As the famous saying goes, “First impressions last” and this truth applies on Social Networks as well. Images and videos are among the most shared content on Social Media, and that’s why today I’m showing you how to take advantage of Instagram for Business in order to reach your audience.
Ever since Instagram was acquired by Facebook, the Social Network focused on visual content has increasingly positioned itself as a highly profitable communications and publicity platform. Now let’s look at some data in order to understand the importance this Network can have for your business:
Why should you utilize Instagram for Business to promote your business?
Instagram has two essential features which make it the ideal place to reach your audience. On one hand, the Social Network was acquired by Facebook, whose advertising service is one of the most extensive of our time, thus it’s features are extended to Instagram.
On the other hand, the types of content published on Instagram are the most shared on Social Media. According to statistics, videos and photos rank among the publications that people all over the world are interested in sharing. This means they’re very effective at attracting users!
Now let’s go over the key statistics of Instagram for Business:
As you can see in the image, the number of Instagram users surpasses 400 million, and more than 75% of them are located outside of the United States. This means that your audience is most likely on this Social Network! Furthermore, everyday more than 80 million photos are published and more than 3.5 million Likes are given.
Although there is a desktop version of Instagram (with less features of course), it’s the mobile app that is a real hit among users. Thus, Instagram is a fertile place to connect with your audience, being as 80% Internet traffic comes from Smartphones.
Following the success of Instagram throughout the entire world, it’s not only companies who use the tools that this Social Network offers in terms of diffusion, but also current celebrities. In order to graph this point, below you can see a list of the most popular Instagram accounts, ordered by millions of followers:
On another note, Instagram’s growth over the past years has been such that this Social Network is already very close to the Social Media giants. Below you can see an image that displays Instagram’s position in the world Ranking of Social Networks, based on the quantity of users they have (in millions):
Largest Social Networks in the world in terms of User Quantity (data in millions).
As you can see, Instagram is close to Twitter and Skype and continues its ascend upwards in the list led by the other two large Social Networks owned by Mark Zuckerberg and his mobile applications: Facebook, Whats app and Facebook Messenger.
Finally, the interaction rate on Instagram (comments and “Likes”) is elevated, which indicates that their users are exposed to and involved in the content published there. So for example, according to statistics, 50% of comments are published within the first 6 hours of the publication being made.
How can you use Instagram for Business to boost your business?
Being as Instagram is a Social Network centered around images, you can transmit the spirit of your business to the public in a more human and close way. Additionally, it has informational benefits for photos and videos which are perfect for exhibiting your products, being creative and entertaining your audience.
Some of the benefits of Instagram for Business, from a Digital Marketing standpoint, are:
- Features a huge Facebook database used for advertising purposes and boasts it’s incredible segmentation power for offering highly effective and personalized advertisements.
- Provides access to a predominately young and ever growing base of followers.
- Brands with more than 100K followers grew more than 163% in just two years.
- It uses Visual Storytelling, which can transmit a brand’s values like no other content in terms of effectiveness.
- It provides you the efficiency of placing hashtags, tags that if used well can put you in view of your audience daily.
- It gives you the possibility to accomplish different goals in your advertising campaigns.
The Three Types of Advertisements Instagram for Business offers
Instagram is a Social Network oriented towards mobile devices and every day it is more and more necessary to execute your mobile ads campaigns with success. In this regard, they offer you the best tools so that you can develop your Branding (brand building) and Performance goals.
Similarly, Instagram allows you to create three types of advertisements with different objectives whose completion highly depends on setting clear goals. In fact, to make a campaign page on Instagram you have to choose one of the following objectives for your promotional communications:
- Increase your website’s clicks.
- Promote the installation of your app.
- Obtain numerous video replays.
- Improve brand awareness.
To carry out the goals just mentioned, Instagram for Business enables you to develop three different types of advertisements:
As you can see in the image above, the basic advertising formats on Instagram on Photo Ads, Video Ads and Carousel Ads.
Photo Ads: Help brands to tell their story and present their proposals through attractive and beautiful images. This way you can encourage people in a more human, original and creative way in order to promote the execution of a specific action or to convey your brand’s values.
Video Ads: Allow creating video advertisements with the same parameters for quality images as photography ads, but with moving and audio communicative benefits. This class of announcements may have a duration up to 30 seconds and should be created in landscape format.
Carousel Ads: This focuses on the possibility of enhancing Photo Ads through the exhibition of various photos in a single advertisement which the users can scroll through by moving their finger. It also includes a Call to Action button in order to help you increase web traffic and your online sales.
Instagram for Business has the advertising advantages of Facebook
Given that it is one of the companies of Facebook, Instagram for Business puts a lot of powerful promotional tools into advertiser’s hands which offer the advertising platform of Facebook. Among these is the possibility to purchase and publish certain advertisements through the same self-management platform.
In order to use said self-management platform, it’s necessary that campaigns fulfill a Performance objective, which can be deriving traffic to a website through clicks on a link, promoting the installation of a mobile application or promoting the replay of a video.
Meanwhile, the objectives linked to generating brand awareness or recognition are related to the publication of featured photos or videos in users’ newsfeed. These advertisements require an insertion order and work through a commercial systems managed by companies such as Kickads.com.
Three Instagram for Business Success Stories
The communicative success stories reached through this Social Network are numerous, as it shown on the Instagram for Business page. Here it encourages advertisers to “Inspire People Visually With Your Business’s Story”.
In the following animated GIF you can take a look at the brands who used Instagram and successfully completed their goals:
Here are three brands that achieved success through the completion of advertising goals with help from Instagram for Business:
Cointreau
Cointreau, the famous French liquor brand, managed to increase “engagement” or interest shown by their audience a whole 6 times through video campaigns on Instagram. In regards to this, this is what their Global Communications Director, Maud Rabin, said:
“Cointreau had a goal: we wanted to generate brand awareness and notoriety with content oriented to promote a life style. The Instagram Video Ads allowed us to reach our goals of visibility before a qualified target audience during a key moment in the year”.
Learn more details about this Company by clicking here.
McDonald’s Polonia
McDonald’s Polonia saw a significant increase of 57 points in the “ad replay” parameter on behalf of their target audience, thanks to a creative and attractive photography campaign. In the words of Tomasz Leszko, Oficial Chief of Marketing for the company:
“Instagram was the best channel for reaching our audience consisting of millennials (people who became adults during the change of the millennium) through our diverse offer to their normal routine. Through relevant and creative content, we developed notoriety and credibility for our brand”.
Learn more about this company by clicking here.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola Indonesia managed to increase 7 points the “Message Association” parameter through campaigns on Instagram which tied together Coca Cola, friendship and happiness. The company’s Chief of Interactive Marketing, Quinn Donato, explained it as:
“Our target audience in Indonesia speak visually, which led to Instagram being the ideal place for finding and inspiring them. We learned that a combination of high quality cinematography and photography helped us reach the message association that we were looking for with Coca Cola, friendship and happiness”.
Get to know more about this company by clicking here.
That’s all for today! As you may have noticed, Instagram for Business is ever more important in terms of Digital Marketing and that’s why I hope I’ve informed you on how you can take advantage of this service through this post. Tell me about it later!
To know more about Instagram and how you can utilize this Social Network to promote your business, I advise taking a glance at our posts The Ultimate Guide to Using Hashtags and Interview with Jenn Herman: “Miss Instagram” share the best social media advice for your business.
Did you like this blog post? Does your brand already have an Instagram profile? Tell us your experience! And please, remember to share this article with your contact. We’ll see you next time!?