You don’t need to have an important budget to start doing Instagram ads: you can easily start with $100-$200

But, before starting a campaign and invest money, there are 2 things you have to look at first

What to do before starting an Instagram ads campaign

#1: optimize your profile

What I mean is that you have to make sure that a good percentage of people that will visit your page, will end up being your followers

Think about that: if you run an Instagram ads campaign and 1000 people visit your profile, if only 50 of them end up being your followers, you’re wasting your hard-earned money!

Instead, if you optimize your profile to turn 20%-30% of visitors into actual followers, you will get insanely better results spending even less money

So, my first recommendation is to first look at your profile: your profile picture, your name, your bio, your general look

If you don’t know exactly how to optimize your profile, I highly recommend you to read this article: it’s a full tutorial on “How to gain followers on Instagram” and I explain to you exactly what you need to do to optimize your profile

#2: monetization

In most cases, you should find a way to monetize your account before starting an Instagram ads campaign

And by “monetizing” I don’t mean being salesly and spamming your product every day, but to find something that really helps your audience to solve a problem

But, why do I recommend finding something to sell before running ads?

Because, if you can find a way to optimize the money that you spend on advertising, you could run more ads for a longer time, find the creativities and the targets that work better, and push more on them

I’ll talk about this lately in the article, but you have to know that you can’t expect to make your first ads and then continue to use the same one

You have to test different type of ads for different targets for days, maybe weeks until you find the best ones

This could require a great investment, but if you find something to promote, you can easily amortize the expenses

Think about it: you sell a product for $50 and you want to run an Instagram ads campaign

Let's say that you have a $300 budget

You can spread your budget on 6 different ads campaign and run them for 10 days

After this period, you find the one that converts the most that you should push more

Your budget is over, but during these 10 days, 6 people that have seen your ads, started to follow your page and end up buying your product

In the end, you earned all the money that you spent and you gained a lot of followers

Now you can reinvest this money and repeat the process!

This is why I strongly suggest finding the right product to sell to your audience

If you don’t know what to sell or how to make money with your page, check the tutorial here

So, now that you know how to optimize your profile to convert the visitors into actual followers and you know what to sell to monetize your audience, it’s time to understand what not to do when it comes to Instagram ads

What most people do when they want to start an advertising campaign, is simply go over one of their most popular posts and boost it

They go on their post and they click “promote”

Once you tapped “promote”, Instagram will ask you some basics information about your goals and your target audience and then your Instagram campaign will start

Is it wrong?

No, of course, but it’s not the optimal way to do an Instagram ads campaign and you’re leaving so many opportunities on the table: at the end of the day, you’re simply wasting a part of your investment

Starting a campaign on your smartphone is easy and fast, but you can’t optimize well your ads, you can’t split test and you can’t track precisely your results

Yes, you’ll gain followers even if you simply promote your most popular post, but there are surely better ways to gain the most out of your investment

The point is not to gain some followers but to get the absolute best return on your investment to not waste a single dollar

So, what should you do instead?

Instead of just boost your post, go to Facebook Ads Manager on your pc

Even if you want to run an Instagram campaign, you have to go over the Facebook ads manager because they’ve decided to create a single platform to manage all your ads on Facebook and Instagram

Now, if you have never used the Facebook ads manager, I highly recommend you to watch this full tutorial

I think that by watching a tutorial on Youtube, you can understand much better how it works and how you use all the features available,

Why do I suggest you go over to the Facebook ads manager instead of promoting a post on your phone?

