Boosted posts are an excellent way to grow your Instagram following or to direct traffic toward your business website. For newer accounts especially, boosting your content allows you to reach a wider audience that you might not necessarily be reaching with hashtags. However, just mindlessly throwing money behind your posts will not necessarily bring your page the attention it deserves. By having clear knowledge of your goals, audience, and content, you can make sure you are optimizing your boosting strategy as much as possible.

With that, here are some ways you can improve your approach:

Have a Clear Goal in Mind

When promoting your post, Instagram prompts you to select a goal: more profile visits, more website visits, or more messages. Each of these goals is equally valuable to growing your business, and in order to determine which goal aligns best with your posts, we recommend you examine the nature of the content you are producing.

For example, a social media giveaway typically requires entrants to be following the page of the person hosting the giveaway. If you want to promote your giveaways, we suggest selecting “more profile visits” as your goal, so Instagram will target people more likely to follow your page. In a similar manner, if you are promoting a specific product in your post, we suggest choosing “more website visits” as your goal, so Instagram will target users more likely to follow through to your website and examine the rest of your inventory. If you want to make more connections, perhaps “more messages” would be another valuable goal.

Know Your Audience

Instagram also gives you the opportunity to define an audience for your boosted post. While an “automatic” tool is provided, we recommend entering your target demographic manually as you start out. This is especially helpful if you want to target a specific location when your post contains content pertaining to a local event. You can also target your followers based on age, so if your post is more fitting for a younger or older demographic, you can optimize your reach. As for the “interests” section, we suggest you input a range of general to more niche, specific interests for your audience, similar to the way we recommend you write hashtags.

You can also create multiple different demographics, so if you ever plan on boosting a certain post again or boosting similar content, you’ll already have a target audience curated for you.

Boost Posts That Perform Well

While this advice seems pretty straightforward, it’s helpful that you boost posts that perform well organically too. For example, if one of your Instagram stories organically gets a ton of link clicks, try to promote it and see if you can boost that momentum. If you’re putting the same amount of budget towards two different post formats, and one consistently brings in more likes/comments/followers than the other, it could be beneficial to rework your budget in favor of the better post. Likewise, if you are boosting content that always significantly underperforms in comparison to the rest of your boosted posts, it might be time to explore other content ideas.

Your target audience will evolve as you grow your platform and your business, so you should expect your boosting strategies to shift along with them. Don’t be afraid to try new ideas or abandon a post format that just isn’t working for you. For more ways to optimize your social media marketing and business practices, be sure to check out the rest of our blog!