6 Creative Strategies for Lead Generation with Instagram Ads

Instagram offers a wealth of features to businesses seeking to grow and generate leads in 2020. As well as free creative elements such as Stories or Stickers, it also offers a sophisticated paid ad system that lets you reach your target audience and drive leads with accuracy and success.

With so many B2B brands using these ads to generate leads, only the creative stand out. With that, read on for six creative strategies for lead generation with Instagram ads.

1. Embrace retargeting for persistent messaging

Retargeting lets you follow your audience wherever they go online, helping you hammer your message home through a sustained ad campaign across multiple platforms.

Cascade your Instagram ad across Facebook using Custom Audiences. This is straightforward to do, and you can show different ads to different people based on how they reacted to your ads too. You could even extend your retargeting to email too for a more inclusive and far-reaching strategy.

This lets you create a holistic strategy that gives your message maximum reach across a variety of platforms. As a result, you can create a persistent and cohesive ad strategy that stays in your audience’s minds, regardless of where they are online.

2. Step up your video creation strategy

Video is a powerful content format that offers an array of ways for brands to connect with audiences. From explainer videos to Q&As, video provides a variety of avenues through which you can hit your marketing goals.

In terms of lead generation, your Instagram video ads should follow a narrative for best results. Open with a hook — a statistic, pain point, or curiosity-inciting question — and explore it through personal anecdotes or human stories.

Your video should then build up to reach out to the viewers, placing them in the story. Ask them a question that relates to their role and position your product or service as a natural solution to the problem articulated in the narrative.

3. Break down walls with humor

Humor is an effective marketing strategy, regardless of industry or consumer type. It’s universal and appeals to customers across the board.

Further to this, evoking humor breaks down emotional barriers and makes people more susceptible to a message. This means your ads will have more impact and are more likely to land with your audience as a result.

Humor is especially effective in the B2B sector, as an opportunity to tap into industry in-jokes and niche humor. Reference common industry jokes and pepper in some tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating humor in your ads.

4. Get creative with carousels

What sets Instagram ads apart from other social platforms is the sheer variety of formats you have access to:

• Slideshows
• Videos
• Stories

Carousels are simple effects that offer lots of potential for brands seeking to generate leads. A straightforward multi-slide ad provides you with more space and creative flex to hook audiences and increase conversions.

Use carousels to tell a story using multiple images, with each image building on the one that precedes it. For instance, your first slide could highlight a pain point your target audience has — for example, an emotive image or a hard-hitting statistic presented as a graphic.

You could then build on this on your second slide by presenting your product or service as a direct solution to that problem.

The key is to keep it simple and use concise copy to convey your brand’s value. Aim for short and snappy headlines focusing on key points to quickly summarize how your product can help your target audience.

5. Let UGC build trust and value

While user-generated content (UGC) is frequently leveraged in B2C industries, B2B brands can also use this for lead generation.

Indeed, UGC is perfect for providing value and authority to more niche B2B products (for instance, SaaS products), and customers who share their experiences of your products helps new prospective customers engage with them.

And UGC lends itself particularly well to Instagram ads. The platform is replete with user-led content, so your ads can nestle natively alongside them without feeling overtly salesy.

Reach out to your existing customer base and encourage them to share their experiences of your product.

This could be done as a survey to get some useful quotes, but to take it further, invite your customers to submit video testimonials instead (in return for a discounted product or another incentive).

User-generated testimonial video carries more weight due to its informal, home-produced feel. It doesn’t feel brand-led and is more trustworthy as a result.

6. Lean on hard-hitting facts and stats

As any journalist will tell you, one of the best ways to grab your audience is through a hard-hitting fact or statistic. A single stat is enough to stop a user in their tracks while scrolling Instagram — providing its powerful and relevant.

Conduct original research (or find existing data elsewhere) and pick out one or two points that speak to your target audience’s pain points. Find those relevant statistics that matter to your target audience and give you an in for marketing your product or service.

Combine this with power words such as “missing out” or “warning” to further pique your audience’s interest. This needles their emotions and ensures your ad stays in their minds, even if they don’t click-through.

The best Instagram ads are creative and diverse, employing variety and uniqueness to hook audiences and generate leads. Follow the tips above and create a fluid, diverse Instagram ad strategy that gets you new customers in 2020.