Instagram Ad Guide to Grow Your Store

Written by Harvie Singh, an Ecommerce Specialist at The Ecom Academy

In this guide you’re going to learn profitable Instagram ad strategies and how to leverage influencers without having to spend a ton of money.

Forget having to read several articles to understand Instagram for ecommerce; everything you need is below.

Why Instagram?

Outside of Asia,Instagram is the fastest-growing social media platform with more than a billion monthly active users, and it’s growing:

Whether you’re selling products to doctors, mothers, athletes, college students, working professionals, or small business owners, your target market IS using Instagram.

If you’re already running Facebook ads, you only have to tap one button to serve the same ads on Instagram:

Instagram is most popular with millennials and Gen Z, whereas Facebook is most popular with the 30-49 age group.

Did you know that over 80% of Instagram’s user base is outside the USA?

India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, Russia, Japan, the UK, and Germany are all ranked in the top 10 countries using Instagram, offering very broad geographic targeting and easy entry into new markets.

If you own an ecommerce business that ships worldwide, then scaling is easier as you have access to new markets. Ads make scaling easier and cheaper as running ads in developing markets are cheaper because of less ad competition.

Online shoppers use Instagram as their own personal shopping mall to find new products and discover brands, with hashtags like #instasale #ShopMyCloset and #Instashop becoming some of the most popular hashtags used to find new products:

Instagram has a unique demographic, is used globally, and has validated itself as a place where consumers visit to be inspired and find new products. That’s why you need to use Instagram for your ecommerce business.

The Importance of an Instagram Funnel

If you don’t have an Instagram funnel in place before you run ads….

An Instagram funnel is the journey a customer takes from discovery to purchase.

Let me walk you through one I went through a while back.

I was scrolling through Instagram and was shown the following ad:

“Hmm,” I thought, “that’s tasty.” I clicked the ad and viewed their menu, added a few items to my cart and created an account, but then my girlfriend called me and told me our pet hamster had a fever, so I immediately stopped what I was doing and rushed home.

Stella (our pet hamster) ended up being totally fine, and I completely forgot about the food I was ordering.

For the rest of the evening I relaxed, watching funny animal videos on Facebook, until I saw this advert:

Ah that’s right, I was about to order some food wasn’t I? Moments earlier they also sent me this email as I had signed up to their site but not placed an order:

I went back to their website, ordered my meals, and updated my Facebook status to:

This is a sales funnel. It has multiple steps to re-engage with the prospect until they complete their order.

When you run ads on Instagram, or any platform for that matter, you need a sales funnel in place.

A sales funnel can be various lengths. If you’re starting out with Instagram, ensure that you have the following as a bare minimum before you start running ads:

Retargeting Ads – With less than 3% of traffic converting on the first visit to a website, you must retarget your audience by showing them a relevant offer or piece of content to push them further down your funnel.

Instagram allows you to retarget anyone who visited your Instagram page, a specific ad, or your website.

You can merge Instagram ads with Facebook and Google retargeting. Don’t view Instagram as a standalone platform but rather one of many marketing assets you have to scale your business.

Welcome Email Series – More shoppers than ever are researching before they buy a product, and for that reason I strongly recommend you have a welcome email series in place.

This allows you to re-engage with the prospect for FREE whenever you want via email and introduce them to your business, and you can use your email list to create lookalike audiences to sharpen audience targeting on Instagram.

What is a lookalike audience? A lookalike audience is an group of people on Facebook and Instagram who are very similar to your current email list. Simply upload a customer list on Facebook and Instagram and its algorithm will find users who are similar to your customers to make audience targeting easier for you.

Instagram Placement Options

There are only two places you can run ads on Instagram.

The first is the news feed, where you swipe down and shift through content like so:

You can run news feed ads as a single image, video, carousel, or Instagram’s ace in the hole: shopping ads.

Shopping ads are interactive posts that showcase several products that a user can find more information about and then purchase.

Here’s a shopping post from retail brand Shopbando. In the bottom-left corner you can see the “Tap to View Products” button:

Once clicked, four tags appear for different items showing their name and price.

You can then click on any of the items to learn more and are taken to a product page on Instagram where you can see more photos of the item and visit the product page on their website.