Because here you have much more flexibility, you can easily track all your campaigns to find the most profitable ones and you can go so much in-depth with your target selection that, even if your Instagram campaign is a little bit longer and difficult to set up, it’ll be worth it

So, now that you know how it looks like, how it works, and why you should use the Facebook ads manager, let’s see what you have to do to get the most out of your Instagram campaign

Over the years I’ve tried so many different Instagram ads campaigns, and I found that the ads that get me the best results are the Story ads

I think it’s because they’re very similar to the normal stories, the videos are more visually appealing and they can hook better the viewer attention

Whatever the reason is, I think that if you want to get the most out of your campaign, my #1 recommendation would be to use Instagram stories because they are the most effective and also the least expensive, so it’s something you should at least try

Now, it’s not enough to run an Instagram story ads campaign, there are 2 things you have to look at and optimize before starting your campaign

If you miss only one of these, chances are that you’ll waste a lot of your money for nothing, so keep particular attention to this part because it‘s probably the most important one

#1: Your Target

Finding your target audience is fundamental because if your ads are shown to the wrong people, they won’t be interested in your content, and your campaign will be a total waste of time and money

When it comes to targeting, you have to think about: “Who is my ideal follower?”

“Which type of person could be interested in my content and maybe in buying my product?”

These are the 2 main questions that you have to answer before starting your campaign

A cool game that helps me a lot in this process is to imagine it as a real person: what he does all day, what and where he shops, what are his passions, his hobbies, and his interests?

This could seem a stupid game, but I promise you that if you do it seriously, you’ll learn a lot of things about your target and also about your brand/company/product, so it’s something you should try

After you find your ideal target, insert his characteristic on the Facebook Ads Manager and he’ll find the exact people that you wanna target

This process is really important, but you probably won’t find the “perfect” follower on the first try

So, my suggestion is to play around with it

Maybe you found 5 “ideal followers”

They might have many traits in common but also some differences each other, so now what you wanna do is let Facebook do the rest

If you have a budget of, for example, $300, instead of putting all your money into 1 campaign, start 5 different Instagram ads campaign with a little budget ($5-$10 each) for a couple of days to a couple of weeks targeting different audiences

After this experiment, you’ll be able to see the campaign that has produced the best results and you finally find your “ideal follower” (you might find 2 types of ideal followers, that’s fine)

Now you can finally push more on the most profitable campaign and stop all the other ones: this allows you to be dynamic, turning off the campaigns the don’t produce results and boosting the best ones

For this reason, I always suggest using the Facebook ads manager, because you can track the progress and the results of each campaign and get the most out of it

This is called “split test”

If your first attempt is not perfect, don’t be discouraged: it takes time to master Instagram ads like every skill in the world, but you can receive incredible help directly from Facebook

Facebook has an incredible database of information, he knows almost everything about everybody, so it can help you a ton when it comes to the perfect targeting

Now that you know how to split test, let’s move into the second thing you wanna look at before starting your ads

#2 The creatives of your ads

So, if you want to create an Instagram story ads (that’s what I recommend, feel free to try different formats to find the one that works the best for you), make sure that you’re content fit specifically the story dimension

Always double check before post it

Using the story ads, your goal is to capture the viewer attention in a couple of seconds before he scrolls to the next story, but you mustn’t look too salesly

Your content should also be optimized for your specific call to action: that could be a swipe up to your link, go check your profile and maybe start following you, DM you, whatever it is

You have to create your creativity oriented to your Call To Action!

So, if you want people to swipe up and go to your website, your creativity will be much different if instead, you wanted to make them click on your profile

Now, how should your Instagram advertising be?

Well, I can’t answer with precision at this answer because it depends on your target, on your niche, on your page, and so many other variables

So, what I can suggest to you instead, is to look at your competitor's ads

It won’t be difficult, because generally after every 2-3 profile stories, you’ll see an Instagram story ad

Study your competitor's ads in your niche, look at what they are doing, study your emotions: "how did you react to that particular ad?"

What’s working for other people will probably work for you

So, looking at what your competitors are doing is the best way to learn how to create your first Instagram story ads campaign

Maybe your first one will be a disaster, but it doesn’t matter: keep trying and improving and with the time you’ll become a master of ads

You’ll understand your “ideal follower”, what works on your page and with your audience, which creatives give you the best results, etc...

No one can give the done-for-you formula: you have to test, fail and, in the end, succeed!

