A place par excellence for sharing photos and videos with neat aesthetics, Instagram is the daily meeting place for millions of mostly young French people. It is also the undisputed kingdom of influencers and web marketers, insofar as it offers a perfectly calibrated platform to promote your products and services.
The realization of an advertisement on Instagram allows you to reach an increasingly large audience, but also particularly receptive. However, the design of the campaign must obey specific standards to improve performance and effectively convey its message.
What are the good reasons to get into the world of Instagram ads? Ad Premier, your reference agency in social media communication, gives you all the keys to make your place on one of the most popular social networks on the planet.
Summary
- Make you visible on a popular social network
- Target an extremely specific segment
- Reaching a young, urban and feminized demographic
- Test a wide variety of ad formats
- Easily manage your Instagram ads budget
- Benefit from a native integration under Facebook Business Manager
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What are the benefits of advertising on Instagram?
- How to create an effective advertisement on Instagram?
- Is Instagram Advertising Right for All Businesses?
Make you visible on a popular social network
If it arrived later in our lives than its direct competitors, Instagram quickly joined the big leagues. Created in 2010, it is already the third most used online social media, just after YouTube and Facebook.
The potential audience is now massive: “Insta”, for friends, has around 21 million active users at least once a month in France. This represents almost 40% of all Internet users aged 2 and over in the country. The daily audience, meanwhile, reaches 11.5 million users.
The concept of the social network, which gives pride of place to visual and interactive content, makes it a perfect platform for the visibility of many brands specializing in retail, but also for other sectors of activity.
In 2019 and 2020, a Mediacy study confirmed Instagram’s dominant position among influencer marketers: 78% of them consider Instagram posts effective in conveying their message, and 73% have the same opinion regarding Stories: a result simply unmatched by other social networks, Facebook posts and videos obtaining, for example, a respective score of 22 and 23%.
Instagram: a powerful notoriety relay for your brand
60% of Instagram users confirm having already discovered a product or service using the platform;
The user engagement rate (shares and comments) is 60 times higher than on Facebook;
Over 2 million advertisers are already using Instagram worldwide.
Target an extremely specific segment
Instagram ads may target an audience that has been subject to particularly fine filtering. Thanks to the many data collected by the social network, you can in particular address a target:
- according to their age group;
- according to its gender;
- according to their mother tongue;
- according to his interests;
- according to their socio-professional category;
- according to its geographical area (on the scale of a country, a region, a city, etc.).
Instagram allows you, among other things, to define an audience based on their behavior on the social network. A user can for example be selected by the advertising agency according to the accounts to which he subscribes – which constitute an index of his centers of interest – or even according to the type of content he shares more willingly.
If you already have a good level of customer knowledge and have an excellent idea of the ideal prospect for your brand, additional possibilities are available to you:
- automatically generate an audience of profiles similar to your customers or “Look-alike”, to reach in priority the users most likely to be interested in your offer;
- On the contrary, target your already known customers, via a listing of telephone numbers or e-mail addresses for example, in order to initiate a retargeting strategy.
Reaching a young, urban, and feminized demographic
The young and trendy reputation of Instagram is not usurped. It should therefore be noted that:
- 69% of Generation Z Internet users (15 to 24 years old) use Instagram, a clear overrepresentation compared to the average population;
- The platform is particularly popular among 20–24-year-olds, 59% of whom consult it daily.
However, the demography of the social network is not as unequivocal as one might think. Note in particular that daily users aged 25 to 49 are slightly more numerous than those aged 11 to 24 (42% against 41%). The share of people aged 50 and over, moreover, represents 17%, which is certainly lower, but absolutely not negligible.
Instagram users in France are 54%, female users. The breakdown by gender is therefore more balanced than on a global scale, where the network appeals to more than two-thirds of women (68%).
Finally, it should be noted that Instagrammers mainly live in urban areas. More than a quarter of French users (26%) live in Île-de-France.
Test a wide variety of ad formats
Like Facebook, Instagram offers a particularly rich palette of advertising formats. It is thus possible to modulate the form of your message in an effective way, depending on whether you are looking for example to promote a new SEO strategy, to make the image of your brand more prestigious, or to present a maximum of references within your catalog.
Instagram ads come in the following formats:
- The images, in JPEG or PNG format, are squares of 1080 × 1080 pixels and represent the most standardized advertising formula on the social network. They are naturally and natively inserted into the user’s newsfeed, in the middle of other photos, so as to maximize the chances of capturing attention.
- Videos in MP4 format respect the same dimensions as images and are positioned in the same place. They offer more dynamic and engaging content than static visuals, and are therefore particularly appreciated by advertisers. Lasting 2.5 to 15 seconds maximum, they must be able to be appreciated and understood with or without background music, knowing that 40% of videos are watched in mute mode.
- Instagram Stories are also available in an advertising and sponsored format. This ephemeral and very popular content is perfect for creating a sense of brand attachment and belonging to a community. Stories appear for 5 seconds in full screen before allowing the user to skip them. They are of a maximum duration of 120 seconds.
- The carousel, like on Facebook, is a succession of photos or videos in a slideshow. A carousel can include up to 10 different contents, including videos. A cycle has a maximum duration of 60 seconds.
- Collection is a format consisting of a main image or video, with three other smaller images located just below. This is particularly an attractive formula for retailers who wish to both promote their brand and present a selection of products from their catalog.
Easily manage your Instagram ads budget
Managing your advertising budget is made particularly easy and intuitive on Instagram. All you have to do is set a maximum daily amount for your campaign. A bidding system then makes it possible to determine your positioning according to the target you are trying to reach.
The advertising agency constantly informs you about the CPM, that is to say, the amount paid for 1,000 impressions. If you notice an insufficient display of your campaigns, this means that the allocated budget is insufficient compared to the level of demand for this target audience and that it must therefore be increased.
Benefit from a native integration under Facebook Business Manager
Since the takeover of Instagram by Facebook in 2012, the two platforms have worked in perfect symbiosis in terms of advertising management. Advertisers can very easily simultaneously design a campaign on each social network and have access to the same parameters in terms of advertising formats or targeting criteria.
The Facebook Business Manager tool is specifically designed to give you a single, consistent interface as part of a joint Facebook and Instagram marketing firm. It will save you time and improve your performance.
Designing an effective Instagram ad campaign requires real creative know-how. The challenge is indeed to catch the eye and seduce the user in the middle of an ocean of other visual content. The major challenge is access to a very committed public with a strong interest in your offer, with the key to a significant stimulation of sales.
The three key points to remember:
1. Instagram has enjoyed exceptional growth and now boasts a massive audience;
2. Many advertising formats allow you to promote your products and services;
3. The use of a web agency is recommended for creating a good Instagram ad.
