Instagram is owned by Facebook, which means that your ads have the ability to be highly targeted. Facebook has spent years researching how to target specific groups with a shared characteristic in order for ads to reach the right people. This way, you can place your product or service directly in front of the people that are most likely to engage.
There are many ways that you can segment markets on Instagram:
Location: You can get very highly targeted geographically. Focus on specific countries, regions, states, cities, and zip codes. You can also choose to exclude locations you are not interested in advertising in.
Age: With a minimum age of 13, you can choose to target any age range you would like. Keep in mind that the max specific age is 64, after that it is 65+.
Gender: You can choose to focus only on women, only on men or all genders.
Languages: Instagram will default to your target location’s common language; however, you can target a specific group who share a language if you want.
There are a few choices in “Detailed Targeting” to get very precise
Demographics: This is a great place to dive into the specifics to reach the kind of people you want based on quantifiable population characteristics.
Interests: This will allow you to target based on people’s expressed interests, a great indicator that they are more likely to convert.
Behaviors: The old adage “actions speak louder than words” comes to life when you can target people based on their previous online behavior including purchasing behavior, how they use the internet and if they have an anniversary coming up.
Connections: This allows you to connect a Facebook Page, App or Event in order to reach people connected to you through these other platforms
Custom Audience: You can upload your own list of people to focus on. This is basically a remarketing campaign. Reach people who are in your pipeline or have been customers previously.
Lookalike Audience: Use lists to create an audience based on your ideal customers. This is a great way to target people that are similar to people you have already done business with.
Reach
Facebook and Instagram will show you how big your potential reach will be. This is a very useful tool, it’s important to reach enough people to make your campaigns worthwhile. What I have found, however, is that it is trickier to focus your campaigns enough to not reach too many people. If your potential reach is too big, your advertisements could benefit from being more focused to be more effective.
Conclusion
It will take some time to build your ideal audiences, but it is well worth it. If you target the people that matter to your business, you will increase your conversions and not waste ad spend on people who are less likely to want or need your product or service. Instagram is a great place to engage with people and has the ability for you to find the right people that you can form business relationships with.
Next installment will be about the different available formats on Instagram. What other kinds of topics would you like me to cover?
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