Drawbacks of Instagram Ads

Introduction

 

In the last decade, there have come more ways to market the fashion brand businesses. The picture at the right shows the ways, how to conduct marketing through instagram. These ways are very less cost effective, which makes it popular world wide.

Social media platform like Instagram have made astonishing records in terms of web trafficking, business and customer engagement in online retail sector. There are over 100 million active users only on Instagram platform. 60% of the total 100 million are daily users, while 90% of them are under 35 years old males, females and others. It has bee estimated that 50% of the total 100 million users, use Instagram as a market research tool. While 48.8% of the total brands have online presence on Instagram. 90% of these brands count to be the most popular brands across the

globe (Marketing, 2018).

News

Lately, Instagram has introduced new tools to increase its advertising capabilities within the platform. Power Editor and Ads Manager have been mitigated within the platform as advertising tools to help social marketers and small businesses reach their potential customers on Instagram.  The prices of posting ads on Insta are relatively low, with an average cost of 0.20 – 0.40 dollars per click (Solberg, 2015).

Draw Backs

Sounds very promising and cheap right? However, some rumors say that they receive Post mates’ ad on their Insta. People who sometimes receive an ad based on their clicks are not creating what they call organic web trafficking. Apparently, if I click on one of these pop ups ads, it only records data, but does not increase its appearance around my friends or for specific demographics for example. So it only appears limitedly, thus who only click on it and if I decide to tag my friends, it will redirect them to a similar ad but not necessarily the same one (Ahmad, Ashiq and Salman, 2015).

 

 Here are some drawbacks of Instagram ads:

 

1-High Engagement level vs. low conversion level: Instagram visuals have high engagement level when it comes to its user experience with sharing, liking and commenting. However, it is almost impossible to convert these users into dollars, or cents. Liking and sharing are easy tasks that do not require any additional payments. Perhaps the only way to trigger a user is by posting what they really need to have in hand such as Nike shoes or Apple tablet.  Brands that have loyal customers are ought to have stronger advantage when they post a visual art with their brand logo on it. Still it is not possible to measure the behaviors that a post wants to drive into buying customer.  In this case Instagram marketers cannot relay to track customer behavior because it may change depending on seasonality, inflation, deflation and many other factors that could influence the market and its users.

2-Brand enforcement level: An Instagram post can deliver a brand image that does not correlate with its real purpose or feeling. For example everyone in early 2012 believed that Nike manufactures its products in un-ethical manner due to the child labor story (Nisen, 2013).

 

 

(Nisen, 2013)

Guess what! It went all over the place in Insta. People were posting it and making all kinds of rude comments about Nike and their falsely brand image.

In the other hand, Instagram was convinced to obey Nikes’ orders and erase every single post that had to do with posts that could damage the brands reputation. So I do not know if Instagram is a becoming a platform in favor of society or in favor to business interests?

 

3-Providig false information through Intsagram -This may sound like a positive indication, but it is also an issue because someone like Kylie Jenner can influence over 2 millions of people about false information regarding a product, or service. The wide spreading popularity of instagram could be used as a digital platform where users spread false information, which could be harmful for both digital and real life business platforms. As it let’s people tailor their data according to the targeted audience although its takes a lot of effort and time to create the right content that captures the right market audience.

 

 

 

References

Ahmad, N., Ashiq, R. and Salman, A. (2015). The Impact of Social Media on Fashion Industry: Empirical Investigation from Karachiites. Research Gate, 7, 2015(ISSN 2422-8397).

 

Solberg, A. (2015). The Downside of Instagram Ads. [online] Social Media Today. Available at: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/downside-instagram-ads [Accessed 5 Mar. 2020].

 

Nisen, M. (2013). How Nike Solved Its Sweatshop Problem. [online] Business Insider. Available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-nike-solved-its-sweatshop-problem-2013-5?international=true&r=US&IR=T [Accessed 5 Mar. 2020].

 

Marketing, B. (2018). Advantages and Disadvantages of Instagram and How to Leverage Them | Burkhart Marketing. [online] Burkhart Marketing. Available at: http://burkhartmarketing.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-instagram-and-how-to-leverage-them/ [Accessed 5 Mar. 2020].

 

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