DIY: Instagram Promotions

Majorly there 3 broad types of promotions you can run,

Sponsored Posts or Boost Posts – Objective of this type is generally to boost engagement on a particular post.
Story Promotions – This can be used either for increasing profile visits or website visits, or even for lead generation.
Carousel Ads – These are multiple post ads to boost website traffic, sales or profile visits.

From your Instagram handle, you can run the first two types of promotions – sponsored posts or story promotions. Let’s look at the basics of running a successful campaign,

Define a very specific and clear objective.
Define a Target Audience – it again has to be very specific.
Allocate a media spend.

STEP ONE

What do you want out of these ads? Profile visits? Likes/Comments? Web traffic? Well, you can’t have everything out of just one campaign so define a specific objective such as I want 250 likes on this post (I normally get just 50-70).

STEP TWO

This is where the magic happens! The campaign performance majorly depends on this parameter. There are multiple points in this exercise – demographics, interests, behaviour, etc. Ask yourself the following questions when working on this,

What is the age group of my audience? Where do they come from?
What are their education or work backgrounds?
What can be their interest areas? (This is partly guesswork, partly common sense)

To simplify this, let’s assume we’re trying to target Architects/Interior Designers.

This is just for your clarity, now let’s start narrowing down your audience. This is how we do it, there can be different ways of doing this. We usually start with demographics (Age, Location) – Define a specific range (for age) then if you feel you’d like to expand this you can do it marginally – don’t try to make very broad. Then for location, wherever applicable we try to pick major cities (change the radius to just “city”). If you’re running the ad within a city, you can pick areas of the city to be specific.

Half job is done with the location and age. Now Let’s get to interests – I usually start with our topic of the post as interest. That becomes are first. area of interest. Now since we want to target architects – it makes sense to add in the following interest,

Architects
Interior Designer
Designers
Builders
Contractors

Now we also add the related topics of interest such as architecture, modern architecture, landscape, interior architecture, and more.

Now let’s think from an Architect or Interior Designer’s point of view and pick interests – what is it that they want to see on their instagram feed? what can be inspiring to them? What are the different things they like to look at? This will help you really narrow down your audience but again remember you also have to keep in mind your area of interest and it should always coincide for this campaign to work.

If you’re trying to sell something they’re not interested in, you will never see results. Again, also remember there’s alway someone who is interested in your product/service – you just have to find them and strike the chord.

So let’s try and other interests,

Photography (Let’s be specific – Landscape, nature, documentary, aerial)
Artefacts, Decor
Furniture, wallpapers, landscape, gardening, etc.

You can go on and add whatever other related ideas you have. Here’s one last thing you should cover before you’re done,

Related Verified Accounts – famous architects, designers, etc.
Magazine pages – Elle, AD, etc.
Feature pages – Homesofinstagram, etc.

You may not find all of it but try adding whatever is available.

STEP THREE

Define your budget and duration for the Ad – you may want to select this as per the estimated data provided by the Instagram. You can also do a test run of different ads and see what works for you.

That’s it! Three simple steps to run Instagram promotions from your handle. If you have further queries feel free to write us at deepa@godiawala.com.

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