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Use Instagram Advertising to Drive Brand Awareness

Tip

December 17, 2015

Driving Greater Brand Awareness

BY: Instagram Business Team

San Francisco, CA

We’ve seen businesses drive awareness of their products, apps and services with our suite of branding solutions for Instagram ads. Across more than 700 campaigns that have run on Instagram, 98% of campaigns have generated significant lift in ad recall with an average ad recall of 18 points.1 That’s 2.8 times higher than Nielsen norms for online advertising. Our advertising suite offers a variety of brand objectives and buying options that allow businesses of every size to tell a richer story and get noticed.

We currently offer objectives and tools to help advertisers drive brand results through Instagram’s self-serve interface. With the brand awareness objective, advertisers can deliver their ads to people who are more likely to remember seeing their ads. And with the video views objective, advertisers can optimize to reach people most likely to view videos on Instagram. Across both of these objectives, advertisers can predictably reach a significant number of people and control the frequency of the message through our reach and frequency buying tool. And, with our best-in-class targeting capabilities, brand advertisers can also drive greater personal relevance on the platform.

We’re seeing advertisers embrace Instagram to solve real brand needs.

Driving incremental reach

Sony Pictures wanted a way to reach their core audience to drive awareness of, and intent to see, their new film The Perfect Guy. With the film opening prior to the fall season premieres, the studio actively engaged Facebook and Instagram in how to scale their audience for awareness of the film. Through a campaign on Facebook, Sony targeted the African American ethnic affinity segment to reach as many people within this target as possible. They added Instagram to their campaign strategy, which helped drive incremental reach. In fact, at the end of the campaign Sony Pictures was able to reach 23% more people in their target segment by adding Instagram to the existing Facebook placements.

Sony Pictures’ creative team made a video cut specifically for the Instagram platform in the square aspect ratio, and is now considering using this type of creative on both Facebook and Instagram—to improve the ease of executing across both platforms with impactful video. This incremental reach contributed to the ultimate success of the film, with The Perfect Guy opening at #1 with $25.9MM opening weekend box office sales.

Instagram ad for The Perfect Guy movie using video
With access to Instagram’s self-serve buying, we were able to invest and see incremental people reached. Being an early adopter on Instagram was important, as The Perfect Guy was launching prior to key fall season premieres. Now that Facebook has Reach & Frequency buying on Instagram, we plan to control the frequency, so that each dollar invested can reach more people on both Facebook and Instagram.
Elias Plishner, EVP Worldwide Digital Marketing at Sony Pictures
Targeting for richer relevance

BlackBerry’s launch of PRIV, its first smartphone based on Android, was unlike anything the company had done before. The new device arrived with a new creative approach and a new way for BlackBerry to appear to its customers.

Building on its heritage of keeping customers data secure and private, BlackBerry turned to Instagram as one of several digital advertising tactics to generate awareness around the company’s first Android device, PRIV. They ran video and photo link ads focused on the design, function and features of PRIV—featuring people in personal moments of their lives in an emotional and sophisticated campaign.

BlackBerry used Instagram’s precise targeting capabilities to make sure their campaign reached and spoke to their key audience in Canada, the US, the UK and Germany. They further defined their audiences by tapping into different interest-based targeting groups around fashion, technology and professional sectors. In addition to raising awareness, BlackBerry included a Shop Now button on their ads where customers could go to learn more about PRIV.

Set of Instagram ads from BlackBerry using targeting options to show different ads
The BlackBerry community is essential to our brand, and Instagram allows us the privilege to create an experience just for them. We utilize the platform to showcase our products and bring value to our users lives. Instagram’s medium for expressing creativity is unrivaled, and we’ve found it to be one of the most influential channels for reaching and engaging with our target audience.
David Wiseman, Head of Product and Field Marketing (@blackberry)

No matter what brand objectives you’re trying to drive, Instagram has proven to be a platform to help get your business noticed.

BY: Instagram Business Team

San Francisco, CA