’t feel like your brand needs a proper week-long ad campaign, but could definitely use some promotion to get new followers and engagement. The main point of Instagram Promotions is to increase your brand awareness — when people see that your posts get more engagement and your content is always on display, they tend to trust your brand more.
Basically, this algorithm makes your most popular post viral, boosting visibility for your business. The promoted post will still have a “Sponsored” mark, but the difference in the mechanics of this promotion is big. For example, when you create an Instagram Ad, you set a daily or overall budget — the amount of the money you pay to Facebook in this case sets the amount of views and actions your content gets, and also you choose your targeted audience manually. With Instagram promotions, the algorithm rules everything out on its own: you only have to set a period of promotion and amount of money you’re ready to spend for boosting an activity for your post.
How to make your Instagram promotion work?
Good news: you don’t need an Ads Manager account to have access to Instagram Promotions. Manage your promo directly from your phone — all you need is some time and an IG business profile. You don’t even have to connect your Facebook account — everything can be done right from your Instagram app on iPhone or smartphone.
To make it work, you have to consider a few factors:
- motivation;
- traffic destination;
- target audience.
To choose the right motivation, ask yourself what are your business goals on Instagram: profile visits, additional website traffic, or brand awareness. The first option allows pushing your content through algorithms to get more people to see your post and eventually check out your profile. Creating bigger website traffic is great if you have an online store or your services are better represented on your website. In the meantime, brand awareness is just a way to get more people to see your ad — no engagement promised.
The next part is deciding where to direct your traffic — your profile, website, or your offline facility. Our advice would be to direct it to the most convenient place to use, where people can make decisions faster than in other places. If it’s your mobile-friendly website with a quick buy option — choose it, if your profile has more opportunities to make better conversions, choose it instead.
Instagram is used by millions of people — even billions now. To make a successful ad, you have to map out your preferred demographics. You can use an automatically suggested audience, parse one from similar accounts and use it, or create a completely new one manually. For this step, you really have to dive into your target audience’s portrait: what can this person look like? What are their interests, age, wealth? Every bit of demographic info will aid you in your promo.
These factors heavily influence the success of your promotion, so before promoting your post, write down a portrait of your audience and use it in your campaign. You’ll have to consider a few factors while creating said portrait (you might want to create a few of them is true audience is diverse enough):
- demographics — age, sex, location, and everything you’ll find on the “demographics” tab in Facebook Ads Manager for reference;
- occupation, hobbies and interests — this is the most important part as you should know who you cater your content and products to. Choose carefully and think about your average client — do they work 9/5, do they have a pet? This might seem like the hardest part, but getting it right will be 80% of your task to promote a post.
So, the hardest part is done — now you have an Instagram Promotion campaign ready. But what’s in it for you and your business? How can you convert this promotion into money and receive more than you’ve spent?
What are the possible results of Instagram promotion?
Of course, you can’t expect immediate results for $20 a week. But a good combination of Instagram Promotions and ads will give you a nice result within a week or two, depending on how long you are planning to run your campaign. Finding out the best money/period ratio is another sometimes difficult task, but we can assure you that the best results come with experience. Your first tries may be efficient enough to boost activity on your Instagram account, but when you find out what parameters work the best for you, you’ll get a significant increase in conversions and sales, which is really great for your business.
Either way, it’s a great choice to give a boost to your business — new customers will definitely find your brand. Depending on the options you chose while configuring your promotion, you can either get more engagement in likes & comments, more profile or website visits or even more conversions to direct sales!
