How to promote a post on Instagram? 16 easy steps for promotion

In my previous posts I have talked about everything from promoting small business on Instagram to using new platforms like reels for business promotion. This post is very vital as all the efforts that you are putting for promoting your business on Instagram could not give desired result due to limited reach. This post will talk about How to promote a post on Instagram in order to reach new and relevant audience

How to promote a post on Instagram is also known as boosting on Instagram. Here is a complete guide for you on What is boosting on Instagram . Now, before moving to how to promote a post on Instagram, it is important to know why boosting is important for your business

• To increase the reach of your posts
• Recent updates in algorithm has limited your posts reach. To improve the reach one needs to experiment a lot with content and see what works for your audience. Beside experimenting with content one can do boosting too. If not all but some posts can be boosted for better engagement. Read this blog on why to boost Instagram post – 5 posts to consider for boosting
• Reach more relevant people with detailed targeting
• Get Insights on your content and work towards betterment

As mentioned in earlier posts, content is really important for engagement and impact. So, one need to focus on quality, useful and engaging content for your brand. Boosting is secondary and to be chosen when one is done with all kind of experimentation and thinks the algorithm is no longer working in favor.

Let’s move to main section of this blog post “How to promote a post on Instagram”

Here we will be discussing step by step guide on boosting. Before boosting it is important to note that one needs to have public account on Instagram before boosting any post. Now, let’s move to step by step guide

Step 1: Visit your profile section(Start with how to promote a post on Instagram by this step)

Edit Profile section is available below your name and bio. You can click on edit profile and you will get an option to switch to professional account. Make sure yo do this while you are logged in to your business/brand page not your personal profile. Check the screenshot below for better clarity

Step 2: Click continue after going through the following

Once you click on switch to professional tools, Instagram showcases the benefits of switching to professional account which are following

• Get professional tools

• Learn about your followers

• Reach more people

• Get new contact options

We will discuss about these features in details in later sections

Step 3: Select a category for your business

Now comes the step where we need to select category for a business. It is an important step of how to promote a post on Instagram as right category will help Instagram select right audience in case you choose automated targeting.

There are ample of category to choose from. You can choose the most related one for your business. For example, a dietician can choose health/beauty, a clothing page can choose clothing as a category, for ahead with digital page we can either choose education or blogger as category.
Choose well for your brand/business.

Step 4: Once category is chosen, you can select to display category label or not

If you want to show your category on your business page you can click on display category label. Then your category will be visible to your audience.

Step 5: Choose between creator & business (Important pointer to note while promoting a post on Instagram)

Based on the category that was chosen before one needs to fill the field here. There are two options creator & business

• Creator: If you are creating content on your page for your audience then you will fall under this category. However, some businesses show themselves as creator because of flexibility creator profile provides with respect to promotion
• Business profile: This is chosen most of the time by businesses. To use most of the features on Instagram one needs to have business profile

Note: Both the accounts can be used for promotion but some features are available on one and some are not. Since this field can be changed anytime one doesn’t need to worry about it.

Below screenshot shows the final welcome message you will be shown when done with all the profile set up.

Now your page is ready for boosting. You have completely fulfilled the prerequisites for promoting a post on Instagram

Let’s move to the other important part of how to promote a post on Instagram that is how to start promotion of an individual post. Here we will be discussing everything related to targeting – what all needs to be selected for accurate targeting of audience in order to reach business goal

Step 6: Make sure you have profile picture

Usually people create page and do organic promotion first. They experiment with content a lot and focus on improving performance. Once done with all experimentation and reach the stagnancy then start with paid promotion. And this is the ideal case. In case you want to learn How to promote a small business on Instagram organically, read this post

If you have just created a page and thinking of promotion on Instagram then you must have profile picture. See the screenshot below. Promote button is not clickable and showing message of updating profile picture

Step 7: Click on promote below your post

As discussed in the last pointer, once profile picture is updated we can see promote button is clickable now. One can start with Instagram promotion. Stay tuned for step by step guide on How to promote a post on Instagram

After clicking on promote button, there will be various fields that need to be filled. All fields are discussed in below sections. The list is as below

• Goal setting
• Target audience
• Creation of audience
• Choose audience name
• Target location
• Targeting basis interest
• Age and gender selection
• Budget and duration selection
• Payment method

Step 8: How to select Goal for your promotion

Goal setting is the major part of campaign creation. It will determine the performance of your campaign, Instagram allows us to have following goals

• More profile visits: This will show your ad with CTA as visit profile. Your audience after clicking this ad will be able to see your Instagram page. This is best suited for engagement like Likes, comments & more followers
• More website visits: Most of businesses have social media channels just for branding. Provisions like order placement, tracking of orders, services details are present on the website. In such cases one can choose website clicks as an objective. These ads have CTA as visit website. This is same as what we see in our stories and timelines more often especially after visiting any particular website or e-commerce portals like Myntra, Amazon.

