Advertising on Instagram accounts has already become a source of revenue for arbitrageurs and small online stores. Gradually, larger advertisers begin to use it. The growth rate of this market is incomparable with the current performance of the advertising market, for example. In the blogosphere, it is on Instagram that the volume of sold advertising and advertising opportunities is growing most rapidly. For half a year, accounts gain 300 thousand or more subscribers.
The reasons for the popularity of Instagram lie in the fact that for a long time there was no advertising in the channel and the audience was loyal to it. The social network combines a solvent and creative audience of smartphone owners with Internet access.
SEO company California has found that many advertisers are still ignoring this channel. Perhaps the problem is not understanding how this market works. I want to talk in detail about the business model and capabilities of Instagram to make the relatively new and growing market more understandable and open to advertisers. The information will also be useful for publishers who would like to start making money on their Instagram communities and advertising agencies.
Business model
Right away that we’ll only talk about thematic pages, not personal Instagram accounts.
The essence of business on communities in Instagram is simple – to attract an audience to a thematic account in order to further sell ads. For example, in a cat account you can sometimes sell cat food.
By type, accounts can be divided into photo pages and video pages. Accounts of the second type are now very popular, attract users better and are easier to advance in the market, so we will focus on them. Top players in this market receive about one million rubles of revenue per month from one community.
Who is who in the market
For ease of perception, I will call the players in this market admins – these are people or companies that are involved in the creation and development of one or more pages. Among admins, we can divide players by size and degree of activity:
- Small players. One or two accounts, passive development.
- Average players. One or more accounts, active development.
- Large players. One to five accounts (small grid), aggressive development.
To explain how passive, active and aggressive development is different, you first need to talk about the channels and methods of promoting pages on Instagram.
- Massfollowing and masslayking – As the name implies, this is a massive subscription to users and likes on their pages in the hope of subscribing. This is the easiest and cheapest way to attract an audience. However, serious companies, in our opinion, cannot and should not use this method as the main way of promotion. If you decide to use mass follow, you should do this with caution – only at the initial stage of page development for recruiting the first subscribers. Be prepared for the fact that this way of promotion can cause a negative reaction in the professional environment and damage the brand’s reputation.
- Mutual PR – promotion of the content of users or other communities with a link to their accounts in exchange for their promotion of our page.
- Advertising in accounts and opinion leaders, as well as the purchase of official Instagram advertising.
- Traffic from external sources , for example, from other social networks. Most often paid.
- Organic growth through engagement and engaging content.
Passively developing players engage in sluggish mass following, active ones engage in mass following, mutual PR and buying advertising. Aggressive development is all of the above, plus paid traffic from external sources. Actively developing publics usually limit advertising spending to money that they themselves earned by selling advertising, and attract foreign investment for aggressive growth.
Project economics
The main indicators that you need to focus on calculating the payback of the project:
- CPU (cost per user) – the cost of attracting a subscriber.
- The cost of an advertising publication is one of the components of success. The better and more loyal the audience, the naturally higher the cost of advertising.
- Salary of account employees (payroll).
- Indicators of sale of advertising on the page (buyback advertising)
Hence, the first thing to do is decide on a niche choice. For this, firstly, it is necessary to assess the competitive environment, and secondly, to formulate the UTP of your content and account.