Instagram Marketing Guide for Beginners

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By Sydney Suttles

Searches for “Instagram marketing” mostly end with “for beginners” or “for dummies.” Instagram users want to how to market their personal as well as branded accounts, but don't know how to start. If you’re paying to promote, you want to make sure the right content is featured to the right audience. We can help!

Checklist to get Started

  • Business Profile or still a personal profile? Switch!
    1. Make your profile public
    2. Connect with your Facebook page
    3. Enjoy the benefits of adding links in your stories and access to more in-depth business tools like analytics!
  • Description is a simple 150-character introduction to who you are and what you do. This can be a short sentence or a string of words. You can also add a URL other than your website here, but make sure it doesn’t take up too many characters.
  • Website 1. Do you have a website? 2. Do you need a website? If you answered no to both questions, skip this part or add your business Facebook here. If you have or need a website, ensure it’s polished and ready to represent your brand before showcasing it.
  • Address is another optional field where you can set your city to appeal to local users.
  • Target Audience is the most important part! Instead of running a sponsored post to all 500 active users, narrow it down. You can use location, demographics, interests, and more to hone in on your market. Instagram’s official advertising page can answer any further questions.
Ways to Promote

The first step in deciding how and what to promote is finding your goal! Have the end in mind. Are you looking for more followers, website traffic, sales? Now choose how you’re going to do it: inform, entertain, persuade. You can boost stories,a single photo, video, or a carousel post which features multiple photos. Here are the hyperlink choices:
  • Learn More is great for brand awareness. The hyperlink can lead back to your profile to encourage likes, comments, and shares. @FootCardigan used this to gain traffic to their website (left).
  • Download is to encourage app downloads. Promo codes are usually included to get access to extra features.
  • Shop Now leads to a landing page for a category of products or the specific product feature. Another fun feature of a business profile is product details including the name, price, and link to a product (left).
  • Stories is a newer yet prominent feature on the platform. You can promote single or multiple photos and videos here. Keep in mind, users can click to skip these in a heartbeat. If there’s a promotion, make is obvious immediately to catch attention. Hopper, an airfare analysis company, used stories to show three different deals going on right now (right).
Go Forth & Conquer
You can start promoting with just two dollars! Click the post you’d like to promote, fill in Audience, Budget, Duration and you’re done. You can change these later too. The campaign needs to be at least two days with one dollar a day. Instagram will optimize it for you too! If you aren’t getting clicks, it will run less and won’t use your whole budget. The platform is on your side *praise hand emoji.* You can also integrate your ad with Facebook too, that’s why business profiles need to connect through Facebook.
If you’re interested in making money rather than spending it, check out my last blog about How to Become #Sponsored on Insta! Learn the difference between Sponsored and Ads and some tips on how to get started with sponsorships.
Author’s Note: After all of my Instagram research on sponsored posts and ads, you can’t believe the amount of sponsored content I am receiving. As mentioned earlier, Instagram will optimize to the user. After significantly interacting with sponsored posts, I’m seeing sponsored about every four posts! I’m not complaining, it’s interesting to see how their algorithm truly works.







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