The Best Way To Create Instagram Ads That Work | Instagram Ads Tips And Tricks

In this post I’m sharing some of my Instagram marketing agencies top Instagram ads tips and tricks to help you get way better results from one of the most powerful forms of advertising available today Instagram ads.

Let’s get to it.

Hey there my name is Adam Erhart, modern marketing strategist and welcome to the modern marketing show where we help you grow your business by making way better marketing.

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It’s no secret that Instagram is easily one of the most popular and powerful social media networks available today but what many people still haven’t caught on to especially the entrepreneurs and business community who at the end of the day are trying to generate more leads customers and sales from their Instagram accounts well what they haven’t fully caught on to yet is the true power of Instagram ads and just how profitable this platform can be.

Yes organic posting is great and yes using Instagram influencers is fast becoming a a very viable part of our business strategy but they rival in comparison to the true power of Instagram ads which simply gives you a crazy level of targeting and creative control and really the ability to create high profit producing campaigns.

So with all that said, I’m going to share with you seven Instagram ads tips and tricks that we use inside the agency every single day so you can use these tips to quickly level up your ad game and start creating high profit campaigns.

Alright so the very first thing that we need to cover is tip number one which is you’ve got to get friendly with Facebook.

I always find it interesting when I’m having a chat with a potential client ora business owner or an entrepreneur and we talk about this real big stretch or divide between the Instagram crowd and the Facebook crowd people seem to fall into one of the two camps and very rarely is there that true division.

Basically, people say that yeah all my clients are on Facebook or all my clients are in Instagram and they rarely sort of acknowledge the fact that they could very well be on both.

Regardless even if they’re not on both even if they’re really just specifically on Instagram well you still got to get friendly with Facebook because the way that you run Instagram ads is through the Facebook Ads manager.

So for this reason you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with the platform and specifically the backend of the platform, the ads manager, because this is where you’re going to be creating pixel and getting them installed on your website so you can track conversions and make sure your ads are doing what they’re supposed to do.

This is where you’re going to be creating all of your ads and the creative part and making sure that everything looks and feels exactly how you want it to and the best part of it all is this is where you’re going to be leveraging the true power of the Facebook Ads manager which is in their targeting and their ability to essentially get your ad in front of the ideal and most perfect customer or client for your business.

Also as a side note even if you truly believe that your customers aren’t on Facebook I’d argue that at least a few of them are and with the simple click of a button you can reach them there as well as on Instagram so it doesn’t hurt to at least test.

Alright so the next tip that I want to share with you here is to dress it up but maybe not too much and it really depends on your market on your audience but the point that I want to make is that when you’re putting out content and you’re actually putting money behind it so you’re paying to promote this and making sure it ends up in front of the right people well you want to spend a little bit of extra time and really making sure that you’ve got your creative absolutely dialed in.

Now, inside the agency we use a combination of Adobe products including Lightroom and Photoshop 2 to really dial in the photo and make sure that it pops and just jumps off the page and directly into your customers eyeballs.

It sounds like it’d be painful.

Also one of the benefits of Instagram ads and one of the secrets behind really effective Instagram ads something that’s made me a better Facebook Ads marketer as well as other marketer is the fact that with Instagram ads we really want the image and the creative and the graphic or whatever that we’re using to essentially tell the story well we wanted to do just that.

We wanted to tell the story essentially, show the story with the image alone rather than with the text.

I know that sounds like kind of a weird concept so let me break it down here.

Basically, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get the image to convey the end state or the benefit that your customer is going to receive rather than the early state or the features or any technical specifications of the product or or what not where they’re at at the beginning.

It’s a bit confusing, let me break it down even more.

Basically, what we want our image to do here is to sell the end result and really make it benefit driven so that it tells the story of where your customer is going to end up once they do business with you basically you want to show not tell now a few other real important tips when it comes to image so action is you obviously want to make sure that it looks like it fits in to the Instagram feed well at the same time pops out enough but at least so that it doesn’t look like an ad so in other words stay away from stock photos or people in business suits shaking hands or high-fiving.

Also there’s rarely a need to brand the image itself so you can avoid putting your logo on it because again they can see it right at the top of the ad.

So the takeaway point for this tip is really just this: spend a little bit of extra time on the formatting on the design making sure everything’s really dialed in because you’re going to be putting money behind it.

Make sure that the image or the video or whatever you’re using shows the story more so than tells the story directly.

Alright, so the next step in something we use every single day is to leverage conversion campaigns.

