Instagram For Your Business Growth
How to use Instagram Video Ads to Grow Your Business
Out of every 10 Instagram ad impressions served in the first quarter of 2019, only 4 featured images. The other 6? Videos. Instagram started offering video ads a few years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that the network hinted it was becoming more video-focused.
Instagram has more than one billion active accounts worldwide, 500 million of which are active every single day. Instagram reports that 80% of its users follow businesses, making it a pretty compelling platform for advertisers.
Today, we’re watching more videos on our phones, and we’re spending less time staring at our TV sets. Online, video hogs more than an hour of our days, and 70% of all internet traffic. By 2020, that number is projected to grow to 82%. It doesn’t matter who you’re marketing to. Whoever they are, wherever they live, whatever job they have — research shows consumers love video content. It’s both engaging and easier to process mentally.
Instagram has continually expanded its video offerings for advertisers, and in this article you will find the best ad formats, how to use them, and the best 10 tips on creating effective content.
1. In-feed Video Ads
In-feed Video ads have the look and feel of standard posts, and should blend seamlessly into users’ feeds to offer a more natural way of reaching your target audience. This format allows companies to get the same visually immersive quality as photo ads, with the added power of sight, sound and motion. And now, you can share videos that are up to 60 seconds long in landscape or square format. The feed is the area where most users spend their time, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the place they’re more willing to interact by clicking. That’s why in-feed video is the ideal placement to increase awareness and reach. If used together with Instagram Stories Ads, advertisers see higher engagement, more sales and increased conversions.
Tips for In-feed Video Ads:
- Create content that blends with the user feed – it should be engaging but never overly- promotional.
- Use videos that capture attention in the first 2 seconds.
- Offer something relevant and useful, rather than pushing a purchase straight away. Show value first, sell second.
Sizes and specs:
Square video (recommended)
Resolution: 600 x 600;
Aspect ratio: 1:1;
Max size & length: 4 GB/60 seconds
Vertical Video
Resolution: 600 x 750;
Aspect ratio: 4:5;
Max size & length: 4 GB/60 seconds
Landscape Video
Resolution: 600 x 315;
Aspect ratio: 1:91:1;
Max size & length: 4 GB/60 seconds
2. Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories is the new place to be if you want to capture peoples’ attention, and it’s also the placement where you must create the best quality content. Instagram stories have the look and feel of normal posts, but advertisers can choose from a wide range of features to enhance video ads with special effects, face filters, video effects and text overlay to create fun, interesting promotions. Nowadays, there are over 500 million accounts on Instagram using stories daily, making your visibility potential massive on this placement. However, the user can pass by your ad very easily (just by tapping right), which is why your content must be exceptional and offer something amazing right from the beginning.
Instagram Stories have higher CTR when compared to feed ads, and also have a low CPC when compared to all other ad formats.
If you want to dig more into Instagram Stories (which you should), just check our latest blog which focuses on how to succeed with Stories ads.
Tips for Stories Videos:
- Because it only lasts 24 hours, these are great ads for limited-time offers and promotions.
- Use Stories with In-feed Ads to maximise your reach.
- Videos only run for a few seconds, but you can combine videos to show more content. Use your time well!
- Inspiration-driven ads are the best for Instagram due to its audience- 64% are millennials.
Sizes and Specs:
Resolution: 600 x 1067;
Aspect ratio: 9:16;
Max size & length: 4 GB/15 seconds
3. Instagram Canvas Ads
Canvas is an immersive full-screen format for mobile devices. You can use an Instant Experience template to create a dynamic format for your ads. On Instagram, Instant Experience can be supported in both stories and feed.
Canvas gives your ads an immersive and therefore superior viewing experience, and is essentially a mini-website that opens inside Instagram’s app. This format eliminates the need for a landing page, which helps decrease your bounce rate.
How to Create a Canvas Ad (Instant Experience):
- When creating an ad on Facebook, select the box for ‘Add an Instant Experience’ in the Formats section at the ad level.
- Select an Instant Experience template or select Build a Custom Instant Experience.
- Give your Instant Experience a name, select the components you want to add and how you want them to fit a mobile screen, and select Save.
- Select Done.
Tips for Canvas Ads:
- This format is perfect for a quick catalogue of products, allowing users to view your products inside Instagram.
- Use compelling CTA buttons.
- If you select Instagram Stories as a placement, your Instant Experience won’t be available to run across other placements or platforms.
- If you have access to placement asset customisation, you can use it with Instant Experience campaigns to customise the available ad formats, but not the experience itself.
- Linked Instant Experiences will deliver, but won’t be clickable.
- Tilt to Pan, Tap to Expand, 360 Video or Photo and Link to App Store features aren’t supported with an Instant Experience on Instagram.
4. Instagram Carousel Ads with Videos
With Carousel, you can add another layer of depth to campaigns; people can swipe to view additional photos or videos in a single ad. This is an excellent opportunity to create deeper brand storytelling or to highlight multiple products or even details of one single product. By adding three swipeable videos, you’re showing 3x more of your content for the same ad spend!
Tips for Carousel Ads (with Videos):
- Your videos need to be connected and tell a story.
- Use creatives that entice your user to swipe across your ads – maybe add this to your creative (i.e., use arrows)!
