Instagram Advertising: How to Create Instagram Ads

Do you want to get new clients to grow your Edmonton business?

Are your patients primarily female?

If so, promoting your practice on Instagram can help you reach an audience of new clients in Edmonton.

According to a recent study at Ryerson University, 46% of online Canadian women use Instagram, and 61% of those women use it daily. It’s the most popular social media network for women in Canada.

In other words, there are about 17 million Canadian women that use Instagram and about 10 million that use it daily.

However, 36% of Canadian men also use Instagram, especially if they’re younger than 44 years old. Regardless of the averages, do your patients use Instagram?

The best way to answer that question is to ask them directly. A patient survey is an effective tool to learn more about your patients and the social media platforms that they use. This helps you learn who your clients are, and how to find more clients like them.

If you’ve already tried creating Instagram posts, how were the results?

If you’re like most people, your organic Instagram posts are not reaching your audience. In fact, according to a study by Ogilvy, the average reach of an organic post is about 2%-6%. In other words, if you have 1,000 followers on Instagram, only 20-60 will see your posts.

The reason is that Instagram is owned by Facebook, and Facebook’s primary source of income is digital advertising. Facebook and Instagram prioritize paid or sponsored ads instead of organic posts.

In other words, if you want to promote your health and wellness practice in Edmonton to a wider audience on Instagram, you need to buy Instagram advertising.

Fortunately, the average cost per click for Instagram ads in Canada is about $2.

The average cost to reach 1,000 people using traditional Canada Post flyers is about $150. The average cost to reach 1,000 people using social media ads is less than $10.

But, does social media advertising work?

According to a study published by Curalate, 76% of people surveyed have completed a purchase based on a company’s social media post.

We wrote this article to help you learn:

How to create an Instagram Business account?

1. Sign up for Instagram
2. Create Instagram Business account
3. Edit account details

How to create Instagram ads?

1. Your marketing objective
2. Choose an audience
3. Set your budget
4. Create your ad
5. Analyze and optimize

Let’s get started!

How to create an Instagram Business account?

In order to create an Instagram Business Account, you have to first download the app on your phone to setup a personal account. Then, you convert it to a business account.

Sign up for Instagram

1. Go to your phone’s App Store or Galaxy Store to download the Instagram app.
2. Open the app and press “Sign Up”.
3. Enter your email address.
4. Fill out your username, password, and profile information.

Create Instagram Business Account

1. Tap on your profile icon (usually in the bottom right corner).
2. Tap the three lines button at the top-right corner and press “Settings”.
3. Tap “Switch to Business Profile”.
4. Add your email address, phone number, and address of your clinic.

Edit account details

1. In a few sentences, summarize your health and wellness practice using 150 characters or less.
2. Upload your business logo for your profile using dimensions of 110 x 110 pixels.
3. Select your business category that appears under your profile name.
4. Select “Edit Profile,” then “Contact Options,” and tap “Add an Action Button” to create buttons that allow Instagram users to call your clinic, send you an email, look up directions, etc.

How to create Instagram Ads?

Since Facebook owns Instagram, the advertising options are almost identical. Just like in Facebook, there are two primary ways to create Instagram ads: using the Facebook Ads Manager, or by creating ads directly inside of your Instagram app.

If you’re inside of your Instagram app and click on any of your existing published posts, you’ll see a button below your image that reads: “Promote”. Although this method to create ads is quick and easy, you have many limitations for creating your Instagram ad.

For example, you have limited options for segmenting your audience and can only display your ad in Instagram, instead of on both networks.

The average cost-per-click on Instagram ads in Canada is about $2, while the average cost-per-click on Facebook ads is about $1. To lower your overall marketing costs, consider advertising on both platforms, instead of just on Instagram.

To create Instagram advertisements using the Facebook Ads Manager, you need to connect your Instagram business account to a Facebook Business Page.

In order to connect your Instagram business account to your Facebook Business Page, follow these steps:

1. Login to your Instagram app.
2. Go to your profile and tap on the three lines button (usually on the top-right).
3. Tap on the “Settings” link at the bottom of the list.
4. Tap “Account”, followed by “Linked Accounts”, then select “Facebook”.
5. Enter your Facebook login information. By default, your personal profile on Facebook is selected. To link to your Business Page, tap on “Share to” and choose your Facebook Business Page that you manage (you have to be an administrator on that page).

Once you’ve connected your Instagram business account to your Facebook Business Page, you can use the Facebook Ads Manager to create ads for both networks. This makes it easy for you to create and manage ads on both platforms in one central location.

Next, we’ll review our 5-step process for creating your Instagram advertisement using the Facebook Ads Manager:

Step 1: Your marketing objective

The first decision that Facebook Ads Manager asks you to make is: what’s your marketing objective?

Instagram and Facebook Ads are designed to help you achieve one of three campaign objectives: awareness, consideration, or conversion.

• Awareness: display your ads to the maximum number of people possible to increase their awareness of your health products and services.
  • Brand awareness: introduce your business to a new audience.
  • Reach: display your ad to as many people in your audience as possible.

