How Do I Target Audiences On Instagram? — Part 2

Published in

Inside Revenue

11 min readOct 9, 2018

The Intermediate Guide

In Part 1, I went over the basics of Instagram ads, how to set them up and what the 3 core objectives of any Instagram ad could be. This is to help guide you on your journey to using Instagram ads for your business. If you missed this article you can click here to read “ How Do I Target Audiences On Instagram? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”. In this article I also went over some ways on Instagram to find your target audiences for the platform.

In this article, I will discuss the targeting options available to you on Instagram as well as ways to target the correct audiences on Instagram. As discussed in part 1, Instagram was bought by Facebook in 2012. This lead to Instagram ads now being created on the Facebook Ad Manager platform. All targeting options available on Instagram are available on Facebook as well.

How Can Targeting Audiences On Instagram Help You Hit Your Revenue Targets?

In this article we will cover:
#1 Instagram Targeting Options

#2 Targeting The Right Audience On Instagram

Let’s get going…
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#1 Instagram Targeting Options

As discussed previously, Instagram has the same targeting options as Facebook. Below I will run through these targeting options for you:

Core Targeting

Instagram’s core audience targeting options allow you to reach people based on their demographics, location, interests and behaviors. This means you can choose the traits you believe your future customers will have and target your ads to them in turn.

The Traits That You Can Target Are:

Demographics
Find people based on traits such as age, gender, relationship status, education, workplace, job titles and more.
Location
Reach people in areas where you want to do business. You can even create a radius around a shop to help create more walk-ins.
Interests
Find people based on what they’re into, such as hobbies, favorite entertainment and more.
Behaviors
Reach people based on their purchasing behaviors, device usage and other activities.
Connections
Reach people who are connected to your Page, app or event, or exclude them to find new audiences. For example, if you want new Page likes, you can exclude people who already like your Page

Below Are Your Steps To Core Targeting:

When you are creating your campaign for Instagram through Facebook’s Ad Manager, and you get to the section on audiences, you will leave the custom or lookalike section blank.

With the location option, you will select the locations you will be targeting

If you have age restrictions, select these as well.

If your ads are gender specific ensure, you should select the gender you are specifying.

If your ads are only for specific languages, you will select this under the languages.

For more detailed targeting, you will use the section under Detailed Targeting. Here you can target based on interests, behaviours and demographics. All these options are available in a simple drop down menu for you to browse through.

Connection based targeting is the last part of the core targeting strategy, and this is done based on people’s interactions with a Facebook Page, Instagramprofile, app or event. You can target people that have liked or people who are friends of people that have liked these, or you can exclude people that have liked your page, profile, app or event.

Custom Audiences

This targeting option is the most commonly used, as this allows you to target people whose details you already have. This is done by uploading a list of emails or cell numbers to the Facebook Ad Manager, to be matched against their user database. This targeting option can help you as you can create messaging that differs based on people’s level of engagement with your brand, as well as where they are in your sales funnel (Awareness, consideration, or ready-to-buy).

Below Are Your Steps To Targeting A Custom Audience:

On the Facebook Ads Manager you will go to your audiences tab.
In this tab, you will select create an audience and then custom audience.

Select customer file and then add customer from your own file.

From here you can drag and drop your file which is a CSV or select upload file and select it from your computer.
Name your audience and select next.

Select Upload.
Once you have uploaded your file you can create your ad.
When you get to the audience stage again in the setup search for your custom audience and select it.
This will then target your customer file.

Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike Audiences is used when you would like to target customers that are similar to the customer lists that you have already loaded on Facebook, as laid out above.

Below Are The Steps To Follow To Create And Use A Lookalike Audience:

On the Facebook Ads Manager you will go to your audiences tab.
In this tab you will select create an audience and then lookalike audience.

Select a customer file that you have already created under the source.
Select the location of the audience that you would like to create .
Adjust the audience size to determine how big of a lookalike audience you would like to create.

Select Create Audience.
Once you have created your lookalike audience, you can create your ad.
When you get to the audience stage again in the setup search for your lookalike. audience and select it.
This will then target your customer file.

“The further you are away from understanding your customers and your market, the less your chances are to successfully build something that hits a nerve, and serves the customer.” — Steli Efti (CEO of CloseIO) @Steli

#2 Targeting The Right Audience On Instagram

Building a funnel is the key to a successful campaign. Not only for your Instagram campaigns, but for all your marketing campaigns. It’s about targeting the right audience with relevant content so that you can convert the people who are unaware of your brand into paying customers or any other desired goal.

Step 1: How To Create Your Instagram Audience Funnel

Let’s quickly grab the basics. A funnel looks like a upside-down pyramid with different layers. There are a lot different setups but in this article we will use a basic three layered funnel.

Layer 1: Awareness
Potential customers who are not aware of your company but are potentially interested in your products or services.

Layer 2: Consideration
People who are aware of your company but currently are still considering options for solutions.

Layer 3: Ready-To-Buy
People who are aware of your company and currently looking for your products and services.

How does the Instagram funnel work?

