With the rising competition in marketing and advertising techniques used by eCommerce businesses, you should always embark on new trends. Today, one of the recent trends is advertising through Instagram, which has 800 million active users, according to Statista.
There are many ways you could advertise your eCommerce products or services on Instagram, such as Instagram influencer marketing, Instagram explore ads, and carousel ads.
However, this is not the only effective way you can promote your eCommerce brand through the platform. Today, Instagram video ads can also help your eCommerce business increase its brand awareness, its engagement with customers, which can eventually increase its Return On Investment (ROI).
In this article, we will walk you through everything you need to know about Instagram video ads.
Table of Content:
Instagram video advertising is one of the paid services offered by Instagram to businesses that want to promote their products or services online. It allows them to post sponsored video content on the platform to reach more customers.
In other words, Instagram video ads are one of the many different types of advertising formats that the platform offers. Video ads on Instagram allow businesses to give customers a closer look at their brand, website, and products or services.
As an eCommerce business, you have 4 different types of video ad formats that you can choose from: Instagram videos, Stories, Reels, and Live. Let us give you a closer look at each one of these formats.
Video ads on Instagram used to be scattered in different places. We used to have 3 different formats:
However, this has changed!
Today, Instagram merged all video posts into one format: Reels. This means that all new video ads will be shared as Reels and will have a length of up to 15 minutes. Also, now the video and Reels tabs are consolidated into one single tab.
So even though Reel ads are considered relatively new to Instagram, they have now become the most effective format for Instagram video ads. Your video ads will be marked as sponsored, and they will appear between non-sponsored reels.
There is another place where your audience can access your Instagram video ads, which is the “Explore” section. It is something that users regularly browse and target audiences with posts delivered specifically to them, which is why it might be a good place for you to place your video ads.
Read more about: How To Use Instagram Reels to Grow Your Ecommerce Store
Instagram stories were inspired by Snapchat stories. They allow users to share full-screen vertical photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. Of course, there is always the option of saving expired stories to the “Highlights” section in users’ Instagram profiles.
Initially, Instagram stories allowed users to share up to 15-second videos. However, recently, Instagram has increased the story time limit to reach up to 60 seconds.
Instagram stories’ video ads are served to the target audience of your eCommerce brand while they are browsing their Instagram stories. Additionally, instead of disappearing after 24 hours like personal stories, you are allowed to choose how long you want your video ads to run.
According to Statista, there are 500 million people around the world who use Instagram Stories every day. This number proves that sharing your video ads on Stories can connect you to many customers.
Instagram live allows you to stream live videos directly to your audiences’ feeds and to interact and engage with them in real-time.
This format has a very creative feature called “Live Shopping”. This option allows you to sell your products, directly from the Instagram app, during your live broadcasts. You can also save your live videos with the products that were featured in them so that your customers can rewatch them and continue shopping at any time they want.
You can easily create and run Instagram video ads for your eCommerce business through Facebook Ads Manager. Let us walk you through the major steps that you will need to follow:
The first and most important step of any advertising campaign is the identification of your marketing objective. There are three major categories of campaign objectives from which you can choose:
You can choose between:
Under this broad objective, there are several sub-categories from which you can choose, such as Traffic, Engagement, App installs, Video views, Lead generation, and Messages.
Under the Conversion objective, you can choose from these three sub-categories: Conversions, Catalog sales, and Store traffic.
The second step is where you choose how much you want to spend on this Instagram video ad and for how long you want it to run.
First, while choosing your budget, you will find 2 options:
Second, to choose how long you want your campaign to run, you will find an option called “Ad Scheduling”, from which you can choose to run your Instagram video ads whether continuously or at specific times of the day.
This is the step where you specify your target audience based on demographics, interests, behavior…etc. Here you can choose from two options: Create New Audience or Use Saved Audience.
This is the most important step in creating and running Instagram video ads for your eCommerce business because this is the step where you decide exactly where your ads will appear. In this step, you will find two options: Automatic Placements and Manual Placements.
To create an Instagram video ad, in this step, you will:
The reason why this step is so significant is that this is where you choose one or more of the Instagram video ad formats that we talked about in the previous sections of this article.
In this step, start by choosing the Instagram account on which you want to launch the advertising campaign. After that, do the following:
Well, we have already covered how to create and run Instagram video ad campaigns. Now, let us tell you some tips and tricks that will make your Instagram video ads for your eCommerce business more successful.
As you can see in the steps we listed earlier, identifying the objective of your advertising campaign comes as the first step to creating and running an Instagram video ad. This step is very important, which is why you should take your time with it.
Not rushing here means taking all the time you need to identify the stage of the eCommerce conversion funnel or the buyer’s journey in which your target audience is. After that, you should dedicate only one specific goal for each Instagram video ad.
What you shouldn't do here is merge all the available campaign objectives or incorporate them all into one ad. This might confuse your audience and make them feel overwhelmed by your ad, which will stop them from taking any action at all; and hence, lead to a low conversion rate.
Remember, you are dealing here with audiences who probably have a short attention span. This means that you should use the first few seconds of your video ad wisely and in a creative way that acts as a hook.
In other words, make sure that your first few seconds have enough movement, catch the users’ attention quickly and compel them to stop scrolling and continue watching the rest of your video.
Always take into consideration that your customers are most probably viewing your Instagram video ad from their mobile phones. Therefore, you should always make sure that the landing page to which your customers will be transferred after clicking on the CTA is optimized for mobile devices.
The main aim here is to make your video ad seem less like an ad and more like an organic video that offers a solution to a problem that your target customers have. When we say organic, we mean that your video ads should not look like ads and should seem natural and blend with the feeds and stories.
The trick here is to know how to create a balance between delivering content that adds value to your customers and promoting your eCommerce store at the same time.
For example, you could create educational videos with useful tips for your customers. Or you could make tutorial videos that show your customers how to solve a problem they have while using your product or your service.
Instagram audio is muted by default; therefore, you should find a way to grab the users’ attention before they even unmute the audio. This can be done through on-screen text.
Create a text that transmits the most important messages that your eCommerce brand wants to deliver.
However, what you shouldn’t do here is go overboard and add too much text because this might drive the attention away from the video itself.
Another thing that can convince users to turn on the sound of video ads on Instagram is your caption. Research shows that captions increase view times by 12% on average (Brandwatch, 2022).
So, ensure your captions are clear, creative, compelling, and properly deliver the key points you want to communicate.
Moreover, your Call-To-Action (CTA) is also an important factor in the success of your Instagram video ads. Your CTA directs your customers in the right direction. It shows them what you want them to do next and makes it easier to take action. Therefore, you should design it to be clear, specific, concise, and actionable.
Creating a sense of urgency is always a good psychological trick for eCommerce advertising. For example, you can create this by:
There are so many ways you can be creative in your videos. You can, for example, incorporate inspirational messages, use memes, tell a story, talk about your new launches, emphasize the value of your existing products, or even show your current promotions.
Do whatever you need to do to keep the creativity alive and keep your customers interested.
To ensure more success for your campaigns, create multiple versions of your Instagram video ad, and test them using the A/B test, for example. This will let you know which video ads work best for your customers and will help you in the optimization process.
Automation is the future. There is no reason for you to manually do the whole process of creating and running Instagram video ads when automation tools can facilitate the process for you.
Converted.in offers you a very effective tool that will help you segment your target audience; and hence, map your customers’ journey. This will make the previously mentioned steps of creating Instagram video ads so much easier for you.
What are you waiting for? Book your Demo now and start creating Instagram video ads with the help of this great marketing automation system.
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