Anyone with a business knows that you can’t survive without a social media presence, and out of all the social media platforms, Instagram is the best for marketing.
What makes Instagram so unique is not necessarily the number of people who use the platform, but rather how they interact with it. Engagement is the name of the game in social media, and engagement is not just about eyes—it’s about clicks, likes, and comments. But how much does it cost to get that engagement?
Different Methods Have Different Costs
Advertising on Instagram can be done in one of three ways—you can run ads directly through Instagram, you can pay an Instagram influencer to showcase your product, or you can pay different pages to share your post. The last method requires the help of a freelance Instagram marketer to make contact with pages you want to work with and to negotiate fair market rates.
Ads on Instagram
Don’t let influencers persuade you to ignore plain and simple Instagram advertising. One of the reasons why Instagram is good for marketing is because Instagram’s advertising system makes it easy to either boost a post you’ve made or run a custom advertisement you’ve uploaded.
Not only is it easy to choose what to showcase, you can also tell Instagram exactly how much you want to spend. Set a budget and end time for your ad campaign, and Instagram will end the campaign when your ad budget has been used up or when the ad has expired.
Once the ad campaign is finished, Instagram will notify you and you can choose to extend it, if you wish. Instagram will also provide helpful statistics on how many people saw your post and engaged with it so that you can decide if the post got the results you wanted or if you need to try something else.
Pay an Influencer
This cost is 100% variable depending on who the influencer is, what type of product you are offering, and what exactly you want the influencer to showcase. Unless you’re a major brand, you probably aren’t going to be featuring your product with any A-list Instagram influencers just yet.
Even Influencers with follower counts in the low 10,000s can demand a hefty sum if they have enough engagement. That said, having influential people make an impassioned pitch for your product or service can lead to some serious return on investment if you choose wisely.
Pay Big Pages to Share Your Post or Give You a Shoutout
This is a tedious route, but it can lead to a massive amount of clicks. The trick to this kind of advertising is to find pages that have lots of followers, are in your product or service niche, or have your target demographic as followers. They could be other businesses, pages that share tips about your niche, or popular pages that share content related to your business.
Then, it’s all about direct messaging those pages and asking them their rates for mentioning your business. You should be prepared to pay via PayPal or other online systems, as these page owners may be located all around the world.
Still, how do you find the right pages, and how do you find the right page for the right price? This is something that has to be learned over time, and only a professional knows exactly how to distinguish a quality Instagram page from a spam page. That’s where Guru freelancers come in!
Hire an Instagram Marketing Professional
On Guru, you can browse our catalog of thousands of Instagram marketing professionals. Browse around, read testimonials, and see how much experience each professional has. Once you’ve found a marketing professional you’d like to work with, you can explain exactly what you want to achieve with your brand and what your budget is. Once the Instagram professional you’ve chosen is on board, they can take care of the heavy lifting so you can focus on running your business.
