You may utilize the free platform that is Instagram to build relationships with anybody who wants to connect with you, and Instagram itself is free.

That sums it up well.

Therefore, what applications does it have for your company?

It’s simple: you have to provide people with entertainment; providing entertainment and keeping people’s attention is essential to your success on Instagram. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms that has emerged as a result of the proliferation of new online venues made possible by the internet. It is owned by Facebook, and over the last several years they have added advertisements to the platform. These advertisements have grown pretty lucrative, and they are dependent on the quality of the product. Acquiring this knowledge and putting it to use is the key to utilizing Instagram to effectively build your company.

In this post, we will go over the fundamentals of producing and running an Instagram ad, as well as discuss how to get in touch with “Instagram influencers” who are relevant to your business. The number of prospective consumers increases along with the size of the chocolate community; however, this does not always indicate that those customers will come to you. You are the one who is responsible for putting in the necessary effort.

This is the fifth and last part in a year-long series on the use of social media by chocolate companies. Read all of the articles in this series to fully understand the context of the topics that are going to be covered below. First of all, some fundamentals of social media for chocolate companies. How to Use Instagram for Your Small Business is Covered in Part 2 of This Guide. Developing Stronger Content for Instagram is the Topic of the Third Section. Creating an Engaged Instagram Audience is the Topic of This Part 4

What is an Instagram Ad?

A ordinary Instagram post that a business or corporation has decided to pay to promote is what is known as an Instagram advertisement. Instagram’s advertisements are incorporated into the platform, which means that the “sponsored” photographs they display seem exactly the same as any of the other photos or videos in your feed, with the exception that they were tailored directly to you.

Take note that in order to publish advertisements on Instagram, you first need to create a business account on that platform. It has been brought to some people’s attention that business accounts seem to reach less people “organically,” which refers to the instance in which Instagram displays your photo to your followers without you having to pay for it. However, there is widespread consensus among industry experts that the advantages of collecting information about one’s adherents much exceed the disadvantages of having a smaller pool of potential customers. In addition, you may more than make up for the loss with high-quality photographs and insightful descriptions.

So what do you do if you decide to run ads?

After you have successfully ran one advertisement on Facebook or Instagram, the platform will continue to suggest that you run further advertisements. This is something that you should be aware of before we go any further. They will notify you on Instagram and Facebook when a post is doing well and should be promoted, as well as provide prospective ad previews in your feeds, and they will inform you when a post should be promoted. This is starting to upset me. However, you can and should make use of this to your advantage since the photographs that were exceptionally popular with your base audience—that is, the individuals who are already following you—make for the most successful advertisements.

Facebook and Instagram are working toward their own financial gain by increasing your earnings potential via the development of advertisements that are as efficient as humanly feasible.

How To Run an Instagram Ad

When you have made the decision to run an advertisement, the Instagram platform may seem to be overwhelming. In point of fact, all the platform is doing is providing you with a selection of possibilities that it is in your best interest to comprehend.

Option 1: Do you want more people to follow you or do you want more people to buy from you? You have the option of selecting either Your “Profile,” Your “Website,” or Your “Storefront,” and at the bottom of the page you will discover further information on what the implications of these choices are for the individuals who view your advertisement. In this phase, you will be asked the fundamental question of why you want to run an advertisement.

Option 2: Who do you want to be exposed to your advertisement? You have the option of selecting “Manual” or “Automatic.” If you choose “Automatic,” Instagram will target your advertisement toward users who share characteristics with those who currently follow you. If you choose “Manual,” you will be presented with a variety of alternatives, all of which I strongly urge you to make use of. You have the ability to choose the geographical region, demographic age range, specific hobbies, and gender of your desired audience. If you don’t already have a consumer avatar in mind before putting out your advertisement, you may as well be taking shots in the dark when it comes to picking the people who will be most receptive to your message.

Option number 3 asks how much money and for how long you are willing to spend it. Think about if this is an advertisement for a seasonal product or course, or whether it is something that you would prefer to market again in the future or for an extended period of time. You may decide how much money you want to spend on this particular advertisement by navigating to the “Budget” section of the interface, and then go to the “Duration” section to choose the amount of time over which you want your budget to be spent.

I would propose spending at least $20 USD for each advertisement, with a minimum daily expenditure of $2 USD. Your advertisement has a greater chance of being seen by more people if it runs for a longer period of time. You’ll notice that your “Estimated Reach” fluctuates as you modify these two figures; this indicates that the possible number of individuals who view your advertisement is also changing.

