Instagram Expands Content Reach By Enabling New Branded Content Ads

On June 4th Instagram announced it’s official launch of Branded Content Ads as an option for businesses to expand their audience reach. This change will help revolutionize how businesses do influencer marketing. While introduced and worked on since March, in the coming weeks this feature will finally be introduced to all advertisers. Instagram story ads will be added within the coming months. This feature will allow businesses to access the organic posts of influencer partners and choose posts to boost themselves and expand the audience it reaches past just the influencers followers. To stay transparent, the ad will also include a “paid partnership with” under the number of likes or views the post is receiving. 

What Brought This Forward?

A recent Facebook commissioned survey brought to light that 68% of users come on Instagram with the intentions of interacting with different creators. Because of this businesses have developed the opportunity to tell their brand stories through creators. Thus far, these opportunities have only been accessible organically, meaning that the reach of these branded content posts was becoming very limited to the scope of the influencer’s followers. Measuring the impact of an influencer campaign was also limiting without access to said influencer’s post insights.

With the new branded content ads, businesses will be able to see organic influencer posts within their own Instagram and capitalize on promoting the images they want to an audience outside of the influencer’s.

Things to be Aware of:

Boosting a partner’s organic post does not explicitly boost the post to their exact audience along with your new target audience. While followers of the influencer will likely see the post within their feed, it will not be boosted toward them unless they fall into the brackets you set forth for your ad. Note that advertisers at this time cannot edit the influencer’s caption on the post or moderate comments. Creators also may not delete their posts while the campaign is running unless the advertiser does so.

Benefits:

• Advertisers hold control of which ads could benefit their brand more from the ad boost
• Advertisers are now able to measure the impact of each influencer post themselves
  • This will allow analysis for which influencers are viable partnerships
  • New level of accountability 
• More authenticity within ad campaigns 
• Higher engagement rates
• Target specific audiences

Objectives Within Instagram these Ads Serve Their Focus:

• Brand Awareness
• Reach
• Video Views
• Traffic
• Post Engagement 

How to Implement this new Strategy: 

Integrating these new ads into your ad campaign strategy is simple. Instagram’s how-to guide highlights how both advertisers and creators can adjust their settings to begin. Once the creator and advertiser have given each other their brand permission to link each other as business partners, the advertiser has access within ad manager to optimize the post. Creators even have the option to select old brand content posts and link the advertiser to see insights and promote them. Once it’s determined if the influencer is beneficial to the brand, the advertiser may look for more influencers right for the brand or discontinue partnerships with ones that aren’t.

Looking to Expand:

Instagram’s next step puts forth Instagram stories as another option to boost organic influencer posts, just the same as the posts they can now. An interest is also forming in which this tool will be available on Facebook, in addition to Instagram.