Instagram advertising
Working with an Instagram marketing agency puts your account in the hands of industry experts who work on the platform every day and therefore know it inside and out.
Our Paid Social team has over 20 years of combined experience and has worked with clients across industries including eCommerce and lead gen to drive results with Instagram ads. As experts, they keep up with industry updates to ensure they are providing our clients with excellent service that adheres to the platform’s best practices and keeps up with the ever-changing algorithms and trends.
Our team has in-depth knowledge of campaign types, targeting strategies, and creativity that they use to tailor strategies for each client. They also have excellent knowledge of the marketing funnel and how and when to target different users at different stages of the funnel to make the most of your budget and drive results. If you’d like to learn more about the services our paid social team offers you can contact us today.
What does Instagram have to offer
Here at Embryo, our Paid Social team works on Instagram every day and is constantly keeping up with how the platform is evolving and changing. We’ve broken down everything you need to know about Instagram advertising and why it can have a significant impact on your brand success.
1 Huge user base
Emerging into the social media landscape in 2010, Instagram is now a major player in Paid Social advertising. Starting as an image-based platform, Instagram has evolved into a photo and video-sharing platform used by over 2 billion people monthly worldwide.
2 Ad opportunities
After Instagram was bought by Meta in 2012, ads were introduced to the platform. Instagram Ads an integral part of social strategies here at Embryo and offer a multitude of advertising opportunities including in-feed ads and story ads.
3 Creator partnerships
As the social landscape develops further, there’s an increasing opportunity to connect with creators on Instagram and incorporate creator partnerships and user-generated content into your marketing strategy, boosting overall reach and engagement.
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Native Group
Building search real estate with a multi-channel approach
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4,466
viewings booked through PPC
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175%
increase in organic conversions
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Dental Law
Doubling conversions and improving lead quality with organic search and paid media.
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44%
Increase in accepted cases
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Bluefin
Using Advanced Meta Ads Strategies to Generate £717,550 in Revenue for Bluefin
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34%
Increase in revenue (£717,550 vs £535,479)
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5.3
Average ROAS
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£379.05
Average order value
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Meta Advertising
The key to success when running Meta ads, covering Facebook and Instagram, is to ensure that you stay reactive. It’s vital to be fully in the know about new techniques, features and strategies, but to also be flexible with existing strategies to see success. With this approach, we ensure that nothing slips through the cracks and can continue to drive meaningful results.
Advantage +
The Advantage+ suite of solutions is one of the most important parts of Meta development to keep an eye on and get to grips with. This set of features is relevant to both Facebook and Instagram ads. Advantage+ (sometimes just named Advantage) is the name that Meta gives to any of its AI/machine-learning-led features. The suite covers many different aspects of campaign creation, from campaign optimisation to creative improvements and audience targeting. It’s impossible to launch Facebook ads without seeing a toggle for an Advantage+ feature. Let’s take a look at how each of these solutions work:
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Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns
As opposed to other Advantage-themed solutions, advantage+ shopping campaigns are the only full campaign solution. ASC campaigns aim to reduce the time it takes advertisers to set up catalogue campaigns for ecommerce accounts by leveraging machine learning and automatically applying all of Meta’s advantage recommendations. Alongside this simplified setup, the campaign type aims to drive efficiency and improved results for online sales-driven advertisers.
The biggest advantage of ASCs is that rather than the traditional method of separating your prospecting and retargeting audiences into different campaigns, all audiences are bundled together. With this approach, which goes against all previous best practices, the creative is what drives the targeting. In an ASC, it is recommended to add upwards of 15 creatives to ensure you have variety.
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Advantage+ Audience
Advantage+ audience is Meta’s solution to improve targeting that utilises Meta’s AI system to reach your target audience. As opposed to the user-provided targeting options such as interests and custom audiences, the AI uses its own data to reach your audience. Meta’s AI pulls this data from many sources including past conversions, Pixel data and interaction with previous ads. Without past conversions and accurate Pixel data, these audiences are unlikely to be as effective.
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Advantage+ Detailed Targeting
Advantage detailed targeting (formerly known as detailed targeting expansion) allows Meta’s AI system to go beyond your detailed targeting options when its system identifies users who are more likely to convert. Advertisers still input their usual detailed targeting selection but the platform has permission to ignore this if it can drive better results.
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Advantage+ Campaign Budget
Advantage campaign budget (formerly known as campaign budget optimisation) is a feature that allows advertisers to set a budget at the campaign level. From here, Meta’s AI system distributes that budget across your adsets and ads, spending in the places where it determines that it will drive the most performance. Having a central budget allows you to streamline your setup and only spend on high performers.
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Advantage+ Placements
Advantage+ placements (formerly known as automatic placements) allow your ads to be placed on all placements across the Meta network (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network). The placement that the ads feature in is based on Meta’s AI system and determined by placements and platforms that will drive the best performance.