Now when you’re first creating your Instagram ads you’re going to have a ton of different objectives that you can choose from you can choose to generate traffic or engagement or straight up conversions and the point that I want to make here is you want to tell Instagram in this case the Facebook Ads manager well you want to be direct and tell them exactly what you’re after so in other words if what you’re trying to do here is generate leads or sales or anything of that nature you want to be specific and direct with the Facebook Ads manager and tell them exactly that.

In this case it means setting up a conversion campaign making sure that you’ve got the Facebook Ads pixel, yes of course we’ve already covered you can use this with Instagram, but making sure you’ve got that pixel on your website on the Thank You page or the conversion page or wherever they’re going to end up once they’ve taken action.

Now, back a while ago we didn’t have to be so direct, in fact we could choose traffic or engagement and really just rely on the power of our ad and our funnel to do the heavy lifting for us, but those times have changed the algorithms got a lot more powerful and now it doesn’t make sense to try to outsmart the algorithm, rather we play along we tell them exactly what they want and they optimize for it.

Alright, so the next tip is all about understanding and applying the principles behind foundational marketing 101 ideas.

You see, Instagram ads or Facebook ads or YouTube ads or basically any form of marketing is never immune to the foundational marketing principles and the psychology of consumer behavior and why people do what they do and how they engage and interact with brands.

For this reason, there’s no way to avoid learning about those basic marketing concepts.

In this case the main things you want to pay attention to: our market, message, media, match.

So let’s break that down.

For starters, when you’re building out your Instagram ads campaign if you want it to be effective you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got a congruent match between your market, your message and your media.

Now in this case your market is going to be your ideal customer avatar, that person that you really want to target including their demographic details like age, gender, income, occupation, title, things of that nature.

Their geographic details like what city or state or province or country they live in as well as their psychographic details, which is where Instagram ads really shine because you can dial in on pages they like, brands they follow, attitudes they have, behaviors, they subscribe to basically all sorts of different things that you can use to really dial in your marketing.

And then of course last we have media, which in this case is going to be Instagram.

Just having those three pieces in place alone is going to dramatically improve your Instagram ads success.

But we can take it a step further by breaking down three more steps that are required for Instagram at success.

You see, when it comes to creating effective advertising there’s three different components that go into the ad itself that determine the success of it: the list, the offer and the copy.

Now the list is also the audience and again this is kind of gonna fall into line with the market that you’ve just identified well by making sure that you’ve identified the right people who are going to be a good match for your product you’re basically taking care of about 40% of the success of your ad.

Incredibly important.

The message is essentially the miracles and miseries as I like to call it of your customers.

So what are their miracles: their wants, their needs, their dreams, their aspirations, their goals, all of the things that your business is going to be uniquely positioned to help them achieve.

And of course the flip side of that is what are their miseries: their fears, their frustrations, their pains, their problems, their nightmares, everything they’re trying to avoid that your business can come in and save the day from them help them escape from.

The media in this case is obviously Instagram but if we hadn’t already pre-selected that well you could simply line up all the available options and choose the best one that has the highest likelihood of making a match between your market and your message.

When you’ve got all three lined up together you’re well on your way to creating a highly effective ad campaign.

Alright, now that we’ve got that covered it’s important to cover just one more foundational marketing principle that you really need to understand high-converting adds and that’s the hierarchy of where an ad is going to perform best, essentially which part of the ad is going to be responsible for the most results.

Now there’s a bit of debate and kind of discrepancy in the numbers depending on who you ask but it’s largely subscribed to that 40% of your ad success is going to come down to the targeting or the audience or the list that you’re using this is the reason you really want to make sure that you’ve got your market dialed in you know who they are you know who you’re trying to reach and you know that the right ones for you.

Another 40% of the success of your ad is going to come down to the offer you’re making basically it doesn’t make sense to put something in front of people that they’re never going to take action on so you really want to spend some time dialing in your offer and making sure that it’s irresistible enough to your target market.

Lastly, somewhat surprisingly only 20% of the success of your ad is going to comedown to the creative and the image in the video that you use.

Now this doesn’t mean that you can ignore it completely because 20% is still a very large number when it comes to the success of your ad but it just shows the importance of making sure that you’ve got your market and your message dialed in really spot-on.

Alright, so the next tip here is to never stop testing.

Now one of the biggest mistakes I see both novice Instagram ad managers and experienced Instagram and managers make is that they’re testing far too few creative variations.

