Kat Pichardo — June 5, 2019 — June 5, 2019
Instagram Ads are one of the most valuable PPC options available to advertisers. There’s no question about it. With around 30% of users purchasing something they’ve first discovered on Instagram and the massive reach potential of Instagram Ads, this adds up.
Video ads are likely even more valuable, ranking in an average of 3x more comments and engagement than sponsored posts that only contain images. This statistic in particular is important, because it demonstrates why creating Instagram ad funnels with videos is such a strong choice for your campaigns.
Instagram video ad funnels have enormous potential, and in this post, we’re going to go over exactly how to create a high-converting funnel with Instagram video ads in four easy steps.
What is An Ad Funnel?
Think for a second about whether you see an ad for a product for the first time ever and decide to buy right on the spot.
Typically not, right? You’re going to be a lot more likely to have your interest caught, and then move on. It may take multiple touch points of interacting with the product or brand before you decide to take the plunge. It’s why attribution can be so tricky, and why it might take up to 3 months (or longer!) for customers to convert after first seeing the initial campaign.
Ad funnels are designed to capture users’ interest and push them through multiple stages of the research and buying process as quickly and effectively as possible. This will generate more leads and sales quickly, and it will also reduce the likelihood that they drop off forever or head over to your competition.
One of the biggest mistakes advertisers make is to create individual, independent campaigns and to never consider a larger funnel and how certain ads interact with each other. If you strategically coordinate a series of ads to have a bigger impact, you’ll see those results on your overall ROI.
Why Instagram Video Ad Funnels are So Effective
Instagram video ads have a lot of incredible benefits. They give you enormous reach and the ability to show your ad to a hyper-targeted audience, and you can show them a compelling ad that’s followed up with a hyperlinked CTA.
There’s a big reason though why video ad funnels are so incredibly effective, and that’s the retargeting abilities. Many users won’t even click on an ad the first time they see it, even if it’s engaged, making it a little challenging to create an accurate retargeting campaign. Video ads, on the other hand, can be retargeted based on view time. This gives you an enormous opportunity to retarget people who were interested enough to watch your preliminary video but not click, giving you a second and highly-targeted chance you might not have gotten otherwise.
How to Create an Instagram Video Ad Funnel
Creating an Instagram video ad funnel is easier than you’d think, it just requires a little more planning up front. You can use the following template to create a customized funnel that your audience is sure to respond to.
Step 1: Brand Awareness
Create a video that utilizes storytelling to introduce people to your brand and what makes you different. The idea here isn’t necessarily to go for a hard sale, but to explain your value proposition and what makes you different. The video should be no more than a minute long.
Here’s a great example of a video that would work for this:
The video has an emotional basis, and it immediately sucks you in with a fear-based proposition of a health problem. That’s sure to grab users’ attention and appeal to their audience, who are ideally healthy eaters.
Target a cold audience with demographic and interest targeting, or a lookalike audience off a high-value custom audience. Make sure that your audience is relatively large in size but falling within a niche that you’re targeting.
Step 2: Lead Capture / Drive Preliminary Action
Hopefully, users have watched your first initial video, even if they didn’t click on the link. That’s an outstanding start.
The next step is to create a video ad (preferable) or a single-image ad that highlights more specific feature-benefit selling of your product or service, and having the goal of either having a lead form filled out or have users click to your site to learn more. These videos can be long, or they can be as short as the example below.
For best results here, use a retargeting campaign, targeting user who watched at least 50% of the video from your first campaign.
Make sure you choose an objective here that matches either lead generation or clicks to your site, whichever you’re optimizing for.
For best results, you should make sure that your campaigns are relatively aligned in style and voice. Sometimes even using the same video template to create your campaigns will benefit you immensely, giving users a consistency that can lead to increased brand awareness.
Step 3: Drive Conversions
The goal of the last stage was to drive users to a specific landing page or capture their lead information. This means you either need to retarget users based on recent visits to your landing page, or retarget those who filled out the lead campaign.
And this time, you’re going for the hard sell. Your CTA should be strong, and the ad copy should ideally offer something to sweeten the deal to encourage interested but timid users to finally convert. Maybe mention free shipping and returns, or offer up a coupon code just for these users.
Step 4: Re-engage
Hopefully by now, a chunk of your audience has converted and purchased from you. Your job isn’t over just yet, though; many advertisers make the crucial mistake of ignoring customers through ads once they’ve purchased. In reality, retargeting past customers and keeping them engaged is more affordable, more profitable, and more efficient than continuing trying to create additional funnels over and over.
Create re-enagement campaigns that either focus on new products (see below), offer additional discounts, or showcase products that would work well with what the target audience purchased in the past. You can either retarget users from a custom list based on their purchases, or target them a set number of days after they’ve seen your “thank you for your purchase” page. Remember that video ads have extraordinary engagement, so use that to your advantage.
Conclusion
Instagram video ad funnels are an extraordinary way to connect with your target audience, create a relationship with them, and nurture it to the point of a sale relatively quickly. If you want conversions, you need to be intentional and strategic about understanding how users move through the buying cycles and how you can facilitate that further.
Multiple touch points are great; they’ll be a lot more effective when they’re strategically placed. And this video ad funnel will ensure that they are.
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