When it comes to social media marketing, Instagram is one of the best places to spend your budget. On the whole, Instagram influencers are authentic and engaging, and partnering with them can offer a great return on investment.
There are many different ways to approach Instagram marketing, but today, we’ll be focusing on Instagram branded content. It’s one of the most popular and effective strategies used by brands on the platform.
In this article, we’ll be covering everything you need to know about Instagram branded content. You’ll learn what it is, why it’s important, and how to successfully implement it into your strategy.
Table of Contents
What is Instagram branded content?
Branded content on Instagram refers to any content that’s been paid for by a brand. This means that the creator is receiving something in exchange for publishing the content.
Most commonly, they get a monetary fee. But sending them gifts or products for content can also be considered a form of compensation.
Anytime there’s an exchange of value for branded content, the influencers are legally required to disclose their partnership. Instagram’s branded content tool is one way of doing this.
When the creator uses the branded content tool, their content will be labeled with a “paid partnership” tag. This way, their followers know they’ve received some sort of incentive to share the content.
Using the branded content tool will also allow brands to monitor the post and utilize it in their own social media accounts. But we’ll dive into this a bit later.
Why use branded content?
Branded content offers many unique benefits that you can’t replicate with ads. Here are some reasons why branded content is so useful.
It has better reach and engagement
One of the first tasks any brand needs to do is to build a presence on social media. But this goes much further than just creating accounts and posting regularly.
Sure, sharing content with your existing followers on Instagram is essential, but branded content can help propel your brand into the limelight and capture the attention of new audiences.
By creating branded content with influencers, you can reach whole new demographics of followers that aren’t only engaged with the influencers. They’ll also be interested in what your brand has to offer.
The average micro-influencer has between 10,000 – 100,000 followers, and macro-influencers have 100,000 – 1,000,000. That’s a lot of potential customers that your branded posts can reach.
Plus, you can supercharge that reach even further by turning your Instagram branded content into branded content ads.
It’s more authentic and trustworthy
It’s no secret that word of mouth is one of the best ways to market a brand or product. That‘s exactly what branded content can offer to you.
With Instagram branded content, real people share their real experiences with their followers. For that reason, it’s highly effective.
Good influencers spend massive amounts of time and energy carefully nurturing their following and building loyal, engaged communities. Because of this, their followers view them as authentic and trustworthy.
As a result, any sort of product or brand endorsement from them has a big impact on their following.
For their followers, it’s like receiving a recommendation from a trusted friend, as opposed to seeing an ad from a business.
It’s non-invasive
Traditional advertising, like banner ads, can rub people up the wrong way due to its invasive nature.
With branded content, you don’t have to worry about this. Branded posts from influencers fit seamlessly into their followers’ Instagram feed, which makes it less likely that they’ll feel put out by the advertising.
When influencers share branded content, their ads are also much more appealing and personal.
It creates emotional connections
Branded content is one of the best ways to create true emotional connections with potential customers. One of the main features of branded content is storytelling.
Influencers are expert storytellers. By collaborating with them, they can craft a story of your brand through content.
They’ll be able to creatively explain the vision of your brand, and go into detail about how your product has impacted their lives. This adds an emotional aspect to the ads, which can be difficult to achieve with other forms of advertising.
What’s the Instagram branded content tool?
The Instagram branded content tool is a tool designed to help influencers and brands collaborate on branded content. It does two core things:
- Makes it easy for influencers to disclose their sponsorships when sharing branded content
- Allows brands to access insights and track the content’s performance
When using the branded content tool, the content will have a paid partnership tag that says: “In partnership with {brand}.” It’ll be directly linked to your Instagram account, which makes it super easy for interested followers to navigate there.
What can you do with the branded content tool?
Here’s a rundown of everything you can do with the branded content tool.
Approve a branded content partner on Instagram
You’ll have control over who can tag you in Instagram branded content.
Once you’ve organized a partnership with an influencer, you can go to your brand’s Instagram and approve that influencer as a branded content partner. This ensures that users can’t simply tag you in branded posts without being approved first.
To use this feature, you’ll need to change a setting on your Instagram business account:
1. Go to your profile and click on the 3 vertical lines on the top right
2. Select Settings
3. Select Business
4. Go to Branded content
5. Toggle the Require Approvals on
6. Tap Approved Business Partners, and search for the influencer you want to approve
View branded content insights from your Facebook page
One of the most useful features of the branded content tool is its insights feature. Using your Facebook page, you can track insights from Instagram posts that your brand is tagged in.
This means that you can analyze how well the influencers’ content is performing, which can help you to adapt and improve your strategy.
For tags in posts, you’ll be able to track insights, such as engagement and reach, for an unlimited amount of time. For tags in stories, you’ll be able to track reach, taps, exits, and replies for 14-days after they go live.
To do this:
1. Go to your brand’s Facebook page and select Insights in the sidebar menu
2. Then, click on Branded Content
View branded content insights in Business Manager
You can also use Facebook Business Manager to view branded content insights. You’ll have access to the same metrics as you would when viewing it via a Facebook page.
As long as you’ve added your Instagram account to Business Manager, you’ll able to see all your branded content insights by going to your Business Manager and clicking Measure and Report > Branded Content.
Set up branded content ads
Setting up branded content ads is a great way to increase the reach and ROI on your influencer marketing efforts. Using the branded content tool, influencers can allow you to repurpose their content as ads on Instagram.
You can create ads using Ads Manager. But you’ll first need to ensure that the influencer has enabled your business to promote the content and that the content meets the advertising guidelines.
Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to do, but there are quite a few steps to follow. Thankfully, Instagram has provided a step-by-step guide on how to set up branded content ads, which can be found here.
Measure branded content ad performance
Once your ads have gone live, you’ll be able to track its performance using Ads Manager.
The influencer will be able to view the ad insights in the same way that they would with organic posts.
For brands, you’ll only get to view insights that are linked to the performance of the ads. But you can still use these insights to get an idea of how successful the branded content was.
How to use Instagram branded content in your ad strategy
One of the best things about branded content on Instagram is that you can incorporate it into your wider advertising strategy.
You can repurpose the influencers’ best performing branded content as ads to reach audiences beyond their followers. Facebook Business Manager allows you to set up your ad campaigns to target specific, relevant audiences, to ensure the content reaches the people you want it to reach.
You can also redistribute your Instagram branded content in ads outside the Instagram platform to increase brand awareness.
You’ll also be able to generate social proof by sharing content from reputable influencers. For instance, you can share their content on your website and other social channels.
In addition to this, you can use the content from the influencers as a way to scale your ad creatives for future campaigns.
The possibilities really are endless when it comes to Instagram branded content!