After you have made those three selections, your ad will be ready to go, and all that is left to do is examine the information that you have already input. When Instagram determines that the advertisement meets its standards, it will then become visible to users. Read this for a comprehensive guide that walks you through the process of making an advertisement on Instagram.

An excerpt from a promotion that I may be able to run for my own profile.

Designing Your Ad

It is essential to keep in mind the image of your company whether you are creating, photographing, or selecting the picture that will become your Instagram advertisement. This might refer to you as a person, the product you offer, or any other aspect that sets you apart from the competition.

The presentation of an image that is flattering to your brand is the most crucial design decision you can make. When people see the photo in their feed and click on it, it is because they are interested in learning more about the content that they clicked on in the first place. Therefore, if that photo in particular is an accurate depiction of what your business often shares, then it can make for a terrific advertisement.

The bottom line is to know your brand’s aesthetic & base your ad off of this overall aesthetic.

It is important to remember that the objective of every photo on your feed is to first attract attention, therefore you should always select pictures that are both attractive and interesting. You may get ideas from the millions of free stock photographs that are provided by free services like Canva, which can also help you develop advertisements and store them for use at a later time. It is important to keep in mind that images containing text are more likely to be ignored than plain photos. Think about how much money you are willing to spend on the advertisement, and compare that number to the amount of time and work that you are putting into it.

It is recommended that you run many advertisements over the course of a week and spend at least $20 USD each ad. Compare how well they do to one another and then figure out what the advertisement that performed the best out of all of them did differently from the others. However, you should not quit up until you have at least spent a few hundred dollars on advertisements. You shouldn’t be running advertisements in the first place if you can’t afford to spend so much on marketing since it will reflect poorly on your business.

You should think about holding a giveaway that requires people to follow you and tag their friends, and then you should promote the giveaway. The portion where they tag their friends is the most significant aspect of this, since it essentially results in your current followers discovering new followers for you.

Identifying Your Target Audience

It is just as crucial to have an advertisement that is interesting and captivating to look at as it is to know who your target audience is. Social media commercials are highly targeted, in contrast to more conventional advertisements, which are broadcast to anyone happens to be watching that program or traveling on that highway at that particular time. Because of this, an Instagram ad will be able to reach a greater number of people if it is both well-designed and well-targeted.

It’s the equivalent of putting the same amount of gasoline into two completely different vehicles, one of which is a modern Tesla and the other of which is an old pickup truck. Which will get more out of a gallon and a half?

You must choose “Manual” under “Audience” for your promotion in order to manually pick the demographics of the audience for your post. This option is located under the heading “Audience.” There, you will have the opportunity to take into account and target certain age groups, genders, geographic regions, and interests of prospective readers or consumers. If you want to target using Facebook at the beginning, you will have the ability to be even more particular (see below). This is where your “perfect customer avatar” comes into play, which is also why it’s crucial to know precisely what it is that you’re offering before you attempt to sell it.

As an example, our website and the material related with it are centered on chocolate travel; hence, it is the topic on which we provide information. We can construct an ideal customer avatar by using the demographics of both the people who follow us on Instagram and the people who visit the site. Then, we can add their demographics into the avatar, and maybe this will encourage more people to visit the site.

It is crucial to have a solid understanding of the subjects that your prospective consumers are interested in and, as a result, what they anticipate seeing in their feeds. This way, people won’t quickly recognize your photo as an advertisement and scroll right past it without ever going far enough to get a good look at what you have to offer. Consider the ages of individuals who might afford to purchase a chocolate bar, the seasonality of such an item, the interests of a person prepared to spend extra for chocolate, and how you may grab their attention by blending in rather than sticking out if you are attempting to offer them a chocolate bar.

Find out more about determining who your ideal customers are right here.

IG Story Ads vs. Regular Feed

Before we go into Facebook’s position on Instagram, let’s address an issue that comes up frequently: which is better for advertising on Instagram—stories or feeds?

When you create advertisements for Instagram, you have two choices for where those advertisements will appear inside Instagram: either in the main news feed or in stories. If you’ve ever browsed Instagram, you’ve almost certainly seen these advertising, which simply have the word “sponsored” written next to them at the location marker. However, as an Instagram user, you may not even look at the stories that the people you follow post on the platform. If you don’t, you’re not the only one who doesn’t. But if this is the case, know that you are not the only one. There is a tiny learning curve associated with advertisements on Instagram, despite the fact that the stories feature is becoming more popular among Instagram users of all ages, not only those under the age of 30.

