Having a strong social media presence across major platforms is no longer optional for businesses to survive and thrive. Contrary to traditional marketing approaches, ads that are run on Instagram and Facebook helps in generating leads, increasing sales, brand awareness, and more. However, it can be confusing whether to invest time trying to increase engagement on Facebook or run ads to gain engagement on Instagram. To answer your dilemma, here’s a comparison of Facebook ads vs. Instagram ads to help you decide which one is best for brands.
AD FORMATS
Facebook Ads offers its users various ad formats to experiment with, each serving a different agenda. Brands can go for video ads, image ads, carousel ads, offer ads, slideshow ads, canvas experience ads, and more. This results in a remarkably high ROI through Facebook Ads and the chance to increase engagement on Facebook through multiple options.
Whereas, Instagram offers its users a very limited range of options to choose from. The 4 types of ads that you can choose on Instagram are video ads, image ads, stories ads, and carousel ads. But despite having limited options, the Instagram Stories Ads alone has a significantly high CTR and 23% high conversion rate as compared to feed ads.
INDUSTRY
The industry of your business can have an impact on the platform that you choose to prioritize. If you want to increase likes on Facebook, you need to see whether your competitors in the industry have a prominent FB presence or not. If you deal in automobiles, media, real estate, etc., running FB ads might help you more.
For visual, aesthetic, and hip products like fashion, or food; Instagram is hands down one of the best marketing platforms for this purpose. This might be because Instagram is heavily dominated by youngsters having an interest in these niches, making it easier to gain engagement on Instagram.
CONTENT
Content plays a key role in differentiating between Facebook and Instagram. Instagram is known for its aesthetics, and Facebook can be preferred for its information. So if you want to run ads that require you to put out more information in the form of texts, Facebook will let you draw more focus. Moreover, you can also insert links in Facebook Ads.
If you have some great quality and aesthetically pleasing images for your advertising campaign, it will be more fruitful to gain engagement on Instagram ads. You can flaunt and fully utilize the potential of compelling images and videos along with catchy and short captions.
OBJECTIVE AND EFFECTIVE TARGETING
Different platforms serve different purposes, and it’s vital to determine your campaign objectives before deciding your priority platform. Know your advertising objective; whether it is to generate leads, create brand awareness, drive traffic to the website, and increase engagements. Facebook has more options for advanced targeting that covers a range of objectives. If you want to divert traffic to the website or generate leads, Facebook Ads do a well-rounded job.
Instagram Ads should undoubtedly be your number one option to create brand awareness through multimedia and gain a wider reach. Because there’s more scope to gain engagement on Instagram, Instagram ads are also useful in generating leads. However, Instagram ads on the mobile application don’t consist of advance targeting features.
TARGET AUDIENCE AND BRAND AWARENESS
Knowing your target audience and demographics is key to make your advertisement reach the right people who’re actually interested in similar content. Facebook includes a large variety of audiences belonging to different age groups and all genders. However, Facebook usage has dropped significantly by the younger generation, especially Gen-Z with the rise of other trending platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.
On the other hand, Instagram is the go-to platform for Gen-Z and millennials globally. So if your target audience primarily constitutes of teenagers and young adults, it might be easier to gain engagement on Instagram and increase brand awareness.
ENGAGEMENTS
How users interact with your posts through likes, comments, shares, and more is an important statistic for most brands. Although Facebook has more active users, it is not a cakewalk to increase engagement on Facebook. It is seldom that brands are likely to receive thousands of likes and shares.
Being a visual platform, it is easier to gain engagement on Instagram through eye-catching ads. Moreover, it is also easier to build up organic engagement, making Instagram one of the most engaging social media platforms.
PRICING
If executed smartly, Instagram and Facebook ads are quite budget-friendly. Considering the high ROI and CTR, they have proven to be better and more worthy than traditional marketing campaigns. The price that you will have to pay to run Facebook Ad depends on several factors and may be more cost effective than Instagram ads. Ad objective, audience, ad quality, industry, and bidding type are some factors that fluctuate the cost of running Facebook Ad campaigns. Similarly, audience, industry type, ad feedback, etc. are some factors that determine the price of running Instagram Ads.
CONCLUSION
Considering the vast pool of features provided by Facebook, running Facebook ads may seem like a wiser choice. However, it’s unwise to keep all your eggs in one basket, especially when Instagram offers various considerable benefits. At the end of the day, it all boils down to the nature and objectives of your business. So before you make a hefty investment; plan out your goals, experiment, analyze and prioritize accordingly!