Tips and Strategies for Crafting Instagram Ads

So here's an ad from Brooklinen, a mattress company. Hi, we're Brooklinen, home of the internet's favorite sheets. So sheets, bedding, this is what comfortable looks like, right? So that's their brand page.

And here, a very simple ad, an image that certainly will catch your attention. And it's showing the customer achieving the goal that the customer has. He has a very comfortable, attractive bed that he seems to be very happy about, right? And here it's very simple and straight to the point.

Caption rather, our biggest and only sale of the year is here, right? So that's going to generally lightly spur some attention. If you are at all interested in purchasing bedding, well, now's the time to get it, right? And the call to action is shop now, right? And you click on that, you'll likely go to a landing page associated with this ad or to that brand's website, right? And you have options when it comes to call to actions. Obviously, if you're an ecommerce, maybe it's like shop now or buy now, right? And it's sometimes, you know, it's strategic how you use these call to actions, because I could say, shop now versus buy now, right? If I want to create more urgency, maybe I could say Buy now.

If I just want to sort of bring people in without scaring them off, I might say shop now, right? If this is what I might say, buy now, because it's referring to a sale, right? So you might want to generate some urgency. So you'll get to pick the call to action, you know, based upon the specific action you want the customer to do and how you want to express that. Okay.

We do have a project that, to close this section out with, or the advertising portion of it. But before we do that, I just want to go to Instagram and show you where you go to create an ad. So you can go to your dashboard around, if you have a professional account on the left side here, right? And if I already had ads for this account, they would be there, but I can click on create an ad or boost an ad, right? If I do this, it will enable me to look at posts I've done and pick which posts I want to boost, right? So I just pick my top posts in terms of engagement.

And here are the questions that they ask me. What do you want people to do when they see your ad? What's the objective, right? Visit your profile, they're recommending that. Visit my website, message me, a mix of actions.

We'll just go to visit my profile. Any special requirements if you're in any of these sections, like financial products and services, employment, but in this case, no. The reason they ask that is that there might be restrictions on how you can target an audience for some of these categories.

It's against federal law in the U.S. to target financial products, employment, or housing on the basis of economic factors, income, right? So you don't want to… If you were in that category, you'd have to mention it. Not relevant here. Then you have an option about who gets to see it, right? Target this ad to people similar to your followers.

Then, in this case, Meta is going to look for people who've matched some type of statistical profile to the people who are currently following me and then show the ad to them, right? However, I might say, you know what? It's not that. I need to reach people within a specific area, or these other criteria actually match the criteria by targeted audience, and I want to use that, right? And that is still one other option, right? The Advantage Plus audience, whenever you see Advantage Plus, it refers to some AI tool that's integrated into the campaign setup. So in this case, they are not creating lookalike audiences, but if I end up with a big audience, whatever is likely to improve the performance is doing statistical analysis in real time and saying, these people seem as if they will be ideal to match the objective of your audience.

I would generally keep that on, right? Because it's going to just enhance the targeting that you do, but you can also specify the locations that you want, like regional. You search for a location like New York, and it'll give you different options: New York State, New York City, different cities in New York, or, even more local, you can use a map and target it more. So you do have that option.

A minimum age, if your product could, you know, has a minimum age, can't be sold to people under this age, or any factor like that, right? You could do that. Okay, so that was setting it up using the Advantage Plus, which is AI helping, you know, determine who fits that audience based on once you set, this is the minimum age, this is the location. But there's another option is where I really do it myself, and I shut off the user advantage audience.

And now I have additional criteria, right? I can just select the gender, I can set the age range, right? Make it lower. You know, from 25, let's say, I'm trying to reach people as an energy provider, and I want to reach people who are homeowners, right? So I want to set an older age, because most people these years under their late, who haven't reached their late 20s are less likely to be a homeowner. So that might be a consideration to set in, you know, a higher minimum age.

But as you can see in additional locations, they can also do interest, right? So let's say I want to reach people who are interested in fashion, right? So I could type that in. If that's what you're looking for, for your audience, you have a whole bunch of fashion options. Let's say I want green energy seekers, right? Sustainable energy.