This is a HUGE feature that few businesses are using. Your product images and descriptions load instantly on Instagram, providing the user with a faster and seamless experience.

Using a Shopping ad they can browse multiple products instantly without having to experience the load time of your website and sift through various pages.

One strategy I like to use is to run video ads on Instagram for a range of products and retarget them with shopping ads. Then, using custom audiences, I group the audiences based on which items they clicked to show them a super-personalized offer for the item.

By the time they see the offer they have been introduced to the business and have learnt more about the product through the shopping ad. Now they are presented with a call-to-action combined with an offer.

To get started using Shopping ads on Instagram, your business needs to sell physical goods and be in one of their supported markets. You’ll also need to sync your product catalog with the platform so it can pull prices, photos, and descriptions dynamically.

You can apply to run Shopping ads by clicking here.

Your other placement option is Stories:

Instagram Stories blew up in 2018 and have more than twice the amount of daily users of Snapchat, who originally came out with the Stories feature first.

Before, you needed to create a video or image in horizontal format to use Stories, but an update in 2018 allowed businesses to use any image or video and Instagram would resize it for you.

Related: learn how to make money using shopping bots. 

The news feed works great for cold audiences and retargeting, whether it is using still images or video.

When using Stories for cold audiences, I advise using short videos or high-quality videos that are in vertical format because you only have a split second to grab users’ attention before they swipe to the next Story.

Here’s a static Story ad from online giant Alexa:

This was shown to me because I read a few of their blog posts the other day.

As I read their blogs, I do consider them an authority on the subject of blogging, so this ad isn’t spammy to me.

However, if I had never heard of them before and saw this ad, which is pretty ugly if we are being honest, I’d think it was spam and move on to the next Story.

Focus on quality videos and images when targeting cold audiences using Stories.

As the name of this placement suggests, tell a story with your ad about your product. Don’t just focus on the features of the product, but rather how the consumer will feel when they wear, use, apply, or consume your product through video. Stories is a laid back placement where users go to see what their friends and their chosen influencers are doing, so incorporate that message into your ads.

Instagram Is All about the Creatives

On Facebook you can get away with having average images and videos because the news feed is a collection of photos from friends and family, links to posts, text updates, comments from groups you’re in, and images and videos.

The opposite is the case with Instagram.

If you plan to showcase your products, your content needs to be GREAT!. Even with perfect targeting, if your images aren’t making an impact then your ads have a high chance of failure.

The Facebook news feed shows the text first and then the creatives:

The text description being shown first allows you to call the user out. If you can hit on a pain point they are facing then you’ve grabbed their attention, and this gives you some leeway with average-looking creatives.

Instagram shows the creative first and the text second, so the creatives you use need to instantly let the viewer know what you’re business/product is about, or help them relate to a pain point that your product solves.

Here’s an ad that I like from My Protein. Their product image is of a high quality, and within a split second I know what they are selling without having to read anything.

What do you think this ad is trying to sell?

Hotel rooms? Chandeliers? Furniture?

There’s too much obscurity in that creative and most people aren’t going to stop and read the text below to find out more (they are selling apartment units btw).

Instagram is a mobile platform, so attention spans are short as users are getting DMs from friends, Facebook alerts, WhatsApp messages, and other alerts they have on their phones.

You have a split second to grab their attention on Instagram through images. Ask yourself if the average person can understand what you’re offering or trying to say with your creatives without knowing a single thing about your business.

If they can’t, then your creatives need work.

How to Use Instagram Influencers

You don’t have to rely solely on ads to advertise on Instagram; you can also go down the route of working alongside Instagram influencers.

Simply put, an Instagram influencer is someone who has created trust and credibility and is an authority in their niche in the eyes of their followers.

One of the biggest influencers on Instagram (and my biggest man crush) is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He has over 134 million followers:

If you follow his Instagram profile each week, you will see that he records short videos that give his fans support and motivation to reach their goals.

In 2016 the people’s champ teamed up with retail brand Under Armour, and within a week his first product become the most successful in the company’s history.

Influencers on Instagram don’t need to have a million or more followers; they can just have a few thousand followers as long as their followers see them as an authority.

From my experience, influencers in the 10k-100k offer the best value. They are often underlooked by businesses, so due to the lack of deals they’ll work with you for lower rates or even for free if you’re able to support them through free products.

