76% of social media marketers are using Instagram to advertise their products, approaching a pool of more than 1 billion users. The words Instagram and Engagement have lately become synonymous with each other. For businesses that want to expand their market and understand the customer’s pulse, Instagram is the go-to place.
Gaining success on Instagram is highly segmented, industry-oriented, and led by demography. So, with striking visuals and appealing content, you can amplify your marketing efforts. These aspects are of particular importance for the entertainment industry, which requires visual content to appeal and realize visceral stimulation.
How do these marketers use Instagram and its products to expand their outreach, and why don’t all of them achieve success? Is there a reason behind it? What do those who gain success are doing?
3 Trend-setting Instagram Ad Campaigns
1. Yoga International
Runtime: 15th July to 31st August 2019
Target Region and Audience: Global Yoga Enthusiasts
Performance
Within 45 days of running their campaign, Yoga International convinced 3510 people to take free memberships.
Goal
The goal set forth by Yoga International was to add more new members to join their online platform and benefit from yoga exercises.
Approach
With the help of KlientBoost, Yoga International leveraged from interactive poll ads to get the user’s response. Since poll ads are set in a question format asking the viewer to choose one precedent, they gave the users two options and then asked them to register and avail free 30 days membership.
The users came across the Yoga International ads in stories and regular ads in the feed. Plus, all the ads had a question format superimposed with two responses, “Yes” and “Heck Yes.”
The media content of these ads included photos of users posing in any Yoga Asana. In the video ads, the users were shown working out with the trainers from their homes by connecting the phone to their TV or directly accessing it on a big screen.
These small yet impactful touches to these ads were essential to show the ease of access and utility associated with the organization’s standard operating procedure.
Buyer’s Journey Targeted
Yoga International only addressed the Sales-Ready customer segment with these ads. Their target audience was those who had previously been on their website or those who had not completed the registration process.
Furthermore, they also created a lookalike audience and targeted them to pitch their membership and leverage campaign budget optimization to focus on ads that did well.
Did they Succeed?
Yoga International did surprisingly well with their campaign as they were able to add around 78 new members every day through these ads. Plus, with the bulk joinings pouring in, the cost per registration dropped by 21%.
Moreover, around 18% of the new memberships came from those ads which had a low budget. This meant that even the low budget ads were able to get results for the organization.
Products Used:
Photo Ads, Video Ads, Poll Ads, Lookalike Audience.
2. Not a Model
Runtime: 6 days in March 2020
Target Audience and Region: Global Audience (particularly Women aged between 18 to 65) interested in increasing their Instagram Presence
Performance
In just six days of running the ad campaign, Marina de Giovanni was able to close with an 82% increment in the book sales.
Goal
Marina de Giovanni wrote an ebook to help women entrepreneurs grow their business. Along with her team, she wanted to boost the book sales while understanding the response rate of ads that run in Instagram stories.
Approach
Not a Model opted for an innovative approach by first running two ads and then conducting the conversion lift study to identify the actual value of one particular type of ads on Instagram.
Here’s what they did. Out of the two campaigns that ran on Instagram, both had videos featuring Marian, giving the core points of growing influence on Instagram. Plus, both the types of ads had short animated clips of the ebook and a link to purchase it from the website.
The difference between these ads was that one campaign ran on the stories and the other on the feed. Furthermore, both the ads were configured with campaign budget optimization to ensure that only high-performing ads continue to run.
To understand the real impact of story ads and feed ads, they conducted a conversion lift study, which proved the progressive value and conversion yield by the Instagram story ads.
Buyer’s Journey Targeted
With these campaigns, no new users were targeted. Instead, these were retargeting ads for those who had visited the website and understood the value proposition of the book. Moreover, the ads also targeted the users who had previously engaged with Marina de Giovanni’s or Not a Model’s posts in the past six months.
Since the users were already aware of the product offering and what it will provide to them, it was easy for them to understand the video content and trust Marina.
Did They Succeed?
Remarkably! Not a Model’s campaign provided an 82% increase in the total sales from the story ads. Plus, they were also able to realize higher reach through the stories than the feed.
Lastly, the cost per conversion was also 31% less with the stories. Not only did good content and targeting mechanisms helped, but the conversion life study was also a great contributor to this campaign’s success.
Products Used
Story Ads and Feed Ads, Video Ads, Animated Ads.
3. Watcha Play
Runtime: 11 days between September and October 2018
Target Region and Audience: Interested audiences in South Korea
Performance
11 days and 23% more people reached than what Watcha Play used to achieve with other campaigning methods. Their attempt to target the users from Instagram stories brought windfall gains.
Goal
The goal was simple. To test the waters with Instagram ad stories by running a split test across all the family of Facebook’s applications.
Approach
Watcha Play wanted to do three things with its campaign; More Awareness, Test a new Platform, and Reduce the campaign cost. So, out of the two campaigns, one ran on Facebook and Instagram feed, while the other ran only on Instagram stories.
The ads were not about the platform specifically. Instead, they included a quiz for the users. The answers to these quizzes were given on the Watcha Play landing page. From here, the users were further provided options to join the platform and engage further.
Furthermore, all the ads were customized to adapt to different platforms. For the Instagram stories, the ads boasted a vertical format taking the entire screen as the quiz was a puzzle, and solving it would reveal an image.
Buyer’s Journey Targeted
Watcha Play targeted all types of users irrespective of the fact whether they are current users or not. This broad targeting method was used to enhance the outreach and amplify the brand’s voice in the Chuseok holiday period.
So, during the holidays, the users will want to look for some sources of entertainment, and watcha play provided them with that option. Hence they fulfilled the demand at the right time via the right platform.
Did they Succeed?
Not only was Watcha Play able to get 23% more users, but they also achieved this at a 43% lower cost and 2.2x higher return on ad spend. All in all, another split test study proved to be useful for another brand in the same industry.
Products Used
Video ads (Feed and Instagram Story).
Ready to Start your own Entertainment Ad Campaign?
Before you start your campaign, take note of two major deductions from these campaigns. One, the Instagram stories have proven to be a better gateway and a versatile platform to get results.
And the fact that 500 million people use and check Instagram stories every day must also be considered. Secondly, the cost of running the ads came down due to three things, stories, split tests, and budget optimization.