• More messages: One needs to select this as a goal when objective is is enquires & one on one interaction. This is really important as this can help in knowing your customer, what they actually want and also can help in building content for social media

Step 9: Target audience for Instagram your promotion

Instagram like other advertising platforms help us in doing very specific targeting. We can target people who will be actually interested in our product or service(very important to understand for how to promote a post on Instagram). We will learn about the same in following topics but for now let’s discuss automatic & manual ads

• Automatic Ads – This is simple to do you can select this option as shown below and give budget to Instagram. Rest job is with Instagram. It can target people similar as your followers. This is not recommended at early stage because most of time followers are friends or family. So, choosing this option will not help in targeting potential audience of your business
• Create your own or Manual ads – In below sections we will learn how to create your own ad. This is really important as the more precise your targeting is and the more leads you will get that too at low price. So let’s learn how to create your own audience

Step 10: Audience creation

After clicking on create your own ad we can see the below screen for create audience. All the fields need to be filled correctly for accurate targeting. Let’s discuss the same in below sections

Step 11: Choose audience name

We have a provision of creating multiple audience for our page. So we need to have a proper name for our audience so that we can differentiate one from the rest. So it is better to have main difference in audience name. For example you wish to promote one Instagram post to peopleof age group 18 -30 and other to 31-50 then you can name one audience as Promotion_Age_18-30 and other as Promotion_Age_31-50. You can name anything which helps you differentiate

Step 12: Target locationthat is best fit for your business

Location targeting help us in targeting our audience geographically. Imagine targeting audience in New York while sitting in Delhi. Such is the power. We have two option in location targeting – One is regional targeting and other is local targeting.

• Regional Targeting – One can simply add locations and regions and target people in these location for your business. There is an audience size which is mentioned in below screenshot which determine how many people can be targeted in added locations. More specific targeting you do this audience size will reduce but will become more specific. Here, we have added metro cities in our targeting.

• Local Targeting– This is also called radius targeting. Here we can select a location and target area around it. For example, if you have a general store in Rajouri, Delhi, you can target people around Rajouri within radius of 2-3 Km or even larger.

Step 13: Targeting basis Interest

To make your targeting more precise, it is important to select right set of interests. As shown below, Instagram have plethora of options for interests. One needs to select interests basis category of business. For example, for dietician, interests can be health, food, healthy diet, health club etc. Similarly for clothing brand, interests can be fashion enthusiasts etc. One can select multiple interests so include all the relevant interests for your business.

See below some of the options that are selected for interests

Step 14: Age & Gender selection

Now the other targeting option is basis Age & Gender. We can target audience of any age form 13 to 65

Simply by scrolling blue line you can select any age group. For example, in below screenshot age group of 43-65 is selected and both male & female are included in targeting. One can select any age group can target any one gender too (if required)

Step 15: Budget and duration

Here is another very important step of how to promote a Instagram post. In this step we need to select budget and duration of your targeting. By selecting all the above mentioned fields, you can see Instagram automatically suggests budget for promotion. This will vary basis the audience you select. It is not necessary to go with budget suggested by Instagram instead you can adjust the budget and duration by simply sliding blue icon.

Recommendation for selecting budget and duration

To see the effect of promotion and audience that you have created, I recommend to start with the small budget. For example, we can start with Rs. 150 budget duration of 2-3 days and target can be one to two cities. This can help us know how the campaign is performing and basis that we can alter targeting and budgets. And yes, budget and targeting can be altered at any stage

Step 16: See how the review of your promotion looks

Now you can cross check all the selected fields in this step – Goal, audience, budget and duration. The only step that is remaining is payment. Let’s move to next section for details.

Step 17: Payment method (make a note while looking for how to promote a post on Instagram)

See the screenshot below for reference, you can see payment options we have for Instagram promotion. Select the one which is most suitable and start your first promotion. All the best 🙂

This blog posts on How to promote a post on Instagram is mainly for boosting or in simple words promotion of your posts on your page. There is one more provision to run ads on Instagram and that is through Facebook. We will discuss about it in another posts. Till then stay tuned and subscribe to ahead with digital

Note: All the screenshots in this post (how to promote a post on Instagram) is taken from ahead with digital Instagram account

Read more related blog posts (more related topics to How to promote a post on Instagram)

Instagram promotion for free – 5 things that you are doing wrong
How to use Instagram reels for business promotion
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How to promote a small business on Instagram
What is boosting on Instagram
Why to boost Instagram post – 5 posts to consider for boosting