What are Branded Content Ads on Facebook/Instagram?
According to Facebook, Branded content is a creator or publisher’s content that features or is influenced by a business partner for an exchange of value.
Creators and brands often work together on producing content to promote a service or product. To simplify this process, Facebook has allowed brands to create ads in Ads Manager, on behalf of the creator (with their permission of course).
What do branded content ads look like?
They look like this:
Why Use Branded Content Ads on Instagram?
1. It gives brands access to the post’s insights directly in their Facebook Page Insights.
2. It enables brands to easily share their brand story to a bigger audience in partnership with a creator
3. It’s an easy way to share user-generated content at large
4. It amplifies your influencer campaigns
5 Best Practices for a Successful Branded Content Campaign
From our experience, branded content ads can be a powerful tool. Bloom collaborated with a jewelry brand and used branded content ads to amplify its influencer campaigns.
Here are five tips to ensure your branded content campaign is a success.
Tip 1: Add Specific UTMs
Chances are influencers promoting your product will redirect their audiences to your website through a swipe-up link or a link in their bio. Adding a UTM to their link will help track how their content performs and its impact on your marketing KPIs (sales, website visits, time on site, etc.).
Use this tool to create your UTM and follow this setup:
- Source: instagram
- Medium: influencer
- Campaign: influencer’s name
Tip 2: Ask For Approval Early
In order to use branded content on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll need to ask your influencer for approval. Make sure to inform your creator of the process early on so they know what to expect and your campaign isn’t delayed due to missing approvals.
To do so, send them these steps.
Tip 3: Pick the Right Campaign Objective
When creating your branded content ads, we recommend prioritizing brand awareness and conversion objectives over post engagement.
If your marketing objective is to generate awareness or shift perceptions, the brand awareness objective would be the appropriate choice. If you are looking to generate sales from branded content, choose the conversion objective instead.
The post engagement objective will optimize delivery to users who are most likely to engage with your ads. That said, a user can notice and be persuaded by your ad without engaging with it through likes, comments and shares. And, according to Facebook, brand awareness optimization drove 60% higher ad recall versus page engagement.
Tip 4: Leverage The Influencer’s Audience
The main benefit of creating branded content ads is access to your influencers’ followers. Selecting this audience is often very effective as users are already accustomed to seeing this creator’s posts in their feed. Also, they most likely already trust their opinion.
Tip 5: Make Sure Your Content Looks Native
For branded content to work as best as possible, your creative needs to feel native and authentic. Give your influencers creative freedom and don’t try to make your content look like a very polished formal ad.
For additional questions on branded content, feel free to reach out to us.