For starters it’s rare if ever that you’re going to create just one ad and have that thing perform perfectly.

Some testing some variations and some optimizing of that ad is going to be required.

Plus even if you’ve got your market perfectly dialed in and your messaging really dialed in it’s hard to tell which image or which video is gonna resonate best which is why we always test.

Another reason is there is something called ad fatigue which occurs when someone sees your ad too many times and it loses its effectiveness you see there’s a principle in advertising and this applies to Instagram as just as well as pretty much every other medium out there and that’s that the performance of your head will eventually decrease or stop working altogether in some cases this can happen over a matter of days or weeks sometimes it can be months and sometimes even years but you always want to make sure you’ve got backup ad copy and creative ready on hand to interject whenever you need it.

This is a bit of a downer if you have the intention of just sitting one ad and letting it go and never touching it again but the reality is is that if you want to create a truly effective and high profit campaign you’re gonna need to continually be creating new add creative and testing different offers and images and all the combinations.

Alright so the next tip here is equally boring and that’s that you really do need to conduct market research but it doesn’t need to be as boring as it sounds because there is a fun way to do this.

You see Instagram is a fun platform and there’s some pretty cool stuff to look at so my suggestion here is to really go out there and get inspired.

Start looking at your colleagues and your competitors and other brands and influencers that you look up to and respect and who has of a similar style or maybe a completely different style that you could get inspired from.

Also don’t be afraid to mine your own feet look back through things that you’ve posted organically or previous ads find out which ones worked and see if you can reverse-engineer why they worked.

The next thing to keep in mind is that vanity metrics such as likes or comments or shares while not necessarily an indicator of profitability or how much money that ad generated well it’s at least an indicator that this ad is hitting the right cords and creating enough engagement the reason we like to look for engagement is because if your ad is getting good engagement on Instagram well they’re gonna favor it by showing it to more people for a lot less money because they like having engaging content on their platform.

Not surprisingly.

Alright, so the next tip is on split testing.

Now I know we covered this briefly in the Never soft testing point but it’s really important so I want to dive in just a little deeper on how exactly to split test your different images and creative and when you should do it to get the best results possible.

First of all because I already mentioned unless you’ve got a crystal ball it’s nearly impossible to tell which ad is gonna perform amazingly and which one’s gonna fall flat on its face before you get it out there and let the market really weigh in.

This is why when creating an Instagram ad campaign for a client we set everything up so we can test as much as possible as quickly as possible including different audiences, different placements, different ads, different images, basically everything.

So here’s how to do split testing with your Instagram ads in order to get the best results possible.

For starters it’s important to test only one thing at a time.

This part is incredibly important because if you test everything and all sorts of different things all at once you’re not going to really understand which one moved the needle and which one is responsible for giving you better results and which metrics or which changes were really irrelevant and did nothing or maybe even hurt you.

It’s for this reason that I structure things this way> the first step is to create one really good piece of content we’re talking about creative that just blows the minds of everybody who sees it amazing it’s beautiful it’s dialed in and it’s perfect for your target market.

Once you’ve got this perfect piece of content the first thing you want to split test is the different audiences so check your targeting maybe you’re going to use some interest based targeting off people that like your competitors maybe you’ve got an email list that you can build a look like audience off to test or maybe you have another area that you think you’ve got a really good dialed an audience that you want to put this image in front of Regardless of the targeting you want to start here by selecting maybe two, maybe three, maybe even four or five depending on your budget different audiences and seeing which one resonates best with your piece of copy.

Once that’s done and once you’ve got an audience that you’re pretty sure is the right one for you well now it’s time to start split testing your different ad copy and creative.

This means testing different images and seeing if maybe videos are gonna outperform images.

From there it’s time to move on to placements and of course you’re gonna want to split test feed against story ads and seeing which one is going to provide a better return on investment for you.

Once that’s all done it’s time to go back to audiences and build out even more and continually progress from there basically testing different audiences and different creative and different placements and just wash rinse repeat until you’ve got a really dialing campaign.

Alright, so the next thing you’re gonna want to do is check out the videos I have linked up here.

The first is Instagram advertising strategies which is going to give you even more insights and tips into the strategies we’re using inside our Instagram marketing agency every single day the next is Instagram marketing for small business which as the name implies if you’ve got a small business is going to help you with your Instagram marketing to really help you reach more customers and generate more leads and sales so check those out now thanks so much for reading and I’ll catch you next time on the modern marketing show.