This group also has the potential to blow up, and if they do you can ride that wave with minimal costs if you signed them up beforehand.

It’s much easier to go from 100k to 1 million flowers than it is from 0-10,000. If you see potential in an influencer early on, ask to work with them on a long-term deal so, as they grow, your fee remains the same. If they don’t grow as you intended, your losses are minimal.

Gym retail brand GymShark took this approach with influencer marketing and turned a bootstrapped business that started in his mother’s basement in 2012 into generating over £41 million in revenue in 2017.

At first they connected with social media influencers like the HodgeTwins in 2014, when they only had a few thousand followers, and gave them free clothing to use on their videos and podcasts.

Today the twins have more than 556k followers on Instagram and well over 2 million on YouTube, and GymShark has benefited from that.

GymShark also connected with bodybuilders that didn’t have deals with other brands, making it much cheaper for them to get exposure.

To make the most of influencer marketing, find influencers who are on the cusp of blowing up as this will allow you to work out better deals as some influencers today charge so much that you won’t be able to make a profitable ROI, as they are waiting for corporate deals.

Influencer marketing isn’t a sure-fire way to drive sales. If you pick the wrong influencers or the influencer is unable to produce the right content, you can lose out.

If your goal with influencer marketing on Instagram is to drive sales, then provide influencers with a voucher code and bespoke URL where you can track who they send to your business and how well they convert.

Vouchers work great because you’ll be able to tell how many new customers were acquired, and you can work out your CPA by dividing the total number of vouchers used by the money spent.

A unique URL will provide insight into which countries they are sending traffic from and how engaged they are by taking a look at the time spent on your website, pages per session, and repeat return rate. You’ll need a few thousand visits, but this will tell you how engaged their audience is with your business and whether an ongoing partnership will be beneficial.

For example, if you only ship products to the US but the influencer is driving traffic from outside the US because their followers are mostly from Europe or Asia, then it’s not going to work out.

If you’re looking to drive brand awareness, follow metrics such as likes per post, how many new followers you gained since working together, and whether your website is seeing an increased amount of new traffic, and use a tool like Social Mention to see if people are talking more about your brand.

There are dozens of marketplaces where you can find and connect with influencers. Some of the most popular ones are as follows:

• Inzpire.me
• Repped.io
• Mighty Scout
• Heepsy
• Socialbook.io

Don’t Sleep on Organic Reach

Organic reach on Instagram is unbelievably high when you compare it against it’s big brother, Facebook.

If you run an organic Story, you’re pushed to the front of a user’s Story feed and most of your posts will appear on your followers’ feeds.

This is FREE ADVERTISING on the second biggest social media platform outside of Asia.

One of the downsides is that you cannot place links to images on your news feed (you need to tell them to visit the link in your bio); however, if you’re a verified page on Instagram you can insert links to your Stories.

I don’t know how long organic reach will stay alive on Instagram, but I’d guess it won’t be longer than a few years at most!

Now is the time to maximize on organic reach by finding popular hashtags in your niche and using them in your organic strategy using the hashtag follow.

Not a lot of people know this, but you can follow hashtags as well as people, and some hashtags have millions of followers.

Let’s say you’re a supplement company selling protein shakes. By using the hashtag #proteinshake, anyone who follows that hashtag may see your posts on their news feed.

Whatever niche you’re in, there will be dozens of hashtags with huge organic followings that you can tap into.

This won’t be here for long, so take advantage now to grow your business for FREE.

Find Customers on the ‘Gram

Instagram is the future of ecommerce. In 2018 it started testing a native payment feature that allowed its users to link their credit cards to the app to make shopping easier, and their shopping ad format was a clear statement that Instagram was for ecommerce businesses.

Instagram will become one of the biggest platforms in the world to discover, research, and buy products.

Everyday you wait to get started is a day you fall further behind.

Expect to fail when running your first Instagram ad and influencer campaign – it’s part of the process to becoming a successful brand on Instagram.

Once you get past the learning curve on knowing what works and what doesn’t, then you can really start to scale on Instagram by running multiple campaigns, working with multiple influencers, and having an awesome organic strategy to bring more people to your store.