Promotion on Instagram* in 2023 or a year without Instagram :(

What are the methods of promoting a business on Instagram in 2023?

Today we will tell you how Instagram feels a year after being blocked. First of all, we would like to mention that in this article we will focus not only on conclusions but also provide statistics to support those conclusions. We hope that our article and the information in it will be useful to you.

What has changed since February 2022?

Starting from February 2022, business promotion on social media has been divided into the "before" and "after" situation. This was caused by the Instagram block, which was the foundation of promotion for many bloggers and companies. But should you exclude this traffic source from your advertising strategies? That's what we will write about today.

What happened to Instagram?

Did the social network Instagram die? Many people say so. No! Instagram continues to thrive and function. We lost the main advantage of the social network - targeted advertising settings. However, thanks to VPN services, you can still use the social network.
Overall, there was a loss in terms of audience. Based on data from various sources, reach has decreased by 50%, but the warmest and most loyal audience for any business - fans - remained on the platform. This has even led to increased activity on the network. This trend is mainly observed among microbloggers, but it applies to almost all categories.

Can you promote through Instagram?

Promotion on Instagram is possible. You will need to spend enough time conducting tests to find a replacement for targeting, but the conversion results will be more than comparable to the efforts invested. Let me give you an example of a personal blog that a friend of mine started. He reached out to me for help with advertising setup. Initially, we focused on enhancing Interactions without setting any language targeting restrictions. We initially tried audiences from different countries: Turkey, Sri Lanka, Indonesia. In Turkey, we found an engaged audience but not his target group. So, we added targeting based on the Russian language while still keeping Interactions as the main goal of the advertising campaign. Interestingly, with this targeting, we started gaining followers. We set a modest advertising budget of $5 per day. The cost per follower is now 20 cents. During the first two weeks, we conducted tests with audiences, geographies, and post formats that the audience responded to. In the following nine days, we scaled up the advertising, increasing it by 20% every 2-3 days.

As you can see, Instagram is feeling quite well. The only problem is that finding those effective methods takes more time and testing than setting up targeting.

What methods can be used to promote through the social network Instagram?

I'll share with you a few working and highly effective methods of promotion on Instagram:

Reels

Initially chosen as an alternative to the TikTok social network, the REELS format quickly transformed into an effective way to promote both commercial and personal accounts.
The key thing to remember in this format is the regularity of your postings. Posting one REELS video per week is unlikely to yield results. It's best to post 2-3 videos daily. They don't have to be perfectly edited or planned. You can include local jokes, behind-the-scenes moments, or work-related content. The main task is consistency.

Influencer Advertising

Let's not forget that influencer advertising is one of the most effective methods of promotion. And let me clarify once again: the overt, heavily branded advertisements we used to rely on no longer work as well.
The influencer should create the appearance of non-advertisement. The advertising should be subtle. The best solution is to collaborate with an influencer who will genuinely use your product or service and organically showcase it on their profile. Mentioning the product when their followers themselves start showing interest in what the influencer uses.

Communities

Advertising in thematic communities (public groups) remains one of the most effective methods in 2023 since these communities usually have a large target audience. When placing such advertisements, it is important to consider three factors:

• The number of "active" subscribers in the community
• Your target audience within the group
• Preparing the advertisement in the style of the chosen community.

Hashtags

Hashtags have made a comeback with increased audience engagement! Without targeted advertising, the effectiveness of this promotion method has significantly increased. Consider these rules when adding hashtags:

• Hashtags should be thematic.
• Ideally, the hashtag theme should be related to your post's topic. This way, Instagram will better promote your content.
• Avoid using high-frequency hashtags with more than 500,000 mentions.

UGC

Most people trust other people's opinions. It's time for the cozy mode. This can be seen in the graph as Instagram is now returning reach to smaller bloggers. Therefore, user-generated content (UGC) will bring you the highest quality audience. However, even with UGC, it should be implemented with your involvement.

Let's say you sell SMM courses. You can launch a contest for the most creative Stories mask. The condition is to create Stories with the mask on their own account and tag you. Your target audience won't see annoying ads, and the portion of the audience that visits your account will already have a positive attitude.

CPS

Cost per sale (CPS) is becoming increasingly popular. Even bloggers are starting to work on this model. I won't go into detail as the mechanics are simple: someone brings you a lead, you make a sale, and you pay a percentage for that sale. I recommend paying attention to a service like Ublogger.

Direct Messaging

It's clear that spamming is not a good practice. However, before getting blocked, a method of direct messaging through other accounts used to work well. Most of these accounts may end up in spam, but even in highly competitive niches where the cost per subscriber reached 350 rubles, this method achieved a subscriber for as low as 60 rubles, and they were targeted. Here are the key rules to remember:

1. Make sure to scrape the groups of your competitors or accounts related to your niche or closely related to it.
2. Filter out private accounts (you can't send messages to them anyway, and you won't lose 30% of the overall effectiveness).
3. It's good if you can also filter the audience/accounts that have shown activity. This way, you can exclude inactive accounts and save at least 30% on ineffective messaging. The costs may be small, but with mass messaging, it will save you a significant amount of money.
4. If you have a predominantly male audience, it's worth filtering out and keeping only male accounts, and vice versa.

Of course, you will have to put in some effort and search for parsers that allow you to clean and filter groups, but believe me, the results will exceed your expectations. The actual Instagram messaging campaign costs around $2 for 1000 messages. However, it's crucial to remember that a campaign of 10,000 messages will yield approximately 20-22 subscribers. Therefore, aim for the massiveness of such a campaign. In other words, the cost per targeted subscriber will be slightly less than $1, which is several times cheaper than hard and medium business niches. If you have an online school or want to sell your educational course, you need to attract 8,000 subscribers. Around 2,000 people will unsubscribe from you during the warming-up phase before launching your course sales. If you sell a course priced at $800 or two parts at $400 each, you will be able to sell approximately 28 courses to this audience size.
The key is not to stop after sales and start parallelly warming up the audience for the next course while conducting the current one.

Effectiveness of Instagram Promotion

As we can see, Instagram is alive, and it can be used to promote products and services just as effectively.