3 Big Reasons Why You Should Market Your Business on Instagram

Starting life as a humble photo sharing mobile app designed for amateur photographers to share their portfolios of work. From its creation in 2010, Instagram has become one of the world’s most successful mobile apps and has evolved into a vibrant standalone social media platform.

Post being purchased by social media giant Facebook, Instagram has since gone on to represent over 10% of Facebooks predicted global mobile advertising revenue. This will amount to somewhere in the region of 2.8 billion dollars in 2017. All of those dollars can’t be wrong but just in case you needed more reasons to consider including Instagram in your advertising strategy, here are 3 good ones.

Audience Scale & Growth

Instagram has broken records for it’s unbelievable rate of growth, particularly since being acquired by parent company Facebook. Let’s break down some of the numbers:

These numbers alone are impressive but what’s more is that from their vast audience, less than 20% are from the US. Meaning the mobile app come social media platform has huge global reach potential.

What is more astounding is that over 200 million of Instagram’s users were acquired in just the last two years. Not only is Instagram a mammoth platform in terms of audience size, but it’s growth has only recently started to slow after a continuous period of acceleration. This platform is still a huge trend. Particularly among millennials (18-30 year olds) who make up over 35% of the total audience.

Targeting Depth

As we’ve mentioned Instagram was purchased by Facebook in 2012. For a fee of $1 billion no less. Taking their time to create the right advertising approach while keeping the integrity of the app alive, Instagram started trialling advertising to limited brands 3 years later in 2015 and later that year opened advertising on the platform to all.

Advertising on Instagram is actually controlled via the Facebook ads manager and as a result allows for the same granular level of targeting to be applied to Instagram as on the Facebook platform itself. Through linked accounts, data sharing and even mobile app device relationships, Facebook are able to allow data and behaviours from its platform to target within the Instagram mobile app as well.

This means that you can create very specific, very niche targeting groups and demographics within Instagram using age, gender, geo-location, relationship status, education level, interests and job titles to name a few. Very few media channels allow for this level of targeting to be applied when creating a marketing campaign. This allows for even small brands to engage with the platforms advertising mechanics without the need for an extensive budget and still have a superb chance of potential success.

Highly Engaging Platform

On top of all the other impressive statistics, Instagram in comparison to other social media platforms has one of the highest content engagement rates. It’s estimated that on average brand posts on Instagram have a 5x higher engagement rate than the equivalent on Facebook and over 10x that of Twitter.

Instagram is a very personal platform and they have done a wonderful job of ensuring that sponsored content is limited within any given user session so that ads haven’t spoilt the experience and as such don’t feel intrusive to the user. Millennials are one of the most notoriously numb to advertising generations to date and as such having a method to reach them and make a potentially significant visual impact full screen on their mobile device the way that Instagram offers is very unique.

There are many reasons for virtually every business to consider Instagram in their marketing plans but the sheer scale & reach of the platform coupled with the ability to effectively target a highly engaged audience comprised of 30% typically ad resistant millennials should be argument enough.