Instagram has been a growing social media platform for the past decade. The app started its journey as a photo-sharing platform for youngsters. Gradually it became a channel for businesses to promote their products as well effectively. When organizations observed that this social sharing app could attract thousands of users to certain accounts and posts, they started building marketing strategies to promote their brand.
Many businesses started taking the help of Instagram influencers to market their products. Since these influencers do not charge high amounts to market products and services, they are cost-effective for brands to channel their campaigns.
When organic marketing on Instagram does not produce good enough results, businesses start running Instagram promotions to boost their sales. How do Instagram promotions work? An Instagram promotion is different from a regular Instagram post. This post will discuss how you can promote your Instagram account to reach out to the masses and drive traffic to your website.
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What are Instagram Promotions?
An Instagram promotion is a form of Instagram marketing. Some businesses use Instagram stories for marketing their products, while others get in touch with Instagram influencers to endorse their brand.
Instagram promotions are paid advertisements run on the social media platform. They are regular Instagram posts on the brand’s Instagram account promoted or boosted through an ad campaign.
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In other words, an Instagram promotion is a regular Instagram post or story converted into a paid advert. The money for the ad is paid directly to Instagram by keying in your credit or debit card details when you set up the campaign. You can set the daily or lifetime budget for your campaign and choose the characteristics of the audience that you want to target. The platform will then show your post boosted to your selected target audience.
Instagram promotions do not cost much. They are quite cheap to run compared to the traditional forms of marketing, such as television ads, billboards, radio shoutouts, or even roadside banners. You can run a campaign on a budget as small as one dollar a day. You can pause it or stop it permanently any time you like.
The platform allows either to pay a certain amount beforehand, during, or after the campaign once the payment threshold is reached. This mechanism makes Instagram promotions affordable for small and medium businesses. They are also feasible to run by freelancers, aspiring entrepreneurs, or new business owners.
When you promote Instagram posts like this, the viewers can interact with the post in the same ways they interact with other regular posts shown in their newsfeed. This means they can react to them, comment on them, or even tag their friends and peers. The viewers’ comments are a means for the business to get honest feedback from the audience.
When your target customers hear about your brand and products from friends, there is a higher chance of being inspired and influenced towards purchasing. People trust what their friends recommend to them more than what a salesperson tells them. That’s why, like other forms of social media marketing, Instagram promotions have a more tremendous potential to drive more sales to your business.
Even though many other social media sites have been launched after Instagram came out, it has stood the test of time and competition. Instagram is still one of the most popular social media apps globally. That’s why it holds power to make posts, announcements, pictures, and comments virally. Businesses that make use of Instagram promotions have the edge over their competitors.
How do Instagram Promotions Work?
The Instagram promotion option allows a user to convert regular Instagram posts, highlights, or stories into sponsored ones. This has a lot of advantages for the business, as it opens up a bundle of opportunities for reaching a wider audience to get your marketing message across to a large number of people.
When your content is more visible and accessible, getting people to take desired actions is easier. This could be someone reacting to your boosted posts or writing a positive review in the form of a comment under your ad. Your ads must come with CTAs as well. People watching Instagram promotions might click on your call to action buttons, which brings them one step closer to making a purchase.
Instagram promotions are a fabulous way of making your audience flow through your sales funnel. They filter out those among your audience who could really consider buying from your business. Since an Instagram promotion must include a clickable CTA, it is a means of inviting people to try out your products or at least learn more about your brand.
Even though people see Instagram promotions like regular posts or stories, they can know that those are boosted posts because they can see the word ‘Sponsored’ written on the top corner. Most users still find an Instagram promotion a lot less annoying than a salesman blocking your way on the roadside and trying to get you to buy something from him.
Moreover, when users find out that their friends and peers have interacted with a certain brand or post, they want to participate in the comments. This is how an Instagram promotion helps you spread your message in a spiral way to large numbers of people. The way Instagram and Facebook algorithms work, a boosted post sometimes mentions which of your friends have already taken the desired action towards that post. This encourages more and more users to interact with the boosted post.
The types of call-to-action buttons usually included in Instagram promotions are as follows.
- Contact Us
- Shop Now
- Buy Now
- Learn More
Users can click on the CTA to be redirected to another page. In most cases, the destination page is the brand’s website or landing page, where users can find further CTA to guide them on what to do next. The ad or publication of an Instagram promotion appears in the newsfeed of users and in explore sections and Instagram stories.
How Can Instagram Promotions Help Your Business?
Instagram promotions are very beneficial for a brand or business. They help you do your marketing at very reasonable rates because Instagram ads are usually set at meager daily budgets. When they use an Instagram promotion, even well-established firms do not place a very high budget for the ads that they run on this platform. They know there is no point in showing your ads to unspecified audiences, just to see where it fits.
It is rather wise to select your niche carefully, show your Instagram promotions to only that niche, and get leads. An Instagram promotion will get you quality leads in less time than a television or radio ad would do. This is because if someone is interested in your products, they can straightaway click on the CTA showing on the ad and take immediate action towards making a purchase. If you see an advertisement on TV, you cannot handle such impulsive and quick actions.
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Instagram promotions are also suitable for building brand awareness. If you repeatedly show an ad to a certain category of your target market, they will start recalling the message it carries. Before you know it, there will be people humming the jingle of your ad or speaking about your products curiously with their friends. These are all different channels for enhancing your brand awareness. With increasing brand awareness, you can expect a rise in your overall sales revenue. The more people hear about your brand, the more will be the chances that a certain percentage of them will consider buying your products.
How Do You Integrate Instagram Promotions With Your Website?
If you build your website on Strikingly, you can use our social feed feature to insert part of your Instagram feed into your web pages.
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This section of your Instagram feed can also include a boosted post in the form of an Instagram promotion. That means, in addition to your ad’s targeted reach, all your site visitors will also be able to view your ad campaign.
The complete mechanism has a great potential to drive more traffic to your website and bring in more sales for your business. Our web development tools and features have been developed with the ease of use of our customers in mind. It is easy for laymen to integrate their social media accounts with their website built on Strikingly.
If you want to know more about our website building platform, you are welcome to join our online community and interact with our users. You can also contact us directly through live chat or email to learn more about building a site on Strikingly.