• Consideration: promote your ads to encourage people to interact by visiting your website, commenting, sharing or liking your post, watching your videos, and more.
  • Traffic: increase traffic of people to your website or app.
  • Engagement: increase the number of post comments, likes, and shares.
  • App installs: encourage people to install your app.
  • Video views: encourage people to watch your video.
  • Lead generation: get new potential patients into your pipeline.
  • Messages: encourage people to contact you using Facebook Messenger.

• Conversion: encourage your audience to take action by purchasing a product, or by visiting your clinic in person for an appointment.
  • Conversions: encourage people to take a specific action on your website, such as subscribing to your newsletter or booking an appointment.

For awareness goals, you pay every time a person views your ad, known as an impression. For consideration and conversion goals, you pay every time a person takes action, like clicking a link to visit your website.

Deciding your marketing objective affects how Instagram displays your ad to help you achieve your goal.

Step 2: Choose an audience

Once you’ve set your campaign marketing objectives, you can start to segment your audience into groups within the ad sets. You can create multiple ad sets that focus on different audiences.

For example, if you offer health services for seniors and also for parents with young kids, you can create two different audience categories. By creating two different ad sets, you can create different ads that are relevant to each audience segment. Ads that are more relevant have higher success than generic ads for everyone.

Facebook’s extensive information database allows you to create highly focused audience segments based on various demographic and psychographic information, such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Languages
• Relationship
• Education
• Work
• Financial
• Home
• Ethnic Affinity
• Generation
• Parents
• Life Events
• Interests
• Behaviours
• Connections

Since you can save your audience segments as ad sets, you can experiment with the different segmentation options to find the best audience for your business. After conducting various tests, you may be surprised by which audience segment is most receptive to your ads.

After selecting an audience, there is an area below segmenting your audience and above setting your budget called “Placements”.

The default setting is “Automatic Placements (Recommended)”. This default setting will place or display your ad in various places, including Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger.

If you want to be specific about where to display your ads, check the radio button named “Edit Placements”. This opens up all of the options for where you’d like your ad displayed, and on which type of device (e.g. Apple iOS or Google Android).

Step 3: Set your budget

When selecting your budget, you have two options to choose from:

1. Daily budget: ads are displayed continuously throughout the day, up until your daily budget limit. You can also set a start and end date for your ad schedule.
2. Lifetime budget: set a schedule for when to display your ads and they are shown to your audience until your lifetime budget runs out.

You can also choose specific budget spending options, such as your bid strategy, whether you’ll get charged per view (impression) or per click (engagement), and even what time of day your ads will be displayed.

If you already have an audience of followers, you can review the analytics of when they’re using Instagram to determine the best time to display your ads.

Step 4: Create your ad

You can either use an existing Instagram post that you’ve already created and published, or you can create an entirely new post. Instagram’s algorithms favour posts that have higher levels of engagement, so it helps to use posts that have already been published and are well received.

Next, you can decide the format for how your Instagram advertisement will be displayed. There are five ad formats that Instagram uses, including:

1. Carousel: you can include up to 10 images or videos, each with their own link, all in one ad. This works well to showcase different features of a product, to explain a step-by-step process, or to present multiple products.
2. Single image: in addition to a photo, you can also include 125 characters of text, plus a headline and link description. You can also add a call-to-action button, like “Book Now” or “Call Today”.
3. Single video: display videos ranging from short mobile videos to longer ones for desktops that are up to 240 minutes long. Shorter videos have higher completion rates and many people typically watch a video on Instagram without sound, so ensure that your message is succinct and supported with text.
4. Slideshow: this ad format creates a video from several static images. This offers the dynamic motion of video, but using basic images. This ad format loads faster than videos, so keep that in mind if your audience has a slower Internet connection.
5. Collection: this ad format highlights your products right in the Instagram feed. The ad includes a cover photo or video, plus product images with pricing, which allows people to learn about your products without leaving Facebook.

Step 5: Analyze and optimize

Once you launch your Instagram advertisement, it’s important to review the performance metrics of your campaign using Facebook’s Ads Manager. When logged into your Ads Manager dashboard, select the campaign that you want to view, then click on the “View chart” link found either below the campaign name, or on the far right-hand side.

You may have an idea of what you think will work well, but only the results can validate that idea. If your ads are performing well, continue with your plan. If your ads are not performing well based on your goals, consider pausing your campaign and re-evaluate your strategy.

Conclusion

Many of your patients are using Instagram daily, especially if they’re female. The best way to know which platforms your patients are using is to ask them using a patient survey.

Creating organic Instagram posts is free, but it likely won’t reach a wide audience. Since Facebook owns Instagram, they prioritize paid or sponsored ads instead of organic posts. As a result, the best way to promote your health and wellness practice on Instagram is to buy Instagram ads.

Leverage Facebook’s large database of information to focus your ads to a specific group of people that are interested in your health products and services.

Instagram advertising is a cost-effective way to promote your health and wellness business to a wide audience and grow your Edmonton business with new clients.

How we can help