You probably know of Instagram as an app you scroll through when you have a few minutes in your day.
It’s great if you have a presence there already. That’s definitely something I’ll be using to get the organic traffic in for your product or service. But, did you know that Instagram is also an extremely important channel for reaching customers that would otherwise never even know of your existence?
Instagram is one of, what I call the “Big Three” of social media marketing (the other two being Facebook and Youtube, but we’ll get to those!). It’s especially great for small businesses because:
- It’s a picture and video platform. This keeps things visual and visuality converts 90% better than anything else, simply because we are human and hard-wired to process visual information fastest.
- It uses Facebook’s extremely powerful advertising system. This means you can zoom in and target customers depending on what they’re already looking for. No messing around with guessing!
- It’s pretty darn addictive!
Here’s what else to know:
- Instagram is growing incredibly fast: as in, 1 in 3 internet users are also Instagram users, fast; and it’s only getting bigger. This means your target audience on the platform is only growing day by day. Don’t let them swim away.
- In fact, did you know that people who use Instagram spend 30 minutes a day on the app on average? That’s half an hour of them checking out your products and services that you don’t want to miss out on.
- Instagram ads really influence! A whopping 83% of Instagram users will find out about new products or services on this app, thanks to ads or social posts. Once discovered, 81% will go on to do more research about the brand and its offerings. Even more exciting is that 80% of Instagram users will then convert to buyers at the end of this pathway. Good golly, are you getting this?? That’s 8/10 people that will catch an ad, think about it, and then resolutely spend money to get what they saw in it!
- When you use data to craft your Instagram ads, you quickly become one of the advertisers tapping into this lucrative corner monopolized by marketers that know exactly what they’re doing. Here’s an example of data in action: Valentini et. al., (2018), found that there were two things that significantly affected people’s engagement with an instagram ad and their desire to purchase the product they saw on it. The first is direct gaze. The second is high product salience. When you strip away the academic language, this means having really good photography that features eye contact and focus on your product gives you a statistically significant boost in turning window shoppers into must-havers!
What all the above means for you, specifically; is that if you brand yourself and advertise correctly on Instagram, you have a very high chance of turning browsers into buyers!
However, that’s also precisely where businesses tend to trip up. The Facebook advertising system Instagram uses can be a tricky beast to harness. Apart from location, demographics, hobbies, interests, and behaviours, you can also pin users down based on their previous interactions with you or your competitors. What’s more, you can even bring in your ideal customers from precise placement of SEO keywords, great copywriting, and strategic hashtags.
While this is wonderful in terms of delivering all the good stuff about your business to people having an easy, breezy noon-time scroll over a muffin during their lunch-break, it also means that one wrong step can result in thousands of dollars of advertising money dispersing out into the world-wide-web, never to be seen again.
What you need are high-converting ads crafted by someone in the know, with the experience to steer them along depending on the platform’s ever-changing currents.
Let me help your business create consciously calculated Instagram ads to scale your sales and leads, using a proven formula based on psychology, design principles, and data.
This way, you can cast your net to be not only far-reaching and precisely pin-pointed, but also with enough hooks to ensure the best catch of customers (those that you won’t have to throw back in!) Ok, enough with the fishing metaphor already, Casey!
For more information on how I can use Instagram Advertising to grow your small business:
