Instagram Ad Hacks – 6 ways to crush your competitions using Instagram

Instagram Ad hacks can drive a huge amount of massive traffic to your website and today I’ll reveal the 6 hacks you need to implement to see a better ROI for every dollar spent on Instagram for your newly website design landing pages.

What Is Instagram Ad Hacks?

Instagram Ad Hacks is tested & proven advertising or social media hacks and strategies you implement to outrank and crush your major competitions with Instagram Ads to generate more leads, sales, and revenue with your website.

Today, everyone is using Instagram as part of their marketing blitz to help their Instagram ads soar above their competitors in order to gain more likes, leads and sales.

To get more Likes on your Instagram Ads, don’t give up on Instagram advertising before you try these genius tips called Instagram ad hacks! The more engaging your ads are, the better your results will be.

Introduction to Instagram Ads

Instagram has over 500 million active users. It is a social photo sharing app with an average of 2.7 billion interactions per day by its users on the platform.

Businesses and marketers can advertise on the platform to reach and attract an audience of active users to grow and promote their businesses.

It is the fastest growing social apps and most popular on the Web and is not free from competition.

With its fierce competition, you need some advance knowledge and powerful tools to seamlessly integrate your ads in order to stand out and crush competitions.

In this post, I am going to show you the benefits of using Instagram Ads and also share with you 6 most powerful tips you need to crush the instagram competitive market.

Your ads need to stand out, with great impact, from the crowd of over 80 million photos being shared daily. You need to ensure great ROI for every investment ads spent on Instagram and attract loyal fans that are going to buy your products and services.

What Is Instagram?

It is a social photo sharing web app where users can take photos, add a filter and share it on their feeds with their friends. Friends can like, regram, share the photo or comment on it. Hashtags on Instagram can be used to search for images and people to follow.

The app platform acquired over 15 million users in its first year after launch. In 2012, it was acquired by Facebook for over one billion dollars.

An average of 500 million users worldwide uses the app every month and this number keeps growing.

Why Should You Care?

Instagram Ad Hacks
Instagram Ad Hacks

The question is why should a marketer like you care about running Instagram advertisement to grow his business? I’ll reveal to you the reasons why every marketer and business needs to care about Instagram:

Instagram is the fastest growing social media site with a huge market to build an audience in any niche.

Also See: Instagram Reverse Image Search – How to Find Instagram User Profile From Photo

The app receives over 2 million new sign-ups monthly. This indicates that you can showcase your products and services to your target demographic.

It attracts a wide age range. In 2004, it was mainly used by 16-34 year olds. In 2018 nearly 30 percent of app users are aged 25-34.

It’s a highly creative and visual environment. This is perfect for sharing images that present your brand’s story and mission to your audience.

Its audiences are responsive to visual content such as videos and images with increasing online content.

The 3 main fears that plague social media advertising

Instagram was built to eliminate the fears that plague advertising on social media sites.

What are the three main fears of social media advertising?

  1. Will your ad be seen?
  2. Will your ad be blocked?
  3. Will users engage with your ad?

Will Your Ad Be Seen?

Ads posted on social media app cannot be seen by everyone. The level of engagement can increase or decrease the visibility of ads shown to a targeted group of people.

You can’t control the location your ads are shown. Your ad can appear above or below the fold which can affect its visibility. This means that your impressions might have limited visibility with ads below the fold. You are paying for impressions that have no impact on your audience.

According to Media Rating Council “ad is considered viewable when 50 percent of the ad pixels are in view for a minimum of one second”

In other words, you will have to pay for an impression even if someone skimmed over your ad for a second.

The issue of invisibility, however, is removed as Instagram users scroll through their photo feed to access images. You receive 100 percent visibility for every ad posted on the platform.

Instagram ads look natural and fit in with the native images and videos ads.

Users hardly can identify sponsored images because Instagram ads are images or videos. This improves rates of engagements with Instagram audience.

Advertising on Instagram give your ad more visibility and is better investment traffic than other social media apps on the Internet.

instagram ads campaign
instagram ads campaign

Will Your Ad Be Blocked?

Ad blocking means restriction of ads on certain devices or individuals’ feeds due to social media settings.

There has been increased in ad blocking up to 48 percent. This poses a huge risk for marketers.

