Before You Advertise on Instagram

About a month ago Instagram announced they would be widening their advertising offering to new partners this year and we've all been chomping at the bit to get our hands on an unsaturated audience with some native ads.

Although a self service dashboard has not yet been released, a few sponsored posts have been seeping into timelines in the UK, this video ad from Samsung Mobile was one that caught my eye:

As soon as everyone is privy to the platform though, there could be a sudden influx of ads and you really don't want to be getting off on the wrong foot with your potential new audience.

I know it's an exciting new world but it's best to make sure you take a moment to sit back, take stock of what you have, and prepare for what's likely to come when you do finally get the magic key.

Here are some tips and points to consider for when the time comes:

1. Relevance

Consider your audience and think about what they would want to see. Do not create your Instagram advertising strategy around commercial goals. The obvious reason for doing this is so that your campaign is more successful in terms of engagements, clicks and whatever other metrics you have in place, the more technical reason to consider relevance before anything else, is that we have learned from other platforms, it's the best way to get bang for your buck.

Twitter have always pledged a great advertising service for both advertisers and users and weight the reach of promoted products on:

• Recency - How fresh your promoted content is
• Resonance - How much the content resonates with the audience you have targeted, measured by engagement
• Relevance - How relevant the promoted content is to the audience you have targeted and how it fits with what they are talking about

Facebook rolled out their Relevancy Score system in February:

Again, Facebook gives more precedence to advertised content that is relevant to the audience you have chosen to target. This means your ads will gain more impressions and your CPE should drop.

And since it's Facebook insight that's powering the Instagram ads platform, I'll eat my hat if a similar system isn't in place.

2. Precise Goals

The last thing you should do is just throw a lot of money at Instagram without considering why you're doing it in the first place. Twitter have a great guide on setting up goals and the insight here translates across platforms.

Consider what you want to advertise, be it a campaign, an event, a new product or just your brand in general. The latter will be the hardest to test but the clearer your goals are from the outset, the clearer your results will be when it comes to reporting.

3. Calls to Action

Once you've created a strong set of goals (it's best to only have one per campaign) you can focus on a call to action and implement this across your copy and assets. Instagram have already released the four calls to action for ads:

• Shop now
• Install now
• Sign-up
• Learn more

It's best to decide in advance which one of these will work best with your campaign and will yield the best results for your objectives.

4. Target Audience

You'll already have a target audience in mind, based on your brand insight but to get a better idea of what audience targeting will really ramp up your ROI, take stock of past social advertising campaigns. 

Download all data from previous Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, StumbleUpon and what ever other social advertising you have carried out in the past and search for trends among users, really try to dissect specific interests and hone your targeting, this will give you a great basis for constructing targeting on Instagram.

5. Optimise Your Content

Through working out your goals, your calls to action and through past advertising campaigns and what content really works with a certain audience, you should have a good idea of the nature of the content you would like to advertise on Instagram.

Now you have to make sure it is optimised for the platform. 

• Images - Don't forget, Instagram switched their image size this month from 640x640 to 1080x1080 to keep up with retina display and other high resolution displays available on smartphones, tablets and laptops. So make sure, if you're going to advertise an image, it needs to be as high quality as possible
• Video - The Samsung Mobile example above was a video and from many social advertising campaigns I've overseen I can say that video works. I'd predict that videos will need to comply with the existing timeframe for users - 15seconds, the Samsung one did and I can't imagine Instagram allowing for longer, it would be incongruent with the nature of the platform.

We're yet to see what capabilities will come with Instagram ads, but it's always best to at least prepare using the knowledge we have!