This week's featured promotion channel is Instagram. It is trendy. it is visual,It is cool, it is fresh, and if you can find your persona on this channel - a great way to reach an audience willing to purchase, while being highly influenced by what other people do and talks about online.

About Instagram

Instagram is the 6th most popular Social Media Platform, with over 1 billion active users. It has become the “go-to” platform for challenger brands that wish to create a significant organic presence, in a time when organic content on Facebook has become, more or less, worthless. However, as a part of the Facebook-universe, Instagram has lately taken a turn that has forced companies to think differently about the business function of Instagram. While there was a promise that Instagram would stay independent from Facebook, the fact that Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram, unhappily quit, shows that the future of Instagram is intertwined with the one of Facebook. That means that money will eventually rule the platform.

Facts

So Instagram is in many ways in the phase where Facebook was 10 years ago. They are growing, popular, trendy, and have a young demographic with an equal split between the genders. And taking all into consideration, the cost per 1000 view (or CPM - Cost-per-mille), is around half compared to that of Facebooks’. While Instagram will cost you around $5, Facebook will cost you around $10, but don’t expect this to be sustained with the cost of advertising on Instagram rising.

If you have a target persona that happens to be active on Instagram, and you have a wish to grow your organic audience without spending tons of money on Ads, Instagram is still the channel for you.

The fact is that Instagram has some great benefits for businesses:

• 90% of the accounts on Instagram follow a business.

• 83% discover new products or services

• 81% of research products or services

• 80% decide whether to buy a product or not

This makes it ideal for e-commerce marketing, and as a focus for the discovery phase of the sales funnel. If done right, this can be a very efficient sales channel where people are willing to spend their $ directly in the app. The thing about Instagram is that it provides you with big opportunities that do not require you to spend your money directly on Ads.

Influencer Marketing

Making the description of Influencer marketing short:

“Making an influencer endorse, promote, or show your product either through paid or earned content”

My definition of an influencer is:

“Someone with the ability to change or influence someones else’s opinion”

Influencer marketing is a huge topic and will be mentioned in an upcoming post, but to make it short right now: If you can do it, do it! However, Influencer Marketing should not be anything you decide to do overnight; it should be something you carefully plan to ensure it becomes a great success as a key part of your Instagram content-strategy because it can become a failure.

While the average ROI of Influencer marketing is 520%, the top 13% manages to get more than 2000% ROI on their campaigns. Only the 25% worst fail to make money from Influencer marketing. That means that they are still short of email-marketing, but well ahead of Facebook Ads. Making a good User-Generated-Content- and influencer marketing strategy can become a great way to differentiate your marketing from the established businesses.

Conclusion

The truth is that advertising on Instagram is fairly simple. They use the same system like Facebook, and creating your first Instagram-Ad will create the same struggles as your first Facebook Ads. All in all, pretty simple, and the ROI is definitely acceptable if done right. The challenge is that the increased Ad reach of 5,7% most likely comes due to the decreased effectiveness of organic reach, so while Ads are starting to thrive, your organic reach suffers.

If you wish to reach a young audience with an e-commerce platform, Instagram is definitely a channel for you. While advertising is becoming more expensive, factors like User-Generated-Content and Influencer Marketing have to be taken into account before you make a decision on whether Instagram will be your main social channel for advertising. Instagram requires effort and requires skills within visual content-creation.

Want to read more about how to advertise on Instagram? Check out this Wordstream guide.