June 14, 2018 4 min read

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While popularity for social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat has begun to wane, more and more brands have begun shifting ad spend to Instagram.

Related: 8 Unconventional Ways to Grow Your Instagram Following

Whether it be for Instagram Story ads, newsfeed ads or influencer marketing, there’s a lot to consider when running Instagram based marketing campaigns. Here are three strategies to immediately boost your ROI from your Instagram influencer marketing or feed ads:

1. Remarket in a new way and get more followers.

Think about the last time you saw an ad or influencer marketing post on Instagram. You either angrily scrolled past and ignored it, or engaged and/or bought the service or product. If you engaged, you may have (like the majority of people) liked or commented and then continued scrolling. Or, you went to the website and hopefully purchased the product. However, you likley would not have followed the brand.

The result? Tens of thousands of people engaging with your ads and posts, but none of these people following your brand.

By either manually engaging back with them or using automation, you can convert these engagers into followers and customers. Think of it like one-to-one remarketing. By re-engaging with those who have engaged with your ads but don’t follow you, you can now re-market them in a way that wasn’t possible before.

For example: Say you’ve spent $5,000 on boosting a post or running an Instagram feed ad. It got 100,000 likes, 1,000 comments and 500 sales. The number of people who would have followed you from this would likely be around 50-100.

By re-engaging each of these 100,000 engagers individually you can remarket them uniquely, and increase your following simultaneously. With this approach you can quickly extract far more value from each influencer marketing or Instagram feed ad that you’re currently running.

Related: 4 Social Media Stars Explain How You Can Get More Instagram Followers

2. Track every influencer marketing post.

Whenever you’re working with influencers, never give standard links for them to share with their audiences. Every influencer should be a given a unique link so you can track exactly what ROI you’re getting when you work with them. Unique links will show you precisely how much traffic they brought to you, how long those visitors stayed on your site, how they behaved and if they converted. All this data can show you the true measure of return per influencer.

A quick and easy way to do this on the fly is to simply add “/src?=” at the end of any link. After the “=” sign just add in the influencer’s Instagram username (or any identifier you prefer). For example, if you were doing a campaign with me, you would give me a link like this to put in my bio or swipe up link: “www.insertyourbrand.com/?src=@jamesshamsi.”

When you do this, within Google Analytics and Facebook ads you can now see exactly what the quality of traffic is for each influencer you work with.

Related: 7 Marketing Tips to Help Grow Your Brand on Instagram

3. Optimize your funnels with custom audiences.

Once you’ve shared custom links to all your influencers, create custom audiences based on this traffic.

You do this by going to your Facebook Ads manager to create the audience. Once you do, you can run Instagram or Facebook ads toward this specific audience. You can create a custom audience on Facebook based on each unique influencers traffic by segmenting with “URL” containers. See below for how you would do this using the above example.

The added advantage of this is for you to be able to segment your retargeting campaigns according to each influencer’s traffic. If you found a particular influencer converted very well for you, you will now be able to create a lookalike audience specifically for the traffic he or she brought in. This way you can find new audiences that are likely to convert, too.

Instead of creating audiences for each influencer, you can also bucket these custom audiences for influencer traffic based on their specific niches to consolidate large campaigns. For example: “www.insertyourbrand.com/?src=beautyinfluencersunder50kfollowing.”

These three tips are just a droplet in an ocean of opportunities presented by Instagram marketing. Don’t simply give out free products and discount codes and claim you’ve done influencer marketing. Don’t just run general ads that don’t segment each stage of your funnel. Track everything, optimize everything and extract maximum value at every opportunity.

Using data-driven and value-hungry strategies like these you can immediately get more ROI from you current Instagram marketing.