Organic reach and luring followers with great content have always been good, but how effective are sponsored Instagram posts? Let’s find out! Instagram has over a billion users actively scrolling their feeds daily! Its large user base makes the platform the perfect place to look for an audience suitable for you! All you then need to do is engage with said audience and stonks!
Instagram is one of the largest sales channels for online influencers. In reality, some influencers earn more than $4000 per post. But that does not mean that sponsored Instagram posts will cost you lots of money. Here is what you need to know about sponsored Instagram posts and how to leverage them to promote your brand or products.
What are Sponsored Instagram Posts?
Instagram offers numerous advertising options on their platform, and they are all effective in their tasks. From advertising on Instagram stories to brand partnerships with influencers, Instagram has broken all traditional marketing rules and giving birth to new ones!
Sponsored Instagram posts are nothing new on Instagram. As soon as the platform caught the whiff of brands and organizations trying to create a social media presence, it allowed users to pay the platform to reach a more organic audience who are more likely to interact with them.
When posting on Instagram without sponsorship, the app provides you targeting options based on age, location, and other interests to target your audience. Sponsored Instagram posts to get rid of those boundaries. So you have total control over the reach of your posts.
These Instagram posts can have CTA (call-to-action) buttons to drive all incoming traffic towards your brand’s website. Assign custom URLs to specific pages for these posts, so your customers get directed to those websites from your Instagram page.
If you have the question, “how to get sponsored posts on Instagram?” You are in the right place! Read ahead!
Sponsored Instagram posts are best suited for advertisements when it’s important to spread information about the brand to its audience far and wide. They are easy to use, and the dynamic pricing ensures that you are not overspending on your advertising needs and are getting the most bang for your buck!
But Instagram ads are a thing as well! They appear between stories and posts as Instagram posts do. They are both similar in several aspects, but there are subtle differences between them. Let us take a look!
Sponsored Instagram Posts vs. Instagram Ads: Same same, but different?
The more you scroll on Instagram, you may find ads on stories and posts. Which of those ads count as sponsored posts, and which ones as advertisements can be difficult to tell apart. While both play the same role and offer the same functionality (for the most part), there are some differential points. Let us look at them in-depth:
- Based on content: The most differentiating quality between a sponsored Instagram post and an Instagram ad is the type of content they contain. While sponsored posts are appropriate for various audiences over a while, content for Instagram ads is tailor-made for them and does not show anywhere else.
- Based on Engagement: With sponsored Instagram posts, your engagement, including comments, likes, or followers, will stay on your organic post long after promoting your post. However, you cannot capitalize on your Instagram ads as you will lose all engagement once the campaign is over.
- Based on Audience: For sponsored posts, it is possible to target the audience based on gender, age, geographical location, and interests. Instagram ads have limited audience targeting, and the reach depends on the goal of the ad campaign.
- Based on goals: The motive of sponsored posts is to get engagement on the profile. Followers, likes, shares, and other types of reach survive on the original post for a long time. On Instagram ads, however, ads must lead to conversions and brand awareness. Hence, all engagement dies once the campaign ends.
These differentiating factors are minute differences that do not show unless these posts and their objectives are clear. Now that we know how feasible sponsored Instagram posts are. Let us look into how to create one!
Creating a Sponsored Instagram Post with a Brand Partner
Now to answer the question: “how to get started with sponsored posts on Instagram?” As a brand, the first thing to do is to discuss all the details with an influencer. Some will demand payment in cash, while others would give you a shout-out in exchange for free product samples.
Once everything is discussed, you may add the influencer as a brand partner with your brand’s profile.
To do that, go to your Instagram account’s settings and look for “Business.”
Then look for “Branded Content.” Here you will find “Approved Business Partners.” Click on it to add any content creators or business accounts you will be involved with.
Anytime a creator tags you in their content, you will get a notification to approve it. Once you do, the insights of the post will be visible to you and the creator.
That is it! You have successfully set up a branded partner for your sponsored Instagram post! Next, let us move on to creating an Instagram post with a branded partner!
Creating a sponsored Instagram post after finishing the above steps is a breeze!
- Go about creating an Instagram post as you usually would. The content in the post, and the picture it would be accompanying, are crucial to the brand and the creator alike. Both parties need to approve of the visual and the written copy before the post goes live.
- Right before clicking on the “Share” button, click on “advanced settings.”
- Tag your business partner with whom you have collaborated for the post so that they get updates on the insights as well!
And it is that easy!
However easy it is to make a sponsored Instagram post, it is tough to get sponsorships from brands for creators. Being an influencer requires significance on your audience, as brands want to advertise their products from the hands of people who thousands follow!
Let us look into some tips for influencers and creators to optimize their profiles to attract brands to collaborate with them!
Make it big as an influencer: Sponsorships!
