With about 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is an excellent platform to engage with your audience and tell them more about your business. And it’s not just because of the sheer size of the platform’s userbase — people engage with brands on Instagram 10x more than they do on Facebook.
A fun and effective way for brands and marketers to expand their reach and tap into new engaged audiences is through Instagram sponsored posts.
In this article, we discuss what Instagram sponsored posts are, how to get paid sponsorship opportunities, how much Instagram sponsored posts cost — and more! Let’s get to it.
What is an Instagram sponsored post?
An Instagram sponsored post is a type of ad. The person (or business) posting a sponsored post puts a budget behind it to reach a wider audience.
There are two different kinds of sponsored posts: those that brands pay Instagram for (a.k.a. promoted posts), and those that brands pay influencers for (paid sponsorships).
- Promoted posts, boosted posts, and Instagram advertising: Just like the other major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), Instagram has a native ad management tool. Brands can use it to create custom target audiences based on age, gender, interests, and location and serve sponsored content to these custom audiences.
- Paid sponsorships: This is when a brand pays a user to promote them via Instagram posts. Typically, this user (or influencer) has a personal brand and an engaged follower base of their own. When an influencer finds a brand in their niche that wants to sponsor them, they can charge a certain amount of money to create an organic post that features the brand’s products or services. This way, the influencer exposes the brand to an audience it might not otherwise have had access to.
In this post, we’re focusing on paid sponsorships—the kind where a brand pays an influencer to promote their products and services.
As influencer marketing became an established, valuable area of digital marketing in the last few years, influencers were not being transparent about their partnerships with brands. To reduce this, Instagram put out its branded content features, which allows influencers to tag the brands they’re partnering with on the platform.
What do Instagram sponsored posts look like?
Have you come across posts like this on the Instagram app?
This is an Instagram sponsored post. Paid sponsorship posts like this are usually indicated with a “paid partnership with [brand name]” tag that comes immediately after the user name.
Posts like this give the brands access to the organic insights of posts that they’re tagged in. They can see the date the post went live, the reach, and the engagement the post got. This data can help brands decide which partnerships bring the most…