Ad blocking software has hit millions of downloads in the last few years due to popular demands from consumers. Ad blocking software according to media advertising research costs publishers $20 billion yearly.

Apple, for example, has enabled ad blocking options into its platform. There is a need to factor loss into the ad budget when advertising on social media platforms.

However, experienced marketers are now using Instagram that doesn’t allow ad blocking. They won’t block your ad and your audience can view your products and services ads without restrictions.

Advertising on Instagram platform is more cost effective with a positive return on investment (ROI). This will enable more people to engage with your ads.

Will Users Engage With Your Ad?

Most people browsing through pages often ignore ad placements on the screen. These people are banner blind and have become immune to ad placements.

It’s a known issue that if asked you couldn’t recall the last ad you saw online. Could you?

Consumers have learned to ignore some obvious placements for ads on most websites including social media sites. Some of these placement areas are at the top of the screen and in the sidebar.

Your expensive ad space may be a waste and resulting in low engagement rate.

Instagram removes this barrier by giving your ads great visibility through special advertising features.

It allows advertisers to select location, interests, and behaviors in order to target their users’ demographics and ensure that the images or videos are seen by the targeted users.

Ads on Instagram perform 2.9 times better than the other social media sites according to statistics compiled by Neilson Norman Group. An Instagram ad does not stick out like a banner ad but rather integrates into the platform natively.

The Instagram Ad Hacks Strategy to Advertising

When it comes to advertising on social media sites, marketers are faced with 3 main fears and here is the strategy Instagram uses to overcome these fears. These form some of the benefits of advertising on Instagram:

  1. Instagram has targeting options. This means your images can be seen by the right demographic or people.
  2. Instagram ads perform 2.9 times better than ads on other platforms.
  3. They are seamlessly integrated into the platform to look native. Naturally, they don’t look like they are ads.
  4. They are always above the fold. With scrolling nature of the platform, your ads will never be below the fold.
  5. Instagram ads receive more visibility because they cannot be blocked.
  6. The ad program has a CPC as low as $0.10 and costs effective with ad costs currently unrivaled.
  7. Instagram ad program is new and its supply is high in demands because of first mover advantage.
  8. It doesn’t limit the amount of text you use in your ads, unlike Twitter and Facebook. However, a 20% percent text limit is placed on the amount of text that is shown in your image ad.
  9. Your ads can reach over 400 million highly engaged monthly users.
  10. Instagram users are more engaged and more likely to take action unlike users on other social media sites.
  11. It is so powerful with its sophisticated targeting options that allow your ads to be targeted to your niche related audience.

Advertising on Instagram may require some learning curve to master its tricky game for a successful campaign on its platform.

The beautiful photos on its platform are the key attractions and what drawn users to it. Your ads need to tell a story and provide some creativity to perform well and convert viewers to leads or customers as well as drive traffic to your site.

The great news is that I have a detailed step by step 6 hacks Instagram strategy to help you create powerful ads and crush your competitions.

6 Instagram Ad Hacks to Instagram Ads Strategy

Here is the 6 quick Instagram Ad Hacks for your online business or ecommerce store to beat your competition in the game of Instagram advertising.

Hack #1: Use Beautiful and Creative Imagery

You need to blow your audience minds with creatively beautiful and bold pictures. Do not use stock photos. Use picture which is worth a thousand words and exceptionally beautiful.

To paint a visual story for your brand your Instagram ad need to use an original, high quality and beautiful image.

Users want to see aesthetic feelings on their feed and your ads can increase click-through rate if its matches users’ feelings.

You need to deep dive and understand the kind of imagery, objects, and colors that evoke an emotional response with your demographic or niche.

Instagram advertising comes with 3 filters such as:

  1. Valencia
  2. Rise and
  3. X Pro 11

These filters are the most successful and have the highest revenue generation per impression to sell e-commerce store products.

Filtered photos generate more engagement meaning people are more likely to view and comment on your ads. Many marketers use filters to their advantage.

Get creative with fun, quirky, lifestyle imagery for your fans to boost your ads performance on Instagram.

To run a successful advertising on Instagram, integrate the following creative ideas with your ad images.

  1. Run contents and competitions with your fans.
  2. Offer a discount to your customers who take a selfie at your store front.
  3. Offer your fans a discount when they post a photo on Instagram using your products or services.
  4. Show creative and new ways how to utilize your products and services.
  5. Snap a photo of a new product and post on Instagram to get feedback from your customers and fans.
  6. Record a behind the scenes look at how your company achieves your services or how your product is made and post on Instagram for engagement.