If you are just starting out with Instagram advertisements, you may want to limit their visibility to the Instagram news feed until you get the hang of how everything works. According to my observations, around 7 to 10 percent of my followers check out my tales, while 30 to 50 percent see my regular postings. It is important to keep in mind that “Reach” and “Impressions” are not the same thing. “Reach” will tell you how many unique individuals viewed the post, while “Impressions” will tell you how many times it was seen by anybody. This, however, does not in any way reflect the amount of individuals who engage in any manner with these messages; in fact, it may even be an advantage.

I’ll explain why.

Because Stories are still a relatively new feature, having only been available for about a year, not all users make use of them in the same way that they make use of the normal feed. In addition, in the past, in order to generate an advertisement for Instagram stories, you were required to either download Facebook’s Creative Hub platform or generate the advertisement via the Facebook page associated with your company. Therefore, since it is brand new, the advertisements that can be found there are much more valuable, and the cost to reach individuals there is still lower than it is in the primary feed.

Because of the similarities in look and functionality that are offered by story advertisements and feed ads, it is impossible to conclude which platform is more effective at grabbing users’ attention. However, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Instagram Stories are a potentially lucrative advertising tool.

Here you may read about an experiment that compared the performance of Instagram Story advertisements vs Instagram Feed ads.

An illustration of how a stories promotion of one of my normal feed pieces may seem to the audience.

Cross-Posting Ads on Facebook

Since I was a kid, I was taught that if you had a resource available to you, you should put it to good use.

The power of Facebook comes into play here.

If the Facebook page for your company doesn’t already exist, what exactly are you doing with your life?! You may either go and build it one yourself or claim the page that Facebook has already built for it. Because Facebook owns Instagram and Facebook is the more established firm, Facebook, for all intents and purposes, views Instagram as an extension of itself (rather than the other way around). Not only do they have far improved targeting capabilities, which are so precise that they are almost eerie, but they also do not demand that you have an Instagram account to use them.

Because the advertisement was created on Facebook, it is impossible for you to have any of those advertisements directed at your Instagram account. This indicates that cross-promoted advertising are more suited for marketing a certain product or increasing awareness of a particular brand. However, if you create your advertising via Facebook, you are able to target users that fit into even more exact demographic categories.

In point of fact, Facebook provides some incredible tools for anybody who is interested in advertising on their platforms. These materials are particularly beneficial for those of you who are just starting out in the marketing field. Even if you choose not to go via Facebook initially, just reading through their advertising rules will give you a head start in comprehending the mentality behind online and social media advertising as well as the vocabulary that is associated with it.

Even though I operate this website as a one-woman labor of love, I have spent the last several months testing out a range of hypotheses by placing advertisements on Instagram (also through Facebook). Because of my natural inquisitiveness, I’ve discovered that the more appropriate to my brand, but out of the ordinary, an image was, the more people clicked on it to check my profile. Instead of just advertising my most recent piece, the photographs that had more interesting captions or that were tied to some type of movement or hashtag received more profile visitors and likes.

In the same way that Google Ad Words was an undervalued platform fifteen years ago, social media ads and “influencers” on social media are very discounted right now. If you don’t spend the bulk of your advertising money into social media, then you’re doing something wrong because of how many people they can reach and how precisely you can target viewers. In a few years, the affordability of advertising via both ways won’t be an issue, but it will be considerably more expensive to reach your prospective clients and audience. However, while this opportunity still exists, we should make the most of the fact that it costs less than ten dollars to reach one thousand customers who could be interested in what we have to offer and bask in it while it lasts.

You may read an article on how to create advertising on Facebook by clicking here. There will be an option just before your ad is posted to additionally promote the ad on Instagram (in feed or stories), and you will be able to review how it appears on both platforms before it is submitted.

Chocolate Instagram Influencers

It has come to my attention that a number of chocolate businesses have begun to use Instagram influencers as a tool, and I must say that I find this to be a really astute move. Since I am a chocolate writer, I do not take any kind of brand ambassadorship or anything similar since it has the potential to change the way that people see what I write. On the other hand, I believe that the vast majority of Instagram users who have at least a few thousand followers would be more than willing to accept free chocolate or other items in return for a promotion on their accounts. They are not necessarily individuals who are active with chocolate or who consider themselves to be influencers; rather, these are people whose audiences you would be interested in contacting.