Sizes and Specs:
Resolution: 600 x 600 or 1080 x 1080;
Aspect ratio: 1:1;
Max size & length: 4 GB/60 seconds
5. IGTV Instagram
Launched less than a year ago, Instagram IGTV offers longer vertical videos a place to belong. We could compare this feature to a YouTube video inside Instagram, where you can watch 1-hour long tutorials (for example) on a vertical format. You can search for and save videos as well.
IGTV offers an incredible opportunity to deliver high quality content to an audience which is already engaged with you. It allows brands to add documentaries, interviews and short films that should interest your audience base. You can also use hashtags and tags that allow your videos to be found on the Explore tab of users’ Instagram accounts.
Tips to Use IGTV:
- Give your audience an inside look at your brand with a behind-the-scenes video.
- Create step-by-step and how-to tutorials.
- Create TV style content with the use of weekly episodes.
- Interviews with influencers is a great use of this platform!
- The platform allows videos of up to 1 hour, but make sure you know how much your audience is up to watch (by measuring your view-through rate), and produce content based on this data.
Sizes and Specs:
Format: Portrait
Aspect ratio: a minimum of 4:5; maximum 9:16;
Max size & length: 650MB for videos under 10 minutes (3.6GB for up to 60 minutes) / 15 seconds to 10 minutes for smaller accounts (up to 60 minutes for larger, verified creators).
10 tips & Strategies to Create Great Videos
No matter which Instagram video format you choose, these 10 tips can be applied to each format to maximise your effectiveness:
1. Make the first seconds count
Instagram users quickly scroll through their feeds and stories, so brands should create videos that will compel their audience to stop and want to see more. Movement in the first three seconds is something than should help your ads to perform better. This also means that, with the sound off, viewers know immediately that it’s a video and will be more tempted to continue engaging.
2. Add text to your videos (in case your videos are muted)
Sound off is probably the biggest challenge for Instagram Video Ads.
Instagram video ads are muted by default, so brands should lean on strong, compelling visuals and text to make sure the message is understood – even if the sound is off.
A good tip is to use dynamic effects by using apps like Apple Clips, to highlight main points that you wouldn’t want any viewer to miss. In addition, the use of a few short captions in the video will help your audience to pick up on your key points, so that they watch the entire video and maybe even end up playing it with sound later on.
3. Look less like an ad
As mentioned before, video ads and image ads should blend into the Instagram feed for best reception and not be overly promotional. Ads should blend to the feed and stories organically.
4. Shoot in the right dimensions – always!
Unlike Facebook, videos on Instagram can’t be enlarged and in-feed videos can’t take up the whole phone screen.
Therefore, it is important to understand which placement you want to explore, and then use the appropriate format for that placement.
Scrap the horizontal videos and have an editor format them to 600×600. This will give your ad an entirely different look and will catch viewers’ attention even more. In Stories, however, the video will fill the entire screen but should be designed and filmed vertically.
5. Think about thumbnails early on
Unlike Facebook or YouTube, where advertisers can use customisable thumbnails, on Instagram you must use screenshots from the videos. This needs to be on your mind when you are shooting and editing your video, as the thumbnail is a key component of your video ad. It will define whether or not the user turns on the volume to watch your ad, click on your post in the search section, and ultimately end up on your website.
It can be a good idea to use brand colours to make your videos instantly recognisable, or you should at least make your thumbnail an interesting, unusual image that makes the user actually interested in what your video might have to show.
6. Optimise your Landing Page for mobile
Instagram is accessed by mobile, so your call to action and destination link should ultimately be optimised for mobile devices.
You will lose your user as soon as you provide a confusing or difficult user experience. Make your CTA clear and visible, let users know what the next step on the consumer journey is.
7. Use visual consistency across ads and organic content
Brands should support their content and keep the momentum going by creating a consistent style that matches both organic and advertised content. Colours, imagery, music, graphic elements and the style of the video all make a significant impact on how your brand is presented. Carefully consider your audience at this point. How do you want to portray yourself? Are you a serious, corporate brand, or a fun-loving brand that will make use of bright colours and upbeat music?
8. Add a clear Call to Action
You should always simplify your call to action as much as possible. Make the experience and the steps the user needs to take as short and simple as possible. Instead of sending them from your video to your profile to a landing page, just send the message on the video and add a CTA to send them straight to your website.
9. Test. Test. Test
Advertisers should create multiple versions of their video ads, using different formats, colours and music before carrying out an A/B test to learn what works.
Advertisers shouldn’t assume that something will work without properly testing it before.
Testing also allows you to better understand what your audience likes, so that you can really improve upon your ad campaigns.
10. Wait until the users are connected to Wi-fi (and avoid subpar experience where videos are too slow)
In order to avoid a subpar experience where videos slow to a crawl, it is advised to narrow your audience to only show videos when they are using wi-fi.
People are impatient and have many distractions already on the social platform, therefore they are not willing to wait for a video ad to buffer and start playing. Also, even if they barely five seconds of video, you will still be paying for it, so the Wi-fi choice allows you to spend your budget on users who are more likely to watch your entire ad.
Final Thoughts
The longer your prospect spends watching your video ad, the more likely you are to not just make a good impression, but you are more likely to also convert. When using video ads, always closely monitor your performance for engagement rates. This will help you to understand whether the content you’re creating actually resonates with your audience.
Combining creativity, planning and perfect execution, your brand will be right on the way to building effective and successful Instagram Video Ads.
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