Instagram promotion

Instagram promotion is a specific type of Instagram marketing, which implies converting regular Instagram posts and Stories into paid ones. These publications have higher outreach and engagement and work great for boosting your brand awareness and visibility.

In this video, Alex shares key techniques to maximize your brand's visibility and engagement on Instagram, from leveraging hashtags to creating compelling content. 

Why is Instagram Good for Promotion?

If you want to zero in on uplifting brand awareness, Instagram promotion is a must-have for your business. This social network accumulates over 1 billion active users every month, and 90% of them follow at least one business account.

Another reason to make use of Instagram promotion is the opportunity to build close relationships with your customers. Instagram users actively engage with brands online – the average engagement rate on this social network is 1.6% per post. For comparison, on Facebook and Twitter, these rates are 0.09% and 0.048%.

Better yet, Instagram promotion can stimulate sales growth. 77% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand if they follow it on social media — 65% buy from a brand after seeing it on Instagram.

According to this data, paid promotion on Instagram is worth investing in, especially if your goal is to increase brand awareness and your engagement rate. Your brand’s sales and ROI may benefit from your Instagram presence, as well. To help you make the most of Instagram promotion, let’s explore how this feature works.

Instagram promotion option allows you to convert regular posts, Stories, Highlights, or Stories Archives into sponsored ones. This change brings a handful of benefits, such as the opportunity to reach a broader audience, make your content more visible, and add clickable calls to action (CTA).

That is why you should distinguish two types of paid content:

1. Instagram promotion – you promote your own content. It's marked as Sponsored. In this article, we describe this type.
2. Influencer marketing – you collaborate with influencers to create and post content in their profiles promoting your goods and services. It's marked as a Paid partnership. Read more about influencer marketing.

Promoted posts get sponsored labels and CTAs. You may choose to nudge the post viewers to visit your Instagram profile, direct message you, or visit your landing page. In the latter case, Instagram lets you choose from pre-written calls to action, such as Learn More, Shop Now, Contact Us, and more. The publication may appear in the users’ newsfeeds, Stories, and Explore sections.

Here is an example of a typical promoted post on Instagram. The aim of the promotion here is to encourage viewers to visit an Instagram profile.

Paid promotion of Instagram content is available only for business profiles. This type of account has other advantages over personal ones: they show the real-time performance of your posts, statistics on your followers, and so on. To set up a business profile for Instagram, follow our step-by-step guide.

Another point to consider is that you need Facebook Ads to launch and manage Instagram campaigns. To access it, link a Facebook account to your Instagram profile or follow Facebook’s guide on creating Instagram ads.

Now we’ll delve deeper into converting organic content to sponsored content. Let’s unpack the process for regular posts, Stories, Highlights, and the

Promotion button on your profile.

Instagram post promotion

To start a post promotion, go to your Instagram profile and choose the publication you’d like to promote. Tap the Promote button, which will open the settings of your promotional campaign.

To get off the ground, choose the destination for the post viewers; it may be your profile, website, or direct messages. Base the decision on your goals. If you’d like to grow your Instagram follower base, opt for driving people to your profile. To nudge the audience down the sales funnel, go for your website or direct messages.

In the second step, you need to pick an audience. If you choose the auto settings, Instagram will show your post to people similar to your current followers. To pinpoint the most promising prospects, set the criteria manually. Knowing your customer profile will come in handy to leverage better results. Follow our guide on creating a buyer persona for your business.

In the final stages, Instagram lets you set up a daily budget and the duration of the promotion (from 1 to 30 days) and shows you an overview of your campaign. Here is how the whole process of setting up a promotional campaign for your post will look:

Instagram Stories and Highlights promotion

Setting up a promotional campaign for Stories and Highlights resembles the post promotion process, except for the initial steps. To get the ball rolling, you need to choose a Story or Highlight, tap the side menu, and opt for the Promote command.

Consider that the Instagram promotion feature doesn’t support tappable elements. Thus, you can’t take advantage of polls, questions, quizzes, countdowns, and other interactive elements in Stories and Highlights. However, promoting this type of content is worthwhile – 500 million people watch Stories every day. It’s a whopping audience to reach.

Promotions button on your profile

This way of promoting your content on Instagram has a huge benefit compared with previous ones. It allows you to streamline the process by offering top-performing posts for promotion. This option is a way out when you are puzzled over which piece of content to promote.

We’ve unveiled the mechanics and facilities of Instagram promotion. Now it’s time to learn how to implement it into your marketing strategy. Read on to learn more about the best practices, tips, and ideas to adopt.

Instagram promotion is a simple yet powerful tool that can take your social media marketing to the next level. However, allocating your budget is not enough to reach your goals with sponsored content. To make it do the trick, you need to use smart tactics. We’ve picked several tips and ideas that you can stick to and achieve your business objectives.

