Social media strategy: your step-by-step guide
Luke McCarthy
May 28, 2024
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Running a creator marketing campaign allows your brand to generate socially-built, engaging content that speaks to a creator’s followers and drives brand awareness, engagement, and consideration among social users.
To make your content visible to a wider social audience, you need to amplify it through a paid media strategy. When amplified correctly, creator content can drive valuable results, resulting in focused outcomes like online sales, app downloads, or driving website traffic.
One question many brands typically stumble upon is, “Which paid media option is best for my campaign?” Leveraging the many years of experience running campaigns for our clients, we’re sitting down today to explain the different types of paid media options available to brands on Instagram. We’ll unpack the benefits of these options to help you decide which is best for your creator campaign.
Instagram Ads are created in Meta Ads Manager. They give you the option to create ads that appear like they’re coming from your brand’s Instagram account, and are labeled as ‘Sponsored’ posts in a user’s feed.
You have multiple options for where the ad appears, multiple outcomes to target (i.e. driving conversations, app installs or lead generation), and many different audience options, including tools that allow you to create custom or lookalike target audiences.
The advanced capabilities of Meta Ads Manager makes it a powerful tool to amplify creator content. However, amplifying creator content using your brand’s profile can sometimes sacrifice the authentic advocacy you would have otherwise generated directly from the creator.
If you want to keep that authenticity, we suggest using Branded Content Ads (BCA). They’re an extension of a ‘Paid Partnership’ post, allowing brands to easily amplify branded content beyond a creator’s organic following, straight from the creators who posted it.
BCAs leverage the advanced capabilities of a targeted Instagram Ad. This allows brands to measure and optimise their campaigns against goals, driving more effective marketing outcomes.
When BCAs appear in-feed, users will see a “Paid partnership with [your brand name]” tag, as opposed to the standard “Sponsored” tag on Instagram Ads. Instead of your brand, you see the creators handle and profile picture, along with their original content and caption. The user has that same ‘influencer marketing experience’, just as if the creator was sharing something specifically for you.
Learn more about Instagram’s Branded Content Ads.
It’s important to know that while Branded Content Ads combine the benefits of organic influencer posts and Instagram Ads, it requires creator eligibility, format restrictions, creator permissions to tag your brand, and the creator enabling the brand to amplify the content before the content can be accessed via Ads Manager. So if time is of the essence and you need to get your paid media campaign up and running quickly, this option might not be ideal for you.
What is Instagram’s ‘Branded Content’ tool – and why should marketers be using it?
Boosting your creator’s Instagram content essentially involves putting spend behind content that has already been shared on the platform by your creators. It’s an effective way to push that content in front of the eyes of your target audience who aren’t following your creators and didn’t see the original organic post.
When boosting Instagram content, you get to select your target audience based on interests, age, and gender, set a per-day budget and specify how long you want the ad to run for. You can also select from top to mid-funnel objectives, such as reach, engagement, or traffic to your website or social page.
Learn more about boosting your influencer content.
As a low-touch option, boosted posts are best for brands who don’t have the experience of running Instagram Ads, or the time to set up Branded Content Ads. However, to utilise creator content in a boosted post, the content first needs to be repurposed from the brand account.
68% of people say that they come to Instagram to interact with creators. So when utilising content creators, the best way to drive outcomes is to combine their authentic advocacy with an effective paid media strategy, leveraging the full power of a targeted paid media strategy.
Our experience helping brands amplify creator content to drive effective ROAS for our clients, means Vamp’s media boosting capabilities combine the best ad features of the Instagram platform, with a fully managed service to deliver highly effective campaigns.
Our relationship with our creator community allows Vamp to access and boost organic content with or without Branded Content tagging, eliminating the need for the brand to manage the tagging and permissions process before content goes live.
In deciding what approach is best suited for you, you need to determine your campaign objectives, and what type of audience you ideally want to reach.
For smaller budgets, campaigns with objectives to drive awareness and engagement, and for marketers who have limited paid media experience, boosted posts ise the best option.
If you want to create a more advanced strategy, including micro-targeting, extended ad formats, and/or your objectives are conversion orientated, then Instagram Ads will be more suitable for you.
If you want to amplify the unique and authentic voice of your creators, Branded Content Ads is the way to go.
And finally, if you want to amplify your creator content but don’t have the expertise or time to build a media strategy, utilise the platform’s Ads Manager tool, or navigate Branded Content Ads, Vamp can handle your media boosting campaign to maximise your objectives.
