Facebook has recently launched Instagram ads — a great new outlet for brands. Instagram is a perfect way to share visual content, reach and interact with potential and existing customers. Despite the abundance of resources on how to build online ads to drive app purchases or online sales, little is said about brick and mortar. It becomes particularly difficult when it comes to conversion tracking, as it’s not as high tech, and above that, bringing someone physically into the store, someone who has never heard of you or your product, can be quite challenging. At Clear-Coat, we do sell products online and Instagram ads would work well to drive online sales, but our main focus is selling our products at mall kiosks. That’s what we are going to focus on in this article.
Many of our kiosk owners across the globe already utilize Instagram in some capacity. We can draw parallels of what is considered to be a great image on Instagram and a great product at the kiosk. For instance, all successful mall kiosk products share key ingredients, such as mass appeal and impulse purchases (If you want to read up on must have ingredients that all successful mall kiosk have in common, read this blog post). Well, Instagram is sort of like that too. If you look at all branded product images that drive the most engagement, you will see that they have the same mass appeal quality that fulfills our need for instant gratification. So, you opened up a mall kiosk and need to let as many people know that you are here without breaking the bank. Here is how you do it with Instagram ads.
A quick note: you will need a Facebook page and Instagram for your business already set up. You will also need a mobile friendly website or a landing page with more information about your kiosk, products and how to find you etc. You can use a free landing page builder with Wix, here is how to.
[cs_kioskkevin_880]
Step One. Take an awesome, high-res picture of your product. If you are in the mall kiosk business like us, chances are the products you sell belong to one specific category. We sell screen and full body protection for virtually any smartphone, tablet or watch. In this case, we decided to showcase how great Clear-Coat looks on the iPad.
Step Two. Create an Instagram Ad.
Head over to Facebook ads manager and hit “Create a new ad”. Select “Send people to your website” from the list of available options.
Step Three. Set Audience and Budget. Select the location that is close to your mall kiosk location. You can choose to target the entire city or as close as your zip code. In this case, since I’ve never done Instagram Ads, I’d like to throw a wider net to see what works and what doesn’t and improve from there, so I selected the whole city with a potential reach of 390,000 people. I am also betting on the fact that no one else has the same type of product near by, so people might be willing to drive over. Same for age and other demographics — our products have mass appeal, so I didn’t adjust anything this time.
Step Four. Write great copy that goes along with your product picture.
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Deactivate all feeds, except Instagram.
An extra point: Create a unique hashtag specific to your campaign. In my case, it was #clearcoatme. So, if the person clicks on the hashtag, they can see, how awesome Clear-Coat looks on other devices too.
Step Five. Stay on top of the comments. This is crucial to make this campaign succeed. For the period of one week this ad has generated quite a few comments. Most of them, if not all of them, were purchase driven. Where exactly are you located? Do you have Clear-Coat for my device? Which number can I call your store? Etc.
I didn’t stop there. For the sake of curiosity, I ran a similar ad on Facebook and Instagram really crushed it. For the same amount, it generated 5 times more views and the engagement went through the roof. Those were the people who would otherwise never heard about us. We even made some sales!
| Conversion | Website Clicks | Reach | Cost Per Click | Post likes | Comments | In-Store Purchases | Amount Spent | |
| | click to website | 375 | 11,981 | $0.12 | 10 | 0 | n/a | $45 |
| | click to website | 368 | 50,634 | $0.13 | 1,000+ | 15 | 6 | $45 |
Improvements
While both campaigns generated clicks to the website, it was hard to determine if it drove any conversions. In the future, I will create a coupon that will be placed on the landing page with a limited time offer to help track this.
Building an audience on Instagram should always be on the radar — it takes a lot of time and participation, but once you’ve built it you will see the fruits of your labor via your customer engagement and sales. We’d love to hear from you – are you using Instagram ads? Has it helped you gain traction?
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