Growth on Instagram starts by generating awareness—getting eyeballs on your content.

But once people know you exist, it’s time to get them to take a little action, and one of the lowest-barrier-to-entry actions we can ask of someone is for them to follow us on Instagram.

And fortunately for us, this is easily accomplished with ads.

Now, if this is your first edition of The One Thing, we’re in part three of a four-part series covering a multi-step advertising process to grow on Instagram.

So if you want to get caught up first, you can check out this email and this email before digging in here.

I’ve also covered the previous two editions in video format here and here.

So now that we’re all caught up, it’s time to take a look at this week’s step: getting that coveted Instagram follow.

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Setting up the campaign

Now that we’ve started generating awareness, we want to make sure people are making to our profile.

To do that, we’re going to create a new campaign with the “Traffic” objective.

This objective is going to allow us to select our Instagram profile as the destination for our ads, which is precisely what we want.

Once our objective is selected, we’ll name our campaign and select our daily budget.

As usual, I like to leave the Advantage Campaign Budget switch toggled to the “on” position.

With most campaigns, this simple setting will allow my money to be spent in the most efficient way possible, leveraging the power of the platform to do a lot of the heavy lifting for me as it optimizes.

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Ad set targeting and placements

As with all Meta ad campaigns, the meat of the process takes place at the ad set level.

Our first step (after naming our ad set) is to select our Instagram profile as the conversion location for our ads.

Once we’ve selected this, the rest of our conversion settings are going to be baked in, so we can set the start date for our campaign below that and move on to targeting.

Because I’m looking for quality over quantity here, I like to keep things more narrow in the country targeting section of a campaign like this.

I will generally look at only the United States or the US, UK, Canada, and Australia together.

Now your targeting might look slightly different depending on your goals, but I would recommend keeping things more specific to where you want to find your ideal customer, not just listeners if you’re looking to grow on Spotify or other DSPs.

Once we’ve chosen our location(s), it’s time to consider affinity-based targeting.

When it comes to followers, I really can’t stress enough how important it is to be thoughtful about your end goals here.

For example, if you want to sell a music-production service or license beats through your online store, your targeting is going to look quite different than if your sole objective is to get listeners on Spotify.

Cheap vanity metrics may look good, but in my experience, long-term results come from being a bit more mindful of who your target audience truly is.

So because my hypothetical goal with this campaign is to grow my fanbase on Spotify on the other side of Instagram, I’m going to target people within my existing listeners’ age demographic who like Spotify as well as some similar genres, etc.

Lastly, because my plan here is to use an existing reel as my ad, I’m going to deselect every ad placement except for Instagram reels under the “Placements” heading.

I want all the engagement I get here to map to publicly available content on my profile.

Two birds with one stone, ya know?

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Time for ads

Now that we’re at the ad level, we’re going to choose our ad creative by selecting the dropdown under the “Ad setup” heading, and then selecting “Use existing post”.

From there we’ll choose the post we want to use and drop it into our setup as an ad.

As always, we’ll need to select a post that doesn’t use another artist’s copyrighted music if we want to run it as an ad.

But don’t worry, the system will tell you if a post is unavailable by showing a little red icon to indicate that one is off limits.

Easy.

And because our destination and conversion settings are preset as a result of choosing the Instagram profile objective, that’s it for our ad setup.

The only thing to do now is to hit publish and keep an eye on the campaign as it develops.

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If you want additional details on this one, I’ll be covering it in more depth on YouTube this Thursday.

Hope to see you there.

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