Sponsored Instagram posts are a big help to influencers everywhere! Influencers may sponsor their posts by paying money to showcase their content to people who don’t follow them but might be interested. Or they could reach an even bigger audience by collaborating with a brand with massive reach on the platform. But making your social media presence profound enough for brands to notice you is vital for creators to get sponsorships. Here is how an influencer makes their profile stand out from the competition:
- Build a large audience: You don’t need thousands of followers to succeed (though you must charge more if you do). To pique the interest of potential sponsors, you’ll need at least a few thousand followers. Don’t even consider buying likes; you’ll need an engaged audience that actively likes and comments on your content.
- Identify your niche: As an influencer, they must strive to be well-known for one specific thing. Everybody on social media loves determination! Take one particular thing up and do the best you can, all the while keeping your followers engaged.
- Have a public account: Probably the first thing an influencer should do. Unless your Instagram is not open to the public, your potential followers will miss out on all your content, no matter how lucrative they are.
- Shyness is not rewardable: Reaching out to brands directly for collaborations is undoubtedly the #1 way to get sponsored by them. Brands love collaborating, but because of the platform’s algorithm, they fail to notice the content curated by influencers everywhere. It is always a good idea to reach out to them by emailing them or directly messaging them on the platform.
- Tagging them: Whenever you post your content as an influencer, marking them on your sponsored Instagram post will help in getting recognized by them. These brands get notifications from the platform every time an influencer tags them, which leads to brands taking notice of them.
- Be prompt and always available: Have a routine for checking your work emails and your DMs in a day. Having contact information displayed on your bio along with CTA buttons will surely drive more enquires towards your page. It helps brands connect with you easier.
Make a Sponsored Instagram Post using Promote:
Regular posts, Stories, Highlights, and Stories Archives can all be turned into sponsored posts using the Instagram promotion option. This move has several advantages, including the ability to reach a larger audience, increase the visibility of your material, and add clickable calls to action (CTA).
Instagram gives you the option of selecting from a list of pre-written calls to action, such as Shop Now, Learn More, Contact Us, and others. Users’ news feeds, Stories, and Explore areas on the platform may all contain the publication that has been promoted.
Here is an example of what a sponsored post on Instagram looks like:
Promoting your Instagram posts helps it reach newer audiences who might not know of your social media presence. It gives new viewers a chance to check your content out and see if it resonates with them. Interested viewers may begin following you, thus growing your presence on the platform!
Here is how you promote your posts to turn them into a sponsored Instagram post:
- Go to your Instagram profile and select a post you would like to promote. Promoting old posts that had a successful reach means that they had fruitful content. Promoting them would be a good call!
- Click the Promote button under the post.
- Select where you would like to drive your audience. For more sales and inquiries, sending them to your profile would get them to click on your websites, while the latter options would aid you in building customer relations.
- On the next page, the target audience selecting options pop up! These settings let you target your content to a specific audience of your choice, or you can set it to Automatic, and the platform will show your content to people it thinks will be interested.
- On the last page, set your budget and the duration of your posts for the promotion in the app. The app calculates the estimated reach of your promoted posts which gives you a better insight to set your budget.
- Lastly, the app will ask you to review your promotion. It is a time to check if you have missed something and to look at every little thing before pressing Create Promotion.
And that is it! You have created your first sponsored Instagram post! Wasn’t that easy?
The Promote button on Instagram gives influencers and creators on the platform the ability to use their old posts that reached people as an advertisement to see if it resonates with people who are not following them. Influencers can find a sudden boost in followers and likes, and their engagement would skyrocket until the promotion is live.
It is the exact reason why sponsored Instagram posts have such a massive reach. Engaging with other accounts during the promotion of a post ensures an increase in followers and likes on the creator’s end and is a goldmine for influencers.
Also read:
9 latest social media trends that every business should follow
How To Track and Increase Your Instagram Followers Count?
Manage Instagram Followers: Key to Organic Growth?
Sponsorships + Socinator: Icing on the cake!
Sponsorships and sponsored content on Instagram have made it much easier to gain organic reach. But two hands and a brain fall short for influencers and creators managing their Instagram accounts. Social media marketers burn out their work way faster than other jobs because they have to be constantly on their toes to stay on top of their competitors.
Experts recommend using social media management tools like Socinator to help you ease into your life as a creator or an influencer.
Socinator helps you with everything marketing on Instagram. The analytics that Socinator provides will make the decision between native ads vs. display ads easy for you! Get real-time insights into your analytics that will help you make business decisions and strategies for your brand.
Instagram has several ways for its users to interact with their audience, and Socinator pushes them five steps ahead! Socinator combines automation with the nifty features that Instagram provides! Any activity that you had to spend hours doing manually can now be fully automated, thanks to Socinator!
Here are all the features it provides for influencers who are trying to make it big on the platform:
Check out Socinator today and hit your social media goals faster than you ever could! Don’t miss out!