Combine paid promotion with unpaid tricks

To achieve sustainable results, promoting specific posts is not enough. Take a complex approach and employ paid and organic tactics. Start by creating an Instagram promotion plan – follow our guide on crafting an Instagram marketing strategy.

Couple paid promotional activities with influencer marketing. This move will bump up your outreach, engagement, and ROI – on average, brands earn $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.

Another point to consider is adding locations to your promoted posts and tag other accounts. According to Adweek, simply tagging users in your posts can boost engagement by 56%. Adding locations can drive a 79% increase for this indicator.

Promote your top-performing content

The number one best practice to adopt is making use of your best-performing content. You may want to bring out a completely new promotional campaign and create fresh content for it. However, reusing your current pieces of content may save you tons of time and effort.

To optimize Instagram promotion, brush through the organic posts on your page, and find the most engaging ones. Paid advertising can inject new life into these publications and provide a great response from a wider audience.

The non-profit United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) applied this tactic for its fundraising campaign promotion. The association posted a video with Liam Neeson and other celebrities on its account to raise money for Yemen. The post got over 11,000 views and over 1,800 likes. The organization decided to reuse this content for paid advertising. As a result, the promoted post got over 200,000 views and roughly 6,500 likes.

Employ Stories and Highlights

Instagram’s promotion feature allows adding calls to action to regular posts. This peculiarity can make Stories and Highlights the first thing to go out of the window as they vanish 24 hours after publication. However, it’s better to employ the power of this format.

Stories are a rapidly growing type of content – they are growing 15x faster than feed-based sharing. Better yet, they work well for promoting businesses as 62% of people said they’ve become more interested in brands or products after seeing it in Stories.

Choose content carefully

Instagram users are fastidious when it comes to the content they consume. There are thousands of tips and tricks for promoting content on Instagram. Here are the main tactics you can stick to:

1. Make your promoted content look organic. Ad-like creatives with huge logos or calls to action repel Instagram users. 78% of followers unfollow brands if they post too much promotional content. Posts you promote should blend perfectly with other content in a viewers' newsfeed. To express your brand personality, use recognizable traits, such as your signature color.
2. Post faces to drive engagement. According to Georgia Tech, Instagram posts with faces get 38% more likes and 32% more comments. So, change the game and use photos with a model or brand representative.
3. Make the most of UGC. User-generated content can work wonders for your Instagram marketing. It drives a 4.5% higher conversion rate, boosts engagement, and improves cost-per-click metrics. Play around with using UGC for your promotional posts. Remember to tag the authors – Instagram requires you to respect intellectual property rights.

The high-end fashion store, Tsum, employs two of the tactics listed above. The company went for an organic-looking photograph of a glamorous woman. The image does not contain huge taglines or dazzling branding, except the logo on the eyeshadow palette in the model's hands.

Make sure your content is mobile-friendly

If you drive audiences from promotional posts to your website, this tip is for you. Optimizing your landing pages seems obvious, as 91% of users access social networks from mobile devices. However, websites that work incorrectly on mobile devices are common.

Make sure your ad and landing page have the same design, address the same audience, use the same call to action and copywriting style. The harmonized landing page and ad lead to a 39% increase in conversion. To get even better results, follow our guide on increasing your landing page conversion rate.

The tips and tactics listed above will help you make the most of your Instagram promotion. However, the main piece of advice is to remember to budget your paid promotion expenditures. Let’s try to predict the promotion cost for your business.

How Much Does Instagram Promotion Cost?

To start discussing your Instagram promotion budget, let’s take a once-over of the network’s terms and conditions. According to the rules, you need to choose the total sum you want to spend on post promotion. Then you set a promotion duration, and the social network automatically decides how much money it can write off every day. You can never go out of the limits of your total budget.

The process is clear-cut, but you may still struggle to figure out the budget you need for leveraging your Instagram promotion goals. To clarify this issue, consider addressing the cost-per-click (CPC) indicator.

According to AdEspresso, the average CPC for Instagram ads hovers between $0.50 and $1.00. For highly competitive industries, such as apparel, the cost can reach up to $3.00 per click.

To broaden the perspective, take a look at the landscape photographer’s experience. The person spent $50 on promoting an Instagram post and reached over 32,500 people, and got 43 profile visits. Thus, the cost per click was a little over $1, which more or less matches the indicator provided by AdEspresso.

Instagram promotion is a great way to make your brand more visible online and get new leads. To make full use of it, take care of your lead-nurturing process, and employ various marketing channels. Email marketing, chatbots, push notifications, and SMS can come in handy to convert your prospects into paying customers. Register with LIKE.TG to implement these channels into your marketing strategy at an easy rate.