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Advantage+ Creative
Advantage+ Creative covers a range of creative enhancements that use AI to adjust your creative to drive performance. There is a large list of enhancements that can be implemented:
Enhancements for single image or video format
- Standard enhancements such as image template, visual touch-ups, text improvements and relevant comments
- Image brightness and contrast
- Music
- 3D animation
- Image expansion
Enhancements for carousel format
- Profile end card
- Auto adapt to placement
- Music
- Highlight carousel card
- Dynamic description
- Relevant comments
- Info labels
An integrated approach to Instagram advertising
Help your brand drive consistent communication across multiple marketing channels. At Embryo, we focus not only on individual channel success but also on the bigger picture. As a multi-channel agency, we’re able to offer a holistic approach to brands. Our teams collaborate regularly on client work to ensure each channel is aligned and working together. Instagram makes up part of our social offering and needs to be integrated into a full strategy with the other channels to ensure we’re targeting the right people on the right platform. Our paid social team will collaborate on a business-wide scale with other teams to determine what the purpose of each channel will be for the client.
For example, is paid social a brand awareness channel to assist PPC? Or is it going to be conversion-focused? Does the client have services such as PR that we can integrate into our paid social plan? Looking at paid social as part of a wider plan is key. We ensure messaging and brand values are communicated clearly and consistently across all channels. Once a wider plan has been created, the paid social team will then focus in on their individual channel and the platforms within it. They’ll create a strategy and roadmap to determine exactly which role each platform will play, including Instagram.
The Benefits of Including Insta in Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Whether you’re an eCom or lead gen brand, there are multiple benefits to incorporating Instagram into your Paid Social marketing strategy
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2 billion users
The first is the sheer amount of people it’s possible to reach. With over 2 billion users worldwide, Instagram is the fourth most used social media platform, meaning you have massive amounts of opportunity to narrow that down and find an audience that suits your brand.
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Target your specific audience
The second benefit is Instagram makes the process of narrowing down those users easy with its targeting options. You’re able to filter by age, gender, interests, and location to build out your audience pool. You’re also able to build custom audiences depending on where in the funnel you’re targeting, for example, you can build a custom audience to retarget people who have visited your website in the past 30 days, and you can also exclude irrelevant people so budget isn’t wasted.
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Flexible ad formats
Another benefit is the flexibility Instagram offers when it comes to campaign types and ad formats. You can choose your campaign objective from awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, or sales. There’s a range of ad formats available including in-feed ads image and carousel ads,, reel ads, and story ads to suit all needs depending on who your audience is and what your objective is.
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Boost your posts
There’s also the option to utilise organic content by ‘boosting’ posts (putting paid spend behind an organic post), which helps keep content native to the platform and can also help save budget as assets can be reused. All of this can be tested using Meta’s experiments feature, which allows you to ‘A/B’ test campaigns and ad sets against each other to narrow down your approach and see what’s successful. Instagram offers the opportunity to advertise across the funnel to a mass audience.
Is Instagram right for your business?
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With Instagram’s broad user base, the platform offers value to many businesses.
- B2C consumer goods
- B2B services
- eCommerce
- Lead gen
You might think Instagram is more of a sales-based platform only suitable for B2C eCom businesses, however, there’s a lot of opportunity for B2B and lead-gen businesses to thrive on Instagram as well. With multiple call-to-action buttons to choose from, including ‘learn more’ and ‘sign up’, there’s an opportunity to drive actions that aren’t just conversions and send users to whichever landing page suits your needs best.
Tell a Story To Captivate Your Target Audience
Storytelling is key when it comes to conveying brand messages and driving action off the back of ads. Whether it’s a static image, carousel, or reel ad on Instagram it’s important to clearly tell your brand’s story and tell your audience clearly what it is you want them to do. Instagram has its own set of best practices to help you tell your story in an appropriate way for the platform. We’d recommend including your brand name or logo somewhere in the creative asset, but not in such a way that it’s obviously an advertisement and unnatural to see in a feed.
1 Static Images
In static images, text overlay can be used to help tell your story and direct people to your call to action (CTA) button. Features like graphics and imagery including real people can also help to convey your brand story and message.
2 Carousel ads
In carousel ads, you can use multiple cards to create brand awareness (top of funnel), show off multiple USPs in consideration campaigns (middle of funnel), or give step by steps on how to use your product, driving action and conversions (bottom of funnel).
3 Reel ads
In reel ads, it’s important to hook your audience in the first few seconds of the video and generate interest in your story. Music and voiceovers can be used to increase engagement and get people listening.
Invest in paid social media advertising to grow your brand online
"We were really impressed by Embryo's industry knowledge and helpful advice. They provided an excellent service in all of the digital marketing projects."