Let your objective tone and feel of your brand guide you in selecting the ad image to use to effectively communicate your message to your audience.

According to Instagram to drive brand awareness, website clicks, app installs you need to constantly create concepts that align with your campaign goal since compelling ads have a strong concept tied to a deer objective.

Hack #2: Integrate Direct Response Sales Copy

The main purpose of advertising on Instagram is to convert clicks into leads and sales. You need to integrate an inspiring image and direct sales copy into your image ads.

You need to create beautiful images to get your brand exposed to the right audience. This will results in high click-through rates and call to action by users.

One of the reasons for advertising is to increase the numbers: mass awareness, mobile App installs, clicks to a website, video views, and more followers and likes.

To achieve this, your ad image must include direct response sales copy in the caption to inspire the right people to click on your call to action immediately.

To crush it on Instagram your sales copy must blend inspirational, emotional driven content with product-focused content. This is effective sales copywriting.

In your ad copy, you can also use a direct high profile influencer to personally invite the readers to try your products or services and get more sales.

So, using direct response sales copy in running an ad on Instagram can eventually convert your clicks into leads and then sales with high engagement rates with your brand.

Hack #3: Drive Engagement with a Story

According to Instagram you ad sales copy need to establish connective elements across your images and videos like an identifiable color palette, composition or photographic style to make your business recognizable.

Create content that showcases a side of your brand that consumers can’t see anywhere else. Avoid generic imagery that has no direct relationship to your brand.

Such generic images may be aesthetically pleasing but not good for branding through Instagram ads.

Work on creating a story to drive engagement with your ad sales copy on Instagram. You need a story to back up your ads campaign instead of using pushy sales photos.

To boost engagement and build a solid reputation you ad copy need to tell a story and promote user-generated content.

A plain product image is not going to perform like a story telling lifestyle shot for an Instagram ad.

An image that paints a story can help drive engagement.

That means, your ad image wants to make your brand, products, and services a part of the image but not the focus.

You also need to use the same color palette to stick with your image for your brand to establish their overall look and feel and to be more recognizable to your audience.

Hack #4: Manipulate Targeting Features and Create Lookalike Audiences

Instagram has the best targeting features and algorithms in the industry.

The advantage of targeting features allows your ad to be seen on the feeds of those you are targeting in your demographic.

You can narrow down your targeting options based on these factors:

  1. The needs and want of your audience.
  2. The location of your audience.
  3. The behaviors of your audience.
  4. The actions your audience is likely to take.
  5. The interests of your audience.

Depending on your brand and audience you can run your ads by experimenting with Instagram targeting options.

Just like facebook, you can market your ads to a lookalike audience on Instagram by creating a database of your own customers or from a list of customers you buy elsewhere.

Lookalike options allow you to create an audience of people that match the same criteria.

This is the fastest way to limit invalid clicks and increase ROI by reaching the audience that matters to your brand.

According to Instagram – Ads do best when they are well shot, interesting to look and artistic. What you create should draw people in and keep them wanting more.

Hack #5: To Maximize your Objective, Use the Best Ad Formats

Instagram Ads Format
Instagram Ads Format

Instagram offers 3 ad format options with their different price points and benefits. These ad formats include:

  1. Video Ads: Either portrait or landscape with a 30 minutes runtime.
  2. Carousel Ads: (Up to 4 images) Allows users to see more images in a series. This is an additional layer of depth to photo ads.
  3. Photo Ads: Allow the use of beautiful image and filters.

Video option allows businesses to showcase their products or services in action.

The Carousel option allows you to show different versions of the same product or a product line. This is most effective for telling a story to make your brand standout to your audience.

Photo Ads allow you to promote your products, competitions, contents and showcase new products.

These 3 formats come with a call to action button, which allows users to either: shop, install, sign up or learn more.

When users click on these call to actions they are not moved out of the platform rather they are directed to a landing page within the Instagram app browser.

This means you can keep track of the engagement process and ad conversation rates.

Hack #6: Increase Click through Rates through Hashtags

Hashtags allow users to find your images and engage with your ads. Using trending hashtags will increase the visibility of your ads and can drive click-through rates to a maximum.

