Did you know that both Instagram feed ads and story ads are among the cheapest placements you can get for digital advertising? Facebook owns Instagram and in order to do Instagram advertising it is best to do it through Facebook business manager. In this guide we will show you how.
Create An Instagram Business Account
In order to create an Instagram advertising business account, visit your Instagram home page on your cell phone, press the hamburger button and scroll to the bottom and choose settings.
In the settings screen choose ‘Account’- where you can then scroll to the bottom to where it says ‘Switch to Professional Account.’
Here you will be presented with a choice of ‘Creator’ or ‘Business’. In this example we will choose business.
This gives you access to Instagram Business tools.
Among the advantages of having an Instagram Business Account are that you can now get analytics and insights about your followers.
You can now create paid promotions on Instagram.
And an added bonus is the ability to add a contact button on your profile. Once your business gets more than 10000 followers you will have access to swipe up links in Instagram stories that are only available for business accounts.
You will now be asked to associate a Facebook Business page with your new Instagram business account.
Choose the page you want to advertise and press done.
Instagram Advertising in Facebook Business Manager
You don’t need a Facebook Business Manager to create and run Instagram Advertising, but there are good reasons to do it this way. It provides stats and analytics that are much better. There is also greater control over payment options and more. If you haven’t already got a business manager visit https://business.facebook.com/ and set one up.
After you set up a Facebook Business Manager account, you will be to access it from your main Facebook news feed in the drop down menu in the upper right.
Choose the business manager you have just created and you will be taken to a page that looks like this.
Here we have connected the business page and we will now create an ad Account. Make sure you choose the correct time zone and the currency.
Be sure to add yourself as the administrator.
Instagram Advertising in Ads Manager
Now you have a brand new ads manager. It is here where we can create and run any kind of Facebook or Instagram ad.
The first thing we need to do is choose an objective. There is a good reason to choose video views as our objective. Facebook prefers video. They are in competition with Youtube and you can get video views for pennies on the dollar. So lets make this ad a video views ad.
We also have the option to name our campaign, ad set and ad all in one place, so lets do that.
In this example we will leave campaign budget optimization off. We are doing this because we will not be using auto placement, or creating variations of different ad types. To learn more about campaign budget optimization, check this article about Facebook Machine Learning.
In the ad set section we will choose a daily budget of $5.00 and run the ad for one week.
Location and Audience Targeting
For this ad we will choose the English speaking countries.
We will target both men and women between 30 and 60 years of age, who have expressed an interest in creative entrepreneurship. This gives us an audience of 220 000.
Next we make sure to choose auto placement and choose Instagram only.
And for this ad I have created a video for Instagram stories, so this is the only place I want to this ad to run.
We will be choosing the thru play option, so that Facebook will attempt to reach those who are most likely to watch at least 15 seconds of our video.
In the ad section we will choose the Facebook page we want to use to advertise and the Instagram account we associated with it.
The ad format I am choosing is Single Image or Video.
Creating a Video for Instagram Advertising Using Invideo
I am uploading a video I have created using the InVideo video creation tool, with this I am able to choose a mode made specifically for Instagram stories.
Once the video is uploaded, I choose a URL to advertise, and the primary text as well as a call to action, and I am ready to publish.
Conclusion
Advertising on Instagram in fairly easy to set up, and is quickly becoming a very popular platform for digital marketers. I hope this article offers a quick starting point for those who need a quick overview.
Author John Victor