How to Target Audiences Using Promotional Posts on Instagram

By: Anna Cave

With Instagram growing as a new space for advertisers, it's important to know how to use boosted posts to promote your organization. 

Instagram ads are placed within feeds and can act as stories, regular feed posts, or promoted posts on the explore page. When a promoted post is embedded within the Instagram feed, it can be represented as a photo, a video, a carousel (a post that uses Instagram's swipe feature), or a collection ad (shoppable photos or videos). 

Instagram allows you to target your ideal audience in a variety of ways. You can target via location and specify between countries, provinces, states, and cities. Targeting by demographics filters your audience based on information like language, gender, and age. Instagram can look at user's activity to see what apps they use, what accounts they follow, and what ads they click to filter by interest. Instagram can also target by behavior, which is what users do on their devices while they are and are not using Instagram. Email addresses and phone numbers can be used to target custom audiences based on information that is already known. Lookalike audiences find accounts that are very similar to the rest of the following an account already has on Instagram. Last but not least, Instagram can do automated targeting to create an audience that aligns with what the organization doing the promoting would want in a following based on a few of the other combined methods of targeting. Instagram often recommends the last method to those interested in trying promoted posts. 

When choosing what to make a promoted post, there are many things to consider. First, you need to decide whether or not you are creating a new post or promoting something that is already on your feed. Either one is fine, but promoting something that has already been uploaded and has previous engagement is a good strategy. Because you can already tell if a post is performing well organically, it can be a great choice to promote it because there has already been proven initial success. Remember that these posts will be embedded within the content users subscribe to, so making sure your promoted content looks natural and candid will help build trust with potential customers.

Always hashtag your promoted posts so that they can be found on the explore tab. When generating hashtag ideas, think of what people might search if they were trying to find content that looked like yours. It's good to experiment with using general and specific hashtags. Specific hashtags will do a better job of reaching your smaller targeted audience, but it doesn't mean you should avoid general hashtags all together. 

It's also important to create promoted content that incites a reaction from the user. Call-to-action buttons, which are those blue bars you see on the bottom of a promoted post are some of the best ways to do that. Having a corresponding call-to-action button for your post and caption will direct users to act on the post in the simplest way possible. This makes the process easier and can help make more conversions because everything is right in front of them. 

Promoted posts are really starting to rise on Instagram, and they can be incredibly effective for brand recognition. They are a great place to begin paid advertising, especially since they are fairly cheap compared to traditional methods of marketing. ​