How to Target Cold Audiences with Instagram Ads
If you are the owner of a business page on Instagram, you have probably already tried or are considering the use of paid ads to find new customers.
Some of these prospective customers are what you would call ‘cold audiences’ because they haven’t heard of you before they see your ad.
A lot of marketers spend significant amounts of time and resources into remarketing campaigns. These are audiences that are already following you through a blog, YouTube, IGTV or podcast as well as your Instagram profile.
While it is perfectly fine to target people that are already following you, the content pipeline you have to maintain to keep this audience interested requires a lot of effort.
An alternative is to target cold audiences with Instagram ads, which is what we are going to talk about today.
· Finding new customers with Instagram Ads
The alternative to having to create a massive amount of organic traffic on Instagram is to set aside an ad budget that allows you to gather information about your prospects and what they might be interested in.
Since cold audiences have no idea who you are, you can put your best foot forward and begin persuading them immediately with your best offers.
· Understanding acquisition costs per prospect
To begin with, you will need to keep aside a portion of your budget for experimenting and testing for cold audiences.
You will need to understand what the conversion rates are for particular ad formats/copy and understand how much you need to spend to acquire each customer. Once you have this number, it will help you scale your budget up or down depending on what you are working with.
In addition, once you have tested and refined your strategy for cold audiences, it is fair to assume that your warm audience will respond more favorably to the same piece of advertising. As a result, testing cold audiences will actually decrease your acquisition costs over the long run.
· Using organic audiences to gauge what cold audiences might respond to
One of the guidelines you can use while creating a strategy for cold audiences is to see which of your content has performed the best with people who already follow you. Once you have selected the top 5-10 posts that have gotten the most engagement, you can use them as an outline for understanding what kind of messaging cold audiences might like.
After all, if your existing audience isn’t even interested in a particular post, there is no point promoting it to a completely cold audience.
· Determining whom to target
Facebook’s robust targeting module is a huge boon when you are trying to outline whom to target.
The Facebook Audience Insights feature is a great tool to help you gauge what kind of content and pages the people you need to target are already following. You will have to do some trial and error targeting when you first begin your campaign, but the recommendations will get much more refined over time.
· Using audience insights and top interests
The Audience Insights module will give you a rundown of the broad categories of interests for people you might want to target. You will also the number of ad clicks that people in a certain category make per month. Usually, this number ranges from 15-50 ad clicks per month.
Once you have determined the top 10-20 interest categories you want to target for your Instagram ads, you should go and follow some profiles of top accounts in the niche. Instagram will then start recommending similar profiles to you. These are people and audiences you may not have considered up to this point in your campaign.
· Audience size and testing
When it comes to understanding audience sizes, one rule of thumb to keep in mind is that the more specific the interest category is the better your results will be.
If you are just starting out, audience sizes from 50,000-100,000 are recommended. Once you have more confidence in your ads, you can start expanding your reach. Pick 3-5 groups of cold audiences to start your testing.
Secondly, make sure you test each interest group separately until you understand how an ad performs with them specifically. Limit the number of variables in play by running the same ad across all the groups until you get information that shows you should change your strategy.
· Establishing ad frequency
Once you have drilled down and found an audience that is responding well to your ads and costing you a reasonable amount per conversion, you need to think about your ad frequency. Research shows that you can convert an audience that sees your ad multiple times, but it is best to keep your frequency less than 3.
· Establishing an ongoing analysis for cold marketing campaigns
At some point in your campaign, you will have exhausted the potential of a particular interest group. This is when you need to start targeting new cold audiences using the procedures we have outlined so far.
At each step of the process, pay close attention to your click through rates, conversions, acquisition costs and profit margins to understand why a particular metric might be going up or down.
Understanding cold audiences is a key to ensuring the success of your Instagram ad campaigns. The more adept you get at entering a demographic and quickly understanding what messaging will resonate with it, the better off you will be.
We hope this rundown of cold audience targeting strategies will help you take your Instagram ads to the next level. Let us know what you would like us to analyze next in the comments!