Did you know that Instagram has over one billion active users? This makes it a great option if you want somewhere to showcase your business's images, photos, and videos!
If you want to grow your following and make people aware of your brand, creating a PPC campaign can produce great results. Plus, you can refine your advertising to suit your target audience and budget.
Here are our top tips for creating an Instagram ad campaign that will get people clicking on that follow button!
Consider the power of Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories launched in 2016 and is one of the most popular features on the platform. These short and snackable posts help show your business's human side and make prospective customers fall in love with you.
Over 500 million people use Stories every single day, and the Stories feed is promoted right at the top of each user's newsfeed. This makes Stories a great option to focus your PPC efforts on.
Use videos
As well as static photos, you can use video ads on Instagram. Video ads can be up to a minute long in-feed and up to 15 seconds long on Stories.
Videos are great as they are engaging and hold your customer's attention. They also allow you to use sound and music too.
You can even run multiple video ad campaigns at the same time and tell a story about your brand!
Target the right people
Instagram gives you a lot of choices when it comes to targeting your ads. It uses Facebook's advertising system and data, meaning that you can target your ads with laser-sharp precision.
You can use this data to your advantage and serve your ads to the people most likely to follow you. Not only can you target prospective customers by age, gender and location, but by their interests and other accounts they follow too.
Did you know that you can target people who have already bought from you? All you need to do is upload a list of your customer's data, and Instagram will match it with its users. You can then serve these users an ad reminding them to give you a follow!
Look at user-generated content
User-generated content (or UGC) is a great way to grow your following. For example, if you own a clothing brand, it could be photos of customers wearing your products.
UGC is excellent as it's authentic and real. People will look at your advertising campaign and say, 'that could be me!'
In fact, millennials trust UGC 50% more than original content created by brands.
To get UGC, just look at the images people have tagged you in as well as brand-specific hashtags. Then all you need to do is approach them to ask for permission to use their photo.
Most people will be happy to do this for free if you tag their account.
We hope that this guide has given you some insight into the world of Instagram advertising!
How do you use Instagram to promote your brand?
You've done your keyword research and come up with amazing ad copy. However, you're finding that although you're getting a lot of impressions, you're not getting as many conversions as you would like. Sound familiar? If the answer is yes, the PPC funnel can help.
What is the PPC funnel?
Think back to the last time you bought something online. You started off thinking about the benefits of purchasing a specific product, then researched potential companies to buy from. Finally, you went and bought the product from your company of choice.
With the PPC funnel, customers move through a variety of processes. Knowing which part of the funnel your customers are at and how to attract them will help you get the best results.
The four stages are:
1. Awareness. This is when customers are thinking of buying a product or service
2. Consideration. This is when the customer knows that they want to buy a product or service. They then do their research to determine who to buy it from
3. Decision. This is when the customer decides to buy a product or service from you
4. Retention. Did you know that returning customers spend 33% more per order than brand new customers? Retention is when you keep existing and previous customers engaged, so they come back and buy from you again
How to utilize the PPC funnel
So, now that you know what the funnel is, how can you apply it to your PPC strategy?
Map your existing keywords to the funnel
Different keywords will apply to different customers depending on where they are in the funnel. For example, people at the awareness stage may look for "web design services" while people at the consideration stage may look for "affordable web design services in XXX".
Doing this will let you customize your ad copy and create landing pages that resonate with the specific needs of your customers.
Bear in mind that awareness keywords are usually more expensive as they are more generic. If you have a limited budget for PPC, you may want to skip this stage and focus on the other parts of the funnel instead.
Use the right advertising type for your customer's needs
The great thing is that you can apply this funnel to all your marketing channels and not just your pay-per-click advertising! So, give the funnel a go today and see how you can customize your marketing to your prospective customer's intentions.
If you haven’t set up Google Tag Manager (GTM) for your website already, you definitely should. It allows you to add coding to your site without needing a web developer, lets you troubleshoot any performance issues and best of all… it’s completely free!
Another advantage of GTM is that you can use it to improve your PPC conversion tracking. This gives you a better handle on how people came to your site, what PPC platform they used and what they did when they visited.
Interested? Here’s how to do it.
The great thing with GTM is that you can use it with all PPC platforms you make use of, from Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, through to Facebook and LinkedIn.
Not installed GTM on your website yet? You can find out how to do it here. If you have a WordPress website, you can also add the plugin to your site.
How to add PPC tagging to Google Tag Manager
In this example, we’ll be adding Google Ads to GTM.
Adding remarketing to Google Tag Manager
If you use remarketing in any of your PPC campaigns, GTM lets you quickly add tags to your website. You can even add a Facebook Pixel, although this will soon be phased out with third-party cookies disappearing from Chrome.
To add a Google Ads remarketing tag to GTM, grab its conversion ID from Google Ads (you don’t need a conversion label for remarketing). Next, click add a new tag in GTM and paste your ID in. Decide where on your site you would like your remarketing tag to fire (you can select across all pages if you want to), then preview and submit.
Adding your PPC tags to Google Tag Manager gives you a lot more control over how you manage your PPC platforms. You can make changes directly within GTM and test your tags before launching to make sure they pull in the vital marketing data you need.
How will you use Google Tag Manager to help your website grow and evolve?