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Use Instagram advertising to drive brand awareness

Tip

17 December 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 adverts. Across more than 700 campaigns that have run on Instagram, 98% of campaigns have generated significant lift in advert recall with an average advert 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 be noticed.

We currently offer objectives and tools to help advertisers drive brand results through Instagram's self-service interface. With the Brand Awareness objective, advertisers can deliver their adverts to people who are more likely to remember seeing their adverts. And with the Video Views objective, advertisers can optimise to reach people who are 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 its core audience to drive awareness of, and intent to see, its new film The Perfect Guy. With the film opening prior to the autumn season premieres, the studio actively engaged Facebook and Instagram in how it scaled its 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. It added Instagram to its 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 its 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 number one with USD 25.9 million in opening weekend box office sales.

Instagram advert for The Perfect Guy film using video
With access to Instagram's self-service buying, we were able to invest and see the incremental people reached. Being an early adopter on Instagram was important, as The Perfect Guy was launching prior to key autumn season premieres. Now that Facebook has reach and frequency buying on Instagram, we plan to control the frequency so that each amount 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 adverts 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 that its campaign reached and spoke to its key audiences in Canada, the US, the UK and Germany. It further defined its 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 its adverts which customers could click on to learn more about PRIV.

Set of Instagram adverts from BlackBerry using targeting options to show different adverts
The BlackBerry community is essential to our brand, and Instagram allows us the privilege of creating an experience just for them. We utilise the platform to showcase our products and bring value to our users' lives. Instagram's medium for expressing creativity is unrivalled, 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