The Art & Science of Getting Other People to Pay For Your Marketing & Promotion

With million monthly active users , 60 percent of whom are under 30 , Instagram is a massive platform for connecting with audiences and building your brand. More than two million companies use Instagram ads to reach audiences, engage followers, and promote their products. If your company is ready to join them and start advertising on Instagram, read on for everything you need to know.

Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps an adventure photographer used to grow from 0 to , followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear. Instagram offers five ad formats: All are seamlessly incorporated into Feeds and Stories for a smooth user experience. Photo ads allow businesses to tell their story and showcase their products through compelling images.

For example, Parachute Home used photo ads to promote a night trial of their bedding with a Shop Now call-to-action button. The result was an ad campaign that reinforced their brand identity and leveraged their dreamy images. Just in time for fall, say hello to the newest member of our Linen family — Indigo. Time spent watching video on Instagram is up more than 80 percent year-over-year.

Four times as many videos were posted in compared to An example of a successful video ad campaign is OGX, a global hair care brand. Ads were targeted to Millennial women ages 18 to 34 , and the campaign reached an impressive 61 percent of the target audience in the US, and 60 percent in Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia combined. The campaign led to a 5-point increase in brand awareness among Australian women, and an 8 percent sales lift in the US.

One important thing to note is that OGX features the brand in the first few seconds of the video to improve audience recall and use time wisely. Carousel ads let users swipe through a series of images or videos, with a call-to-action button to connect them directly to your website. They offer the creative space to tell a longer story about your brand, allowing you to highlight multiple products, share a multi-part story, or dive deep into a single service in up to 10 images or videos. Kayla Itsines, the founder of fitness empire Bikini Body Guide, used a series of video carousel ads to drive awareness and downloads of the workout app Sweat: The carousel format allowed her to showcase short fitness sequences demonstrating how users could exercise anywhere and anytime with the app.

The campaign was targeted to women ages 18 to 42, reaching 6. Carousel ads were a perfect fit for a brand that wanted to show the versatility of its content, and would be a good fit for other brands with diverse creative assets, like food and fashion companies.

Key discussion points

Instagram Stories Ads are full-screen ads that appear to users between Stories they are already viewing from people they follow. As with other Instagram ad formats, you can target your audience and choose how often they see your Stories ad. And advertisers can take advantage of all the features of Instagram Stories, adding face filters, video effects, and text to create fun and creative promotions.

These options allow you to create Instagram Stories ads that look and feel like your normal posts—in video or image form.

The call-to-action takes the form of a swipe-up feature that takes audiences directly to your website from your Stories ad. Advertisers can also use Facebook Canvas to create immersive videos for Instagram Stories that are optimized for mobile and load quickly for a smooth viewing experience. Facebook has an array of Canvas templates that make it fast and easy to build a Canvas ad for Instagram, or companies can choose to create a custom Canvas for a truly unique ad experience.

1. Diana Palmer Christmas Collection: The Rancher / Christmas Cowboy / A Man of Means / True Blue / Carreras Bride / Will of Steel / Winter Roses (Mills & Boon e-Book Collections).
2. The 50 Best Marketing Books Of All Time - Best Marketing Degrees;
3. Instagram Ads: The Complete Guide for Marketers?
4. The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics (MIT Press).
5. Deseos de ti (Spanish Edition).
6. Inequalities for the Numerical Radius of Linear Operators in Hilbert Spaces (SpringerBriefs in Mathematics).
7. Creativity and Innovation for Managers.

Birchbox, a mail-order subscription service for beauty products, created an ad campaign using Facebook Canvas to build awareness and reach new customers in France. Their Canvas ads featured videos of Birchbox products, inviting users to swipe up for a special promotional offer.

How to Advertise on Instagram: A Guide for Marketers

The Stories campaign generated a click-through rate that was four times as high as other formats, and with excellent value too: Set up your business to advertise on Instagram and learn how to place your ads below. To create ads on Instagram, you first need to connect your account to a Facebook Business Page, which allows you to use Facebook Ad Manager. Ad Manager lets you create ads that run on both Facebook and Instagram.

You can also customize audiences and other features, and monitor how your ads are performing. There are two main ways to create Instagram ads in Facebook Ads Manager: Guided Creation and Quick Creation. Guided Creation walks you through each step of creating an ad, with step-by-step instructions. Facebook Ads Manager offers a list of ad campaign objectives. Not all of them are compatible with Instagram advertising, so you can select from the following:.

Not sure which one to choose? Check out how each objective supports different business goals , and find the one that makes the most sense for your company.

2. Be up front with your request.

Or watch this video to learn more about identifying your objective:. The next step is to decide who you want to target with your ad. Experimenting with creating different audiences can help you determine the best ways to promote your business. For instance, a restaurant might want to try targeting an ad to people who live in the neighborhood, but also to a bigger geographic area of people with food-related interests. You can do this by selecting Create multiple ad sets at the top of the page. In the Placements section, you can decide where your ads will appear on Facebook and Instagram.

However, if you want to limit your ads to only appearing in Instagram Stories, or only on the Instagram Feed, you may opt to Edit Placements. Next you need to decide how much you want to spend on your promotion, and for how long. You may choose a Daily Budget , which offers a maximum daily spend, or a Lifetime Budget for an ad with a set lifespan.

You can also choose to run ads continuously, or only at certain times of day. A vital quality for marketers in the fast-changing digital environment is curiosity, rather than any specific technical knowledge, said Adobe digital marketing director John Watton. A question about the effectiveness of digital marketing was raised by audience member Steve Mullins, content director of brand-e. Lisa Bridgett, sales and marketing director at upmarket online fashion retailer Net-a-Porter, answered that marketers ultimately need to rely on their natural intuition rather than on technology.

How technology is changing marketing | Media Network | The Guardian

She referred to programmatic ad buying, where computers buy and place online ads in an automated way, and said that there are few people who really understand how such technology works. Time and time again it plays out right. So you need to be dextrous in these two different worlds. For brands to work effectively together in the digital world, chief marketing officers and chief information officers must work in unison. But this is hard to achieve for many organisations and the two sides can end up in conflict.

Pure digital players such as Net-a-Porter that have always been digital are structured for the digital age. Should it be the chief information officer or the chief marketing officer or perhaps someone from a different department? Meanwhile, Hema Chauhan, marketing executive at agency TMW, asked whether brand teams, technologists or agencies were best placed to implement new technology systems. The panel agreed that it is usually agencies who are responsible for this. The question of how businesses should identify the marketers and technologists of the future was raised by Omaid Hiwaizi, chief strategy officer at agency Geometry Global.

The panel agreed that having a mix of millennials and more experienced staff was important. We re-skill people on the job, we move people from traditional content roles into web content roles and spot opportunities for people to move towards more data roles. Another audience member, Gregory Gillette, insight analyst at agency Heads, asked what kind of skills were needed from those looking to get into marketing.

Marketers can come from many backgrounds: Those looking for a career in marketing must be prepared to bring together the magic of marketing and the science of technology to create powerful and relevant marketing campaigns. Bridgett summed up the challenge. How has the explosion of digital technology changed marketing? This was the theme of the discussion panel organised by the Guardian in association with Adobe. As a result, marketing departments need to provide compelling campaigns across these different devices and become proficient in using technology.

Marketers need to work closely with IT departments and technologists. They need to understand the processes behind developing websites, handling data and running social media campaigns. The panel discussed how marketers could develop the skills to enable them to work hand in hand with technologists while retaining their creativity, flair and intuition. Seminar report commissioned and controlled by the Guardian. Discussion hosted to a brief agreed with Adobe.