U Got the Look: How Small Businesses Can Use Native Advertising for Instagram Success

U Got the Look: How Small Businesses Can Use Native Advertising for Instagram Success
You've Got the Look: How Small Businesses Can Use Native Advertising for Instagram Success

Promotional Instagram posts that mimic posts made by individual Instagram users are seen as more trustworthy than straightforward product advertising. New research by Benjamin K Johnson, Bridget Potocki and Jolanda Veldhuis tests this “native advertising” in Instagram against User-Generated Content (UGC) and traditional advertising. Native advertising is defined as:

“…a variety of techniques by which sponsored, commercial messages are crafted to resemble and integrate into non-advertising content (Wojdynski, 2016b), to maximize message effectiveness and minimize audience resistance.”

Ultimately, posts from one’s Instagram friends receive the most engagement, but native ads that mimic posts generated by one’s peer group have more promotional power than overt advertisements.

“User-generated social posts produced more credibility and social comparison than native ads, and native ads produced more credibility and social comparison than advertisements.” 

You've Got the Look: How Small Businesses Can Use Native Advertising for Instagram Success

How to Craft Native Advertising Posts on Instagram

The best way to engage in native advertising on Instagram is to understand your customers’ peer groups and what kind of content they interact with on the platform. The scholarly article “Is That My Friend or an Advert? The Effectiveness of Instagram Native Advertisements Posing as Social Posts” provides tips on post presentation:

“This type of Instagram native advertising uses first-person point-of-view, candid poses, naturalistic light and framing, the platform’s photo filters, and casual text or hashtags, all in order to make posts appear organic and similar to the UGC a friend might post. This strategy of mimicking UGC is not restricted to Instagram, but is prevalent there (Chayka, 2016).”

3 More Stellar Examples of Instagram Marketing

To help you visualize achieving “the look” of Instagram, I included popular posts from Disney and Dictionary.com above. Check out three more recent posts from star Instagram brands WeWork, Airbnb and Oreo.

You've Got the Look: How Small Businesses Can Use Native Advertising for Instagram Success
You've Got the Look: How Small Businesses Can Use Native Advertising for Instagram Success
You've Got the Look: How Small Businesses Can Use Native Advertising for Instagram Success

For more detailed information to help improve your small business Instagram posts, read the full article.

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