Take into account the following scenario: You operate a chocolate factory in the middle of the United States, and you’ve already started advertising your internet shop to local residents. The target audience for your advertisements is individuals who live in your town. You are also marketing images of a recent kids chocolate making class to anyone within a 10 mile radius of your business, with the intention of making it a weekly event. Those people may find your store on the map. But you realize you need to improve your performance. You then search for mothers who follow you and who have previously shown interest in some of the photographs that you have posted. The next step is to determine which of those ladies have between one thousand and three thousand followers on Instagram, and then send a direct message to those women offering a free lesson to them and their children in return for one or two posts on Instagram.

Even if you merely make the offer to send these “micro-influencers” some free chocolate, it has the potential to provide your brand some excellent publicity and a lot of goodwill from the parents and their friends. The situation described above would need you to sort out the specific parameters of the trade.

Always provide the product for free before estimating how much to pay a bigger influencer for their promotion, but make it obvious that you would want them to publish an honest evaluation of it. There are websites that may help you estimate how much to pay a larger influencer for their promotion. If they respond with something like, “I’m now prioritizing paid promotion,” then you have the option of either asking them about their pricing or moving on to the next influencer on your list. As long as they have people who are really listening to what they have to say and a much bigger following, it is not unreasonable to pay them for a shout out. This is especially true if their audience is local to your region.

You may also employ influencers as a component of a giveaway, and ask them to promote the giveaway as part of the agreement in exchange for receiving the prize.

To compete in this arena, however, might be challenging due to the fact that there are surely “influencers” who have paid money to increase the number of their followers, likes, and comments. This leads me to the topic of how one may determine if the followers of a certain account are “genuine.” This website has a strong reputation for accurately estimating the number of “actual” followers that accounts have.

If you want to obtain an idea of how much you should pay an influencer for an advertisement, the typical guideline on Instagram is around $10 per thousand followers. However, this number may vary quite a bit depending on the quality of the audience. Finding local or appropriate influencers to collaborate with via an influencer network might seem to be an insurmountable task for small companies. Check read this post for further suggestions on how to locate influential people in your area.

Further Resources

I’m a freelance writer specializing in chocolate and travel, and I do all of the work necessary to keep this website running, including its marketing, the podcast, YouTube, and Facebook, among other things. I don’t sell anything and hence don’t profit from it in any way. In this case, your chocolate marketing approach might be more general if you are utilizing advertisements to sell something rather than to enhance consumers’ knowledge of your brand. You may continue your education about Instagram and other social media platforms by consulting the resources that are listed below.

• How to effectively run A/B testing on ads {article}
• How to target customers in a “buying mindset” {article}
• How to market to a local audience {article}

The majority of individuals seem to be operating under the mistaken assumption that if their product or service is of sufficient quality, customers would seek it out. Others hold the opinion that in today’s climate, only fools would pay for promotion. Both of these assumptions pose a threat to the success of your company, particularly in a market that is becoming more competitive. There is still room for growth in many locations, but if you are opening a chocolate business in the majority of metropolitan areas around the world, then you already have a marketing strategy, even if you choose to do nothing about it. This is the case even if there is still growth potential in those areas.

When it comes to progress, ignorance is great… until it leads to stagnation.

Be sure to go back and read the prior articles in this series now that you know how to run an efficient advertisement on Instagram. They are as follows:

Chocolate Marketing 101: Social Media Basics for Chocolate Businesses

Chocolate Marketing 102: How to Use Instagram For Your Small Business

Chocolate Marketing 103: Creating Better Content on Instagram

Chocolate Marketing 104: Crafting an Engaged Instagram Audience

FAQs

How do you promote chocolate on Instagram?

Use Instagram Stories

As a chocolate business, using hashtags in your bio might serve as a message to your consumers. It informs them of the groups you are a member of and the importance you place on them, and Instagram Live gives you the ability to broadcast live video to your followers, showing them what you are up to at any given time.

What ads work best on Instagram?

Advertisements in the form of images or carousels tend to be the most effective for achieving this objective since it is simple to communicate your message to users who are multitasking and may be scrolling through Instagram in a short amount of time.

How do you make Instagram ads more effective?

13 Tips for Creating More Effective Instagram Video Ads

• Make the most of the initial few seconds….
• Add text. …
• Solve a problem. …
• Concentrate on achieving just one thing…
• Look less like an ad. …
• Take your shots with the appropriate proportions….
• It’s never too early to start thinking about thumbnails…
• Make sure that your landing page is optimized for mobile use.