Now I’ll teach you a little tip that can help you save some money when you run Instagram ads

Don’t worry, it’s nothing illegal, just a simple hack that can save you some bucks

If you have seen the tutorial on "how to create your Ads Campaign", or you’ve already created some campaign on the Facebook ads manager, you probably know that you can set your ads on “pay per click”

It means that you only pay for the clicks that your website receive (if you’re running an Instagram story ads campaign, you’ll pay for the swipe up)

Well, if you optimize your ad’s layout, especially on your stories, to push people to click on your profile instead of your link, you won’t pay for those visitors!

So, if you’re running a story ads campaign and you pay per click, you will have the swipe up feature, but if in your story you persuade people to click on your profile picture, instead of using the swipe up, to visit your page for more info, you won’t pay for those impressions!

They are free visitors, and if your profile is optimized, they could easily become your followers

This is a cool trick that I learned over the years, so maybe try it out and let’s see how it goes

The most important thing is your ad creativity, it should push people to click on your profile and don’t use the swipe up

Well, most people don’t have time to study their competitors, to find out the best creatives, to split test their ads, and so on

So, if you want to run ads and you don’t want to spend all this time learning this skill, my suggestion is to hire someone on Fiverr

Fiverr is a freelancing platform where you can hire real experts for something like $20 or even less!

So, if you’re not planning to master the Instagram ads or you don’t want to manage all this, you can hire someone to do all the work for you

I usually hire people on Fiverr to do different tasks and, if you spend a little bit of time searching for the right person, you can easily find an expert that charge you some bucks for an incredible work

So it’s something you should try!

People don’t like ads

Nobody wants to see ads when he's scrolling on Instagram

Almost everybody has learned to identify them and pay little attention when they see “ads”

So, which is the best strategy to do advertising without letting people know that what they’re seeing is an ad?

The answer is: influencer marketing

This is my favorite way to gain active and targeted followers and, at the end of the day, traffic to my business

Influencer marketing means that you pay some influencer or some big page in your niche to promote your content

I usually use this strategy to promote my page, or maybe a product that I’m selling in dropshipping or I'm an affiliate with (if you don’t know what dropshipping is, check this article)

This is an incredible way to generate traffic to your page or your link because people won’t see an ad, but a post of an influencer or a page that they are already following, suggesting them to visit a page or a website in the same niche

They trust this page and chances are that they will engage more on this post than with a traditional ad

This is hands-off my favorite way to spend my money in advertising, and it gave me awesome results over the years, especially because your ad will look like a normal post from a page that these people are already following!

So, it’s something you should try now because there’s still low competition: it’s the best time to jump on before it becomes saturated

If you want to buy shoutouts (i.e pay an influencer to share your content) you could DM the pages you’re interested in or go to platforms like Shoutcart and buy the shoutout here, it’s up to you

Always remember that the online world is full of scammers, so if you don’t use a third party like Shoutcart, be aware that they could easily run away with your money!

What you wanna do is to go over to Shoutcart or just search on Instagram big pages (50K followers or more) in your niche, look at their engagement (how many likes and comments they receive under their posts) and make sure they don’t have fake followers

Always check if the people that follow this page are real (they have a profile picture and at least a couple of photos in their feed)

Then you can DM them asking for their shoutout price

I also suggest you always ask them to see their analytics: you don’t want to gain Indians followers (I respect Indians, don’t worry), but you want to attract especially American followers because these are the ones that spend the most money online!

If you are already running Instagram ads, the tips that I gave you today could change the way you manage your campaigns and will help you optimize them

Then, you learned a secret tip to help you save some money and get the absolute best results out of your investment

In the end, you understood the power of Influencer marketing

Many Instagram gurus like Gary Vee strongly suggest using influencer marketing, and this is because it works!

People hate advertising but they trust the pages and the influencers that they follow: that’s the key!

Bonus tip:

Sometimes people ask me: "Can you exclude your followers from Instagram Ads?"

Don’t worry, Instagram is very smart, and it automatically excludes your followers from your ads!

Now you know everything you need to create or optimize your Instagram ads:

Go out there and dominate the Instagram world!

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