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3 Strategies for Low Cost Marketing on Instagram

Date published: March 15, 2020
Last updated: March 15, 2020

Are you looking for ways to lower your cost of marketing on Instagram? You might be surprised to learn that lowering your Instagram marketing costs is the result of how you prioritize and optimize your strategy. The cost of marketing is the cost of marketing. Sure, you can save a few bucks by hiring a PPC expert to get better bids, but true savings come from an optimized plan.

If it’s time to lower your cost of marketing on Instagram, the following strategies can help.

1. Optimize your video production costs to increase PPC spend

Spending less money on creating videos means you can spend more money on PPC ads. PPC ads on Instagram are a must – the ROI is great and conversion rates are high. According to statistics published by Promo.com, Instagram converts at 3.1%. The only social media platform that beats Instagram on conversion rates is Facebook, which converts at 4.7%.

There are two main ways to lower video production costs

You can lower your video costs without sacrificing quality. The first step is to leverage systems designed to make video production cheaper. For example, online video creation tools make it possible to create videos quickly by using pre-made templates. You’ll pay a low monthly fee for most of these tools.

The second step is to hire someone to upload your videos. Hire someone competent who can get in the groove and work quickly. Whether you pay hourly or a flat rate per video upload is up to you. However, you don’t need to pay a big salary for this task. 

The key to getting good people to perform cheap work is to make sure the work remains side work and doesn’t turn into a full-time job. You can’t expect anyone to perform a full day’s worth of cheap work, but some freelancers don’t mind an hour or two of low-paying work when they’re trying to supplement their income. 

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2. Target sub-niche markets

It’s no secret that targeting major markets costs more. Are there any sub-niches you can market to? You can reduce the amount of money you spend on Instagram PPC ads by targeting multiple narrow markets. 

For example, say you sell washable, soft, comfortable wool socks. Split your PPC ads into several sub-niches like people who live in cold climates (like Alaska) and people who want warm socks for winter. Go out on a limb and start educating people who need cool socks for summer. Since wool regulates body temperature, thin wool socks are actually great for keeping feet cool, but many people don’t know this fun fact. 

The more micro-niches you can create within your market, the more variety of ads you can create in less competitive sub-markets.

3. Know how data is collected and analyzed

The data you analyze informs your financial decisions. Are you absolutely certain that your statistical data is accurate? If your data is skewed, exaggerated, or otherwise misinterpreted by automatic programs, some of your Instagram marketing costs could be unsupported.

Computer programs can skew data

Say you look at data that says one of your sponsored Instagram posts achieved a whopping 10% conversion rate. A high conversion rate will influence your decision to:

  • Continue running the ad
  • Run additional ads similar to the original
  • Increase your bid amount
  • Run the same ad on other social media platforms

What would you do if you found out the program calculated your conversion rate by including engagement as a “conversion?” If you define “conversion” only as a sale, lead, or website visit, then your true conversion rate is much lower than 10%. 

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Crunch raw data to verify data accuracy

Do you know for certain that your Instagram data is being accurately analyzed? Unfortunately, numbers can lie. According to a Forrester report, 37% of marketers waste marketing spend due to poor data quality. Sometimes data quality is compromised by human misinterpretation or incomplete data collection, but sometimes it’s the analytics software.

In your analytics program, check out the raw data and manually crunch some numbers to verify the system’s analysis. If you don’t reach the same conclusions seen in graphs and charts, you could be dealing with a flawed analytics program.

Remember to integrate content marketing with PPC ads

You can indirectly lower your cost of Instagram marketing by integrating content marketing into your plan. Content marketing will help you gain rank in the search engines and generate organic traffic you don’t have to pay for. Both PPC ads and content marketing contribute to a well-rounded marketing plan.

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