The most lucrative tags in an e-commerce environment are Eyes, Smiles, Makeup, Sun, Female, Water, Hair, and Travel.

You can include these tags in your Instagram photo ad description. Images with such tags always result in higher revenue per impression.

You need to seamlessly integrate hashtags into your ads to increase engagement rates and more call to actions by users.

This will help your ad to reach more people and also help establish your brand and get more fans’ interests in your products and services.

For example, Ben and Jerry, a popular Ice Cream brand is crushing it with their Instagram ads. They have gained over 10 million followers.

They frequently use hashtags in their image descriptions to inspire their audience to promote and share the hashtags using their own user-generated images.

Using these 6 Instagram ad hacks can help you create Instagram ads that are effective with a positive return on your investment.

Instagram Ads FAQ

What is the best budget for Instagram ads?

Instagram Ads are charged for clicks, video views, likes, or post engagement.

You should have at least a daily minimum budget of $5.

However, for low-frequency events, such as app install or offer claims, the daily minimum budget is $40 a day.

How much should I pay for Instagram ads?

The average Instagram ads cost CPC is about $0.50 – $1.00.

However, how much does it cost for competitive industroes to advertise on Instagram is quite different. For highly competitive industries and niches, e.g. fashion and travel you will pay more as more brands are competing for your audience’s attention.

Sometimes, Instagram ads cost can rake up to $3.50 per click.

Should I pause Instagram ads at night?

You should pause your ad as a good way to extend your budget and reduce daily spend!

You can disable the Instagram ad at any time, and then turn it back on again when you’re ready.

Instagram won’t charge you until you resume the ad.

Is advertising on Instagram free?

Instagram is a great platform to showcase your profile, ideas, products, services, and business.

However, entrepreneurs and small businesses often spend huge budget on social media marketing, whereas, these tools are totally free!

Instagram offers free advertising and is one of the best and most rewarding techniques for social media marketing and driving traffic to your website.

Instagram is one of the best free tools for reaching your target market and with hundreds of millions of daily active users, you can use content to promote your Instagram account, publish useful posts, post captivating, high-quality images, schedule post at the right time for the future marketing dripping, ask questions in your posts and as always use #hashtags.

Conclusion

According to Instagram, businesses do best on Instagram when they share well-crafted content that’s on brand and driven by a clear objective. This is a quick win using Instagram ad hacks.

Your brand will be well guided to creating ads that are responsive and rewarding and tap into the potential of Instagram social sharing app.

I love to help businesses crush it with their Instagram ads and increase leads, conversions, and sales on their website.

This is because, according to one study and research data, Instagram delivers 120 times more than Twitter and 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook.

This makes it the most superior social network to advertise on.

Instagram Ad Hacks: Tips to crush your Competitors with Instagram Ads include:

  1. Having your company name as your account name works best to reflect your brand and business.
  2. Use an awesome, simple, and effective company logo as your profile photo. Profile photo should be 150×150 pixels.
  3. Sharing quality products and services images to confer feelings and experience to end users.
  4. Use different caption lengths and call to actions to experiment with your audience response. Use long images captions and short to measure what is effective with your demographic with different sales copy and hashtags.
  5. Like, comment and share others posts allow you to be active in your community. Regramming or sharing other posts can lead to relationship building with top influencers in your demographic or niche.
  6. Instagram app has creative tools like Layout, Boomerang, and Hyperlapse for ad images editing and using filters.
  7. Desist from using poor quality images and sales copy that is not relevant to your call to action.
  8. Never be pushy in your image ads copy. Let your images give your brand an identity that shares your brand’s point of view.
  9. Keep consistency across campaigns to establish your brand’s overall look and feel.
  10. Keep your ad images with a fresh, authentic and original feeling.
  11. Maintain consistent posting frequency. This will help you track growth and engagement.
  12. Cross promote your Instagram ads with email marketing and other social platforms.
  13. Follow influential people in your industry to research and monitor their postings and ensure your brand do things creatively and differently.
  14. To reach an audience that is right and relevant to your brand, you need to market your ads to a variety of different target audiences within your demographic.
  15. Ask your audience to share user generated content, hashtags or participate in competitions or contests. This aim is to get more audience participation in your brand and actively engage them.

If you follow these Instagram Ads crushing tips for your business that could easily generate upwards of $250,000 in sales for your company.