Instagram now fully open to all advertisers

Social media platform Instagram has opened its advertising business to all advertisers of “all sizes, everywhere,” as it pushes forward with its ad-growth strategy.

The Facebook-owned image sharing platform is now expanding its ad operation from eight markets, which included the UK and US, to more than 30 countries including Italy, Spain, Mexico, India, and South Korea, by the end of the month.

The social media site will offer businesses of all sizes the opportunity on a “self-serve” basis to run both large and small campaigns on Instagram using its range of advertising formats, which includes landscape-shape images, video ads up to 30 seconds, meaning that brands can engage in “richer storytelling,” ads featuring links to their website, as well as the ability to run campaigns across both Instagram and Facebook.

Instagram has also launched a new premium advertising option called Marquee, which the image sharing platform says will help “drive mass awareness and expanded reach in a short time-frame,” which it claims will be perfect for events like London Fashion Week, new product launches, and retail sales such as Black Friday.

The platform says that people come for “visual inspiration,” and that advertising on Instagram has the “power to touch, inspire and move people,” and it claims that the ads have already driven strong branding results, with 97 percent of measured campaigns on Instagram generating “significant lifts” in ad recall.

Instagram opens advertising platform and introduces new formats

It adds that with the introduction of these new formats it will assist marketers in achieving a wider range of objectives, from web site clicks to mobile app installs. For instance, Gilt Groupe used Instagram to win new customers, and ran a campaign that drove an 85 percent lift in app installs, while The North Face used iconic imagery to heighten awareness of its ‘believe in the impossible’ speaker series, with results showing high engagement to learn more.

Other success stories includes a case study from John Lewis, the department store used Instagram to reach a young, female audience with its quarterly campaign ‘The Edit,’ which spotlights the latest looks and trends in fashion by partnering with influential fashion bloggers. The six-week sponsored campaign resulted in John Lewis seeing a 14-point increase in purchase intent amongst 25-34-year-old women, as well as almost double their social engagement from 14,000 to 24,000.

John Lewis social community manager, Angela Bertram, said: “People are excited about Instagram as a channel. We can be quite experimental and it’s really helped us grow our community. Instagram is a perfect fit for fashion, and now we’re looking to see how we can use this content in our store environments.”

Other fashion clients that have used Instagram’s ad platform includes Net-a-Porter, Levi’s, Banana Republic, Nordstrom, and Lacoste.

Instagram is an attractive advertising option as it has more than 300 million monthly active users globally, 70 percent of which are located outside of the US, with more than 14 million being from the UK alone.

Images: Instagram