So these people, based upon their content interaction and other factors, have indicated that they are into green energy, right? So that would be the ideal audience if I'm marketing green energy, right? So whatever, you know, pastime, interest, passion, running, let's say, I'm marketing running apparel, right? Or running shoes. And here you have running, road running, running club, right? So that is where you can dig into, you know, factors relating to your audience interest, as well as more advanced demographic factors, all right? And then, as I mentioned, you will set a budget, right? $10 a day, $14, $20, you know, how much you want to spend a day. And it shows you at $22, let's say, make it a little even, at $20 a day, I'll reach 6,000 to 16,000 people, right? So from that, I can run the numbers and see, you know, based upon my understanding of how many of these people are going to click through on an ad.

You might have an average click-through rate of 5%, and then an average conversion rate on your website of 10%. And from that, I can work out how many people I need to reach before I can achieve a certain sales goal, right? We want to set goals for each of these campaigns, SMART goals, you know, that's specific to, you know, I want to increase my sales by this amount or have this many more followers, right? So from there, you can get a sense of how much budget is going to be required to achieve that. And if I wanted to boost the posts, I would just boost the posts there.

And that's it. As I mentioned, you can go to the Better Business Suite, the Meta, and it will find a Meta ad manager, and they'll give you a little bit more robust options when it comes to targeting, budgeting, and some of these other choices that you can make. But you can certainly do a campaign right from there, right? So that is boosting posts, right? So the other option you have with a campaign is to create an ad.

One time is the ad is only going to be seen during your campaign, it's not coming from existing content. So you have to upload content, right? So upload an image or video. In this case, we're going to use the images from the class folder.

And there you have it, right? Now, I get to add a caption. Well, first, I get to add a filter. So let me go with Ludwig.

I could do other options, like make it warmer, contrast, brightness, all these things I could play with, right? So once I've done that, I'll go next, and I get to edit options. I'm going to put something down here, and I'm going to show you a great feature that Meta now has, right? So let's say this ad is for a jean company, you know, a denim brand. So I put that there.

It's going to show me what it looks like in the ad itself, right? And I could do my normal targeting here. I won't go through that again, but the same questions about what, like, you know, set my objective, do my audience targeting, set my budget, all of that. But what I want to show you is, so this is what, I could preview the ad, right? I could say, okay, I want to see what it looks like on my Instagram feed versus my stories versus reels, right? So let's see what it looks like on my Instagram feed.

It'll run in all those areas, so you can check them all out. And there you have it. Feeling the denim vibe, right? Now, instead of that, you can preview all of this.

I can also mention the cool little tool I'm telling you to mention is that AI can generate captions for you as well. So I'm saying, feeling the denim vibe, and this is what they're giving me, various variations on that. We've got a denim crush, shop our trendy jeans and rock that effortless style from Clash of the Bowls.

We've got your perfect fit, ready to elevate your wardrobe game, and two other options, right? And notice that all of this is customer-centric. Their customers are the hero. We got your perfect fit, your perfect fit, fit your style, right? First, right, what's, you know, so we've got it, always look at how you're enhancing the customer, right? So, I just wanted to point that out.

So you would pick, you know, which variation you want, and then that's it. You can run your ad from here. And similarly, you can do this from the Meta Advertising Manager, which you can access through the Meta Business Suite.

All right, so as the final project for this course, I just want you to practice setting up an advertisement, right? Creating an ad, looking at it from the standpoint of telling your brand story, providing a benefit to the customer, and doing it in the context of a single, you know, Instagram ad. So you can actually create an ad right from the app if you want, but we also have this generator here, which simulates what, you know, the steps that you would do on the platform. 

So you would add your brand name here, upload the image, select your call to action, and that could be anything from learn more, apply now, book now, contact us, right? So there's a whole range of options, shop, sign up, pick which one is most appropriate to the action you want your customers to take, and then you can add a capture, right? So, you know, experiment with it, come up with some ideas, and the next thing we'll discuss is how to integrate your Shopify account and what's required to be able to do that, to enable you to have an online store on Instagram.