After creating an Instagram profile, you continuously posted good content for quite some time now but couldn’t see an increase in the number of likes or followers. It is a widespread phenomenon in a giant platform like Instagram. But there is a way or a shortcut to speed up the process.
Now, what is the promotion or promoted posts?
Promoted posts are the ones that you naturally create, just like your other posts. But then, you pay a certain sum to show it to your targeted audience. The number of likes and followers for a particular post increases rapidly when more and more people resonate with your posts, and you can win their hearts through your content.
The promotion of your posts is a straightforward process. On Instagram, you can directly promote your posts by clicking on the “promote” option under your desired post. The process is said to be the simplified version of Instagram ads. Here, you get more opportunities to customize your content’s look and distribution before showing it to your targeted audience. But once you pay for any Instagram ad or promoted post, it will get the tag, “sponsored”. It will show the targeted audience that you have made a specific payment to show them your content. Spending your hard-earned money after promoting your posts can seem to be a little awkward. But, it is worth it.
The worthiness of the expenditure money for promoting posts is often a significant doubt for everyone. But once you start promoting your posts, the process of increasing your Instagram likes and followers starts to flow in.
How to promote your post?
Promoting your post from your business account on Instagram is the most straightforward process ever. It is just a matter of a few clicks. The procedure is as follows –
- After logging into your Instagram account, go to your business profile.
- Click on the option “promotions”, followed by “create promotions”.
- After finding your relevant post, which you want to promote, click on the “promote” option, located right under your post.
- Fill in the necessary details and select your target audience, budget, and duration to promote your post.
- Click on “create promotion”, and Instagram will review your post and run your promotion once it meets their ad policy guidelines.
Isn’t it effortless to promote your posts? It is practical too.
Why promote your posts?
Everyone at some point or the other arrives at this question. So it is vital that the “why” is clear from the beginning and you understand the advantages of promoting the posts.
Get new viewers
It is always not a very smooth experience on Instagram to find and increase your audience. But if you are also the one who’s struggling to find an audience, then promotion is the best option for you. It is an excellent way by which you can introduce yourself to new people through your posts and content. Reaching out to the right people is the most challenging part of your journey of increasing your posts’ value. Promoting your high-performing posts will create brand awareness about your posts. And it will also bring your posts in front of people who might never have come across them naturally.
While you are filling out the details for promoting your post, you will come across an option to either customer your audience or allow Instagram to create an audience base interested in your post. This similar-looking audience that Instagram makes for your promoted posts is based on your already existing follower list. It can also give you some good results, and it also requires less time, research, and hard work. Creating your audience base in such a vast platform is not an easy task, and it requires good time and effort. So it is always better to allow Instagram to create your audience base.
Get popular with your high-performing posts
Brilliant work always reaps more benefits. While promoting your posts on Instagram, innovative work promotes only those already doing well among your existing followers. It has more probability to stir more minds and attract many followers and likes towards your profile. This boost will be strong enough to establish your brand little by little, and it will also increase the engagement metrics for your posts.
Any natural post can burn out quickly after just a few followers got the chance to indulge in it. Promoting your posts can give it a new life and keep it on the platform for a longer time. So, if you have any post that is close to your heart and you want to spread it to more and more people, promoting is undoubtedly the way for you.
Create a plan to get more customers
Promoting posts have many advantages, and one of them is the Call-to-Action (CTA) function. Any regular Instagram post will not allow you to link to your site or other sources. But promotion indeed gives this upper hand. It will enable you to direct the traffic directly to your profile. While promoting a post, you also get an option to add a CTA button to your post. It will help you to now convert the likes and comments into action.
While you are setting up to promote your post, the choice of CTA is given to you. Then you have to choose the appropriate option to where you want to direct the traffic. The possibilities are like: visit your website, visit your profile, call your business, or the directions to your business. Choose the CTA intelligently that suits you and your marketing policy the best. CTA is undoubtedly an effective marketing tool that is only received when you choose to promote your posts.
The Drawbacks
Everything has its drawbacks. And it is also an important thing to know before spilling your money on something. Here are some of the disadvantages of promoting your posts that you might be interested to see –
Less sophisticated when it comes to audience targeting
As stated earlier, letting Instagram choose your audience base is very effective. But there is an opposite side to it. When you give Instagram to select the audience’s list for your post, very little control is left in your hands. Instagram itself chooses whom to show your post, and you can not do anything there.
In case you choose to create your list of the audience, you can choose to target the post depending on the age, location, interests, and so on. But these choices are minimal when Instagram chooses your audience base. People with a more significant business can go for the broad appeal and allow Instagram to select your audience, but those just starting up their brand should always carefully see what the best option for them is.
Reach one audience at a time
As said earlier, you can create your list of the audience for promoting. But what you are not allowed to do is make copies of your post and promote it among different audiences. It is undoubtedly a huge issue if you want to go for A/B testing your post.
To make this more understandable, in other words, you would like to find out which age group or gender engages more in your posts. In these cases, the Ads manager is a much better thing to opt for to know more about the audience’s different interests and desires.
Just a limited number of goals to choose from
You must know what you want from promotions. Some look for more followers and likes, while others want more sales for their business. If you target all of these through your advertisements, promoting your posts may not be a perfect choice for you as Instagram allows only one of these options to be available as your goal from your post promotion.
While you continue to fill up all the details before promotion, at a certain point, you will be asked to choose your goal for promoting from the following options – “More Profile Visits”, “More Website Traffic”, or “More Promotion Views.” And Instagram’s algorithm for creating your audience and meeting your objective will be dependent on your choice.
But when promoting posts is compared to the Ads Manager tool, the latter is the more sophisticated tool. It offers engagement, reach, and traffic and grants options like conversions, purchases, Visits to stores, etc. So if you want to get more out of your budget, other than just hike in the awareness, you might want to reconsider your option.
The bottom line
Like any other thing on Instagram, there is no certainty that you will be impressed with the results you get after promoting your posts. You may not achieve your desired goal even. The real success lies in your ability to create posts that resonate with a large crowd and encourages them to press that CTA button. Just pouring money into publicizing your correspondence will not do the trick if your post’s content is not up to the mark and people cannot resonate with it. So the results can vary depending on the quality of the posts and the interests of the audience.