Now you know what a funnel looks like it’s time to explain how it works. Just by looking at the Instagram audience funnel you could have guessed it has something to do with volume. You’re right about that, and it’s one of the most important things to know.

The first layer of people who are not aware are the largest group. This could literally be anyone in the world. However, targeting everyone in the world is very expensive and will not help you at all, so we’ll teach you how to break that into pieces you can work with.

The bottom layer with the lowest volume has the highest conversion rates. That same group also carries the highest value or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) as we call it.

The big secret about building your Instagram funnel

The big secret about building a funnel is creating personas. Personas are the building blocks of your funnel. Create personas for every layer in your advertising funnel. A persona is a group of people who share the same behavior, these personas define who your audience is. A persona could be all pregnant women between 25 & 35 who are living in Amsterdam and want to buy baby clothes.

Layer 1: Persona X
The first layer, people who are not aware, is the most time consuming to prepare. We’ll have to think carefully what the answer is to this question:

‘How do people potentially interested in my product look like and behave?’

Think about everything: where do they live, what age they have, what interests them, women or men, which brands or products do they already have or buy? Another great source of Persona X is your own existing customer base. Use an export of email addresses or mobile numbers to create a lookalike audience.

Layer 2: Persona Y
You’ll have to find the people who already know you. Instagram offer two easy tools to build Persona Y: Custom Audiences & Page fans. You can use your existing customers to create a Custom Audience. Secondly you can use your page fans.

Facebook’s custom audience tool is very powerful and supports far more options then just emails. Here is the a list of options:

E-mail
Mobile phone numbers
Mobile app users
Facebook IDs
People who have viewed your videos

Layer 3: Persona Z
Welcome to the last stop before conversion! This is your low hanging fruit here. These are the people who are aware of your company and are currently looking around to buy a product or services like yours. Facebook has excellent tools to reach out to these direct leads.

The first and most used tool is called Website Custom Audience. By implementing a Facebook Custom Audience pixel on your website, Facebookcan track the pages users view and retarget those users when they’re on Facebook or Instagram.

Step 2: How To Create Relevance With Your Social Content Strategy

Relevancy is the match between what your are trying to tell your audience and what your audience wants to hear. Relevancy is really important because in a split second it triggers your audience to pay attention to what you are trying to sell through your ads. The key to relevancy is to know who’s your audience.

Desire is the second important ingredient, because who doesn’t want to optimize their Instagram campaigns budgets without lifting a finger? Everybody! You want to show your audience something they want, something they need, something they desire. You can talk about plain unique selling proposition here, but you can also try to talk about feelings.

Exclusivity is the third important ingredient. Because after you have presented a relevant ad which matches the desire of your audience a potential customer could still say: Why should I buy this product from you and not from your competitors? You need to create exclusivity so the potential customer wants to stick with you.

Urgency is the last optional ingredient. You don’t always have to use urgency but in the right moment it could be a great call to action and an immediate lead generator. For example: this is a limit time offer, you have to claim it before twelve o’clock.

Step 3: How To Measure And Optimize Your Instagram Advertising Campaign

With your funnel and ad creatives in place, you’re now ready to publish your campaign! You can’t be better prepared than this. As soon as it is running you can’t just let it run unattended.

Use this 3 step plan to get the most of any campaign.

Test and optimise your creatives
Run multiple creatives and test them all. If you are doing this manually make sure to run a maximum of one or two ads at the same time per audience. Rotate these with other variations based on time, so run perhaps 2 week or monthly stints to collect data and analyse. (Alter this strategy to your own liking and situation) Soon enough you’ll see which ads are performing best. Turn these back on when you have tested all your variations and optionally create new ones based on your learnings so far.

Shift budget between audiences
Like most advertisers your budget is probably limited. So you want to invest it as well as possible right? You can start off by assigning each audiences a proportional piece of your total budget. Take into account the size of your audience to achieve this. Now when your campaign is running you’ll notice that some audiences are simply outperforming others.

If you can get more results by increasing the budget of one audience by lowering the budget of another, go ahead and test it out. Continue this during your campaign to find the best investment possible.

Split audiences in smaller niches groups
After some time of running and optimising your campaign you’ll want to open up your reporting tool and start making breakdowns to see where your results are coming from. Breakdowns are a great way to literally break down your general campaign statistics in smaller pieces to see where your results are exactly coming from. Use breakdowns like: gender, placement, age and device. Using these will show you where your sweet spot is. Use these learning to create new versions of your audiences for even better results and keep digging to get the most out of any campaign. Sometimes it is good to do this in a new version of your campaign as a completely new test. This allows you to compare different versions of your campaign later.

Samsung captured the attention of younger audiences in Indonesia by running ads in Instagram Stories for the new Galaxy A, leading to 9-point lift in ad recall and 7-point increase in brand preference. See How Here — https://business.instagram.com/success/samsung-indonesia/

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Above I went through the targeting options that you have available to you on Instagram. These may be the same as the ones available on Facebook, but provide you with a great way of targeting the right people, at the right time, with the right message. This can essentially help you close more deals more quickly.

In my next article, “How Do I Target Audiences On Instagram? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”, I will cover some of the tips for targeting audiences.