Instagram Advertising and Shopify Integration for Business Success

Hello and welcome to section 5, the last and final section of the Instagram Bootcamp. In this section, we'll be discussing how to set up and manage your advertising and content promotional campaigns on Instagram, as well as how to integrate Shopify into your Instagram account so your customers can shop directly from Instagram. Before you can do any advertising on Instagram, you must first create a Facebook business page.

Each Instagram account has to be attached to a specific Facebook business page. So to do that, you go to your Facebook settings, you switch from a personal account to a professional account. You'll have the option of either having a creator professional account or a business professional account.

A creator account is more for if you want to monetize your content on Instagram and Facebook as an influencer or streamer. Whereas with a business account, you'll be able to run campaigns and push ad campaigns, push your content and some other features that you'll also be able to access with a professional account that includes beyond just the advertising promotion, but access to the insights, to see how the engagement around your content, to see how well your advertising campaigns are performing and to gain insight as to who your audience is. Additionally, you can do the Shopify integration to create an online shop and add content, a contact button to your content where your customers will be able to reach you directly through a phone call, a WhatsApp message, or a Messenger message, Facebook Messenger message, right? So we've discussed the Meta Business Week already, and it's a free tool that centralizes your Facebook, Instagram, and messaging tools in one place.

So you can do everything from accessing the insight around engagement and campaign performance, audience, as well as set up your promotional and advertising campaigns, and even, as we were discussing, create posts and schedule your content directly from the Meta Business Week as well. You can also do some competitive analysis benchmarking there in the insight section on the Meta Business Week. So here's an example of some of the insight you can receive around your account, your growth from week, month to month and followers, the engagement around all your content, including on an individual basis, individual posts, stories, reels or videos and you'll gain some, you know, the engagement include the likes, the comments, the video plays, right? And as well, understanding the gender of your audience, the age of your audience, the location, you know, their age ranges, their location, and another very important bit of information is represented on this last column here, where you see engagement by hour of the day.

Now, when we're discussing the algorithm, one of the key points of the algorithm is that the first hour after you post content, it's going to be shown to your top followers, and if they engage with it, if they like it, if they comment on it, share it, etc. Then it will go to more of your followers, and then eventually it will go to an even wider audience. So knowing when your top followers are on is obviously important, so you can post at that point and get that engagement, and this will tell you that.

There are two options for paid campaigns on Instagram. The first is known as boosting your post or promoting your post. You're taking an existing post, reel video, and you're paying for it to be shown to a wider audience as well as to a specific audience, right? Earlier in this course, we talked about how to maximize the organic reach of your content by understanding the algorithm and using hashtags and these various strategies.

The challenge with that is that it doesn't happen overnight. It takes persistent effort over a longer period of time, and you'll eventually see results if you do the right thing. But by boosting your content, you're going to be automatically showing up in more content feeds, right? In front of more accounts, which will be reached, right? More people will see your posts as well as more impressions, which is how many times your post is seen.

And additionally, you can say, I want this specific audience to see because this is my brand audience. This is where they live. This is how old they are and other factors about them, including potentially their interests.

So you pick the ad or the post to become the ad and set a goal. That goal could be awareness. I want more people to be aware of my brand, more impressions.

It could be more followers. You want people to go from that post to your page and become a follower. It could be driving website traffic.

It could be setting up a form or even generating sales. So you set your goal, and on the basis of that goal, the Meta algorithm is going to find people who fit your audience criteria and might be likely to visit a website, sign up for something, or achieve any of the objectives that you set. Then you can specify the audience, right? We're going to do this on the Instagram app, and you'll see the options.

Some of them are demographic. Some of them are related to audience interests, as well as AI audiences that Meta will provide for you if you want them to set the audience for you, right? Then you set a budget and duration, how much you're willing to spend a day on the ad, and how long you want to run the ad. Based on your daily budget, Facebook or Instagram, Meta will show you a projection of how many accounts you're likely to reach with that budget and how many impressions you're likely to generate at that budget.

Now, I'm going to show you how to do this on the Instagram app. There's also another tool called the Meta Ads Manager, which is part of the Meta Business Suite. You can also set up an ad on that platform and track your ad's performance, and all the same things, and boost content.

You do have additional, more robust options when it comes to some of these factors, like audience targeting and budgeting. It's just a little bit more sophisticated in some of the options it offers you. As you can see, you can also just use the Instagram app and set up an ad from there.

This is boosting an existing post, maybe a post that you felt should have had a wider audience because it's really some great messages you want to get out to the masses, or just essentially increasing the overall audience for your content by strategically selecting posts that you believe are going to drive engagement for your brand content. All right, so that's one option. The other option is to create an advertisement.

Now, an advertisement is not from an existing post. It's just a brand message that you're going to convey to your audience when they call to action, you know, ask your audience to take an action. Either you know, visit your website, call you, or something, you know, sign up for a form.

And you're going to do this by creating an ad that tells a story, right? And in this story or narrative, your brand is not the hero. And that's a mistake a lot of marketers make. It's all about the brand.

That's how wonderful we are. Here are the benefits or the features we have. But the truth is, the customer is the hero, right? And your brand is the guide.

And just like any epic adventure story, like The Lord of the Rings, the hero has an obstacle to overcome, and that obstacle is the customer challenge. And your brand is going to help them overcome the obstacle, just like the great wizard Gandalf helped Frodo, who had his vulnerabilities and challenges, but thanks to the help of Gandalf, he was eventually able to achieve his goal. So, your advertising is really about how your brand is going to help the customer achieve a goal, overcome an obstacle, or solve a problem.

You're offering a solution, which is why it's so important to understand your audience, do an audience analysis that we were discussing, and have insight into who they are, how old they are, what their interests are, all those. And most importantly, what are their challenges? What do they want? What are they trying to achieve? And that should be the basis of your ad: solving a problem for your customer. You're going to include a call to action, which will enable them to access the solution, either by going to your website, or a landing page, or a subsidiary form, or calling you, or the various call to action options, right? And you're going to do this without a whole lot of text, just a very focused message that's going to capture the attention of your customer, the message in combination with the image or the video content, and then drive them to action.

Right? So we're going to look at how to set up an ad. We'll also look at some, you know, sample Facebook ads at the moment. But once you do set up an ad and run the ad, as we mentioned, you can go to either your app, if you have a professional account, your Facebook app, sorry, Instagram app, or to the Meta Business Suite, and view insights, such as how many interactions with your ad, how many visits to your profile, visits to your website, how many emails, right? How many impressions, how many times was your ad seen? What was the reach? You know, 25,000 people were reached by your ad.

You know, how many new followers, and how much you spend, right? And then the audience, like who is responding, men, women, where are they from? So all that type of information, you can analyze and use to optimize your ad, and the ones that are performing well, you can continue to run those or adjust the budget. So you have the option to do that. You can do that in the Meta Business Suite, but there is some, you know, ability to do that as well in the Instagram app.