The Beginners Guide to Instagram Ad Campaigns

It’s no secret that Instagram is an incredibly lucrative space for Shopify stores to show off their products. Unfortunately, your competitors are also aware of the benefits which is why standing out is so tricky.

Ad campaigns make it easier for your target audience to view your content. It’s not a matter of throwing money at the issue, this really can do more harm than good and push away potential and current customers. But by using revenue backed with insider ad campaign knowledge, you can boost your company’s standing.

Facebook Ad Manager is the go-to for creating an Instagram ad campaign and provides plenty of tools so you can achieve maximum results for your budget.

However, it takes quite a bit of know-how to really attain top results. We recommend using software that allows you to manage and edit multiple ads at the same time. Before, this would have been Facebook Power Editor rather than Facebook Ad Manager. However, in 2017 Facebook, thankfully, amalgamated the two under the Facebook Ad Manager name. This gives us more tools to customise the campaign to reach your targets.

Creating an Instagram Ad using Facebook Ad Manager

You'd be surprised how much time can be wasted floundering around Facebook Ad Manager trying to figure out what is going on. Especially, when it comes to setting up an Instagram ad campaign.

It's definitely not the most intuitive, user-friendly ad building model on the market. But once you get to grips with it, and Elkfox is always here to help streamline your day, then you have an exceptionally powerful tool added to your store’s marketing arsenal.

Step #1: Getting Started

First things first, add your Instagram account to your Business Manager.

Next, you’ll want to head to ads creation

Filling in your marketing objective for the campaign.

Step #2: Define your audience

When this block is placed in front of you, with options already pre-selected, you’ll likely skim over it and trust Facebook Ad Manager to take care of everything.

However, each line of this section has a significant impact on how your ad runs on Instagram. One crucial aspect to consider is audience country. Your ad will only run in countries you select here.

Click continue and you’re at the powerhouse of your ad’s formation.

This includes ad targeting, which is a major component of what makes social media advertising worthwhile. By selecting and paying to reach your target audience, the Instagram algorithms will place your ads where your target audience will find them.

Step #3: Format Section

This section in the campaign creation Our next article will make you an Instagram ad format sensei. We tell you when best to use a Story or Slideshow.

Also keep in mind that posts can be square, vertical or landscape which varies the image-to-copy ratio on your audience’s screen.

Instagram links

Up until recently, a major frustration for eCommerce merchants was the issue of directing traffic off of Instagram. Although we’ve identified Instagram as the ideal virtual watering hole for connecting with prospects and building a brand identify, the lack of links was a huge problem.

Online store owners and marketing teams were essentially lollypop men and women without the STOP stick! Directing traffic to their store was a nightmare and still is if you want to go down the organic only marketing model.

However, once Instagram finally allowed links in their ad campaigns, closing sales became a whole lot easier. Hooray!

We’ve now come full circle, where not only are store owners able to lead their target market to their site but they can also enable in-app purchase options.

Simplify your sales process. The average eCommerce store has a conversion rate of 1-2%. Setting up in-app purchases raises this rate in your favour.

Should I stretch my budget?

If you don’t start out with crystal clear goals, it’s all too easy to waste money and time on any ad management system. A common problem we come across with Shopify merchants is when they come to us wanting one Instagram campaign to slay all of their long-term goals.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but to succeed on social media you’ve gotta get #real.

Aspire to a single goal. Nearly all of our clients find that they’re ambitions align with one of the options below.

Top tip: At the budget stage, you can opt to select a daily budget and Facebook will bid for optimum ad space for your campaign. Alternatively, you can set your bid options manually. Scroll down to Optimization for Ad Delivery and you can take control of your bidding strategy. In the Bid Amount section, you can choose a Manual bid.

Instagram Goals and how to achieve them

Brand awareness

This is the first stage of securing a loyal customer. A very low percentage of people who view these posts will commit to an order. These posts, when done well, establish your brand as trustworthy and legitimate while promoting your stock as being high-quality and covetable.

Lead generation

Dynamic product ads target Instagrammers who’ve already been introduced to your brand.

Perhaps they’ve checkout out your site, seen a few positive reviews of your products or an Influencer announcing your new product line and giveaway on Instagram.

They’re intrigued.

Install Facebook Pixel so you can track the events that take place when your audience interacts with your brand.

Now you have the data to create custom audiences in Facebook Ad Manager.

Let the retargeting begin!

Select Lead Generation as your objective for the campaign in Facebook Ad Manager. Unless you’re looking to enter a new market with this campaign, opt for a lookalike audience.

You can upload this using a CSV file or even from MailChimp. Once uploaded, your ad manager sources individuals on Instagram who have yet to interact with your brand but have similar characteristics of your current customer list.

If you have a big enough sample, be sure to select your best customers as your custom audience sample. What this does is encourage the ad manager to find leads that are more likely to become loyal, rather than once off, customers. This extra step is well worth taking if you want to invest in boosting conversions and attaining a loyal customerbase.

Boost conversions

Instagram ads are versatile. You can make them fit your targets. Be sure to negate any lingering doubts about your product’s performance by creating professional shots and videos of your lines.

We suggest combining organic search with ads. You don't want a lead to check out your page to find it almost entirely relies on as content. They'll ask themselves why your store needs to endorse so heavily.

The Instagram community expects content, regular posts, Instagram stories, highlights, and of course, the live streams. Create a solid brand on Instagram with the steps in this article.

Now that you have the first link in the chain, you can begin experimenting with Instagram ad campaigns. If you feel like your IG ad campaigns could use expert TLC from our Shopify experts, then find us on the other side of the contact page.