forbes.com
Instagram announced it has exceeded 500,000 advertisers. COO Marne Levine says the company’s next big opportunity is catering to small- and medium-sized businesses. (Courtesy of Facebook)
The number of advertisers on Instagram has more than doubled over the last six months and now exceeds 500,000, up from about 200,000 in February, the company announced on Thursday. But what this really highlights, says Instagram’s COO Marne Levine, is Instagram’s strength as a place to market to users’ passions, and that Instagram’s next big opportunity is catering to small- and medium-sized businesses.
The Facebook -owned photo-and-video sharing app, which has more than 500 million monthly active users, is expected to generate about $1.5 billion in mobile advertising sales this year and $5 billion in 2018, according to forecasting firm eMarketer. The app first launched advertising widely about a year ago across 200 countries.
“Businesses are beginning to really understand that they can market to passions on Instagram,” Levine said in a phone interview. “They can leverage the creative canvas that we offer on Instagram and combine that with really good targeting to put the right story in front of the right person at the right time for an audience that is active and receptive to discovery.”
Nearly all of Facebook’s top 100 largest advertisers also advertise on Instagram. Now, among advertisers, Levine said small- and medium-sized businesses represent Instagram’s main opportunity for growth. Levine noted that entrepreneurs, such as Samantha Hobbelen, founder of furniture-maker Hobbe, continue to get inspired to start companies because of demand they observe on Instagram. (Hobbelen, Levine said, was inspired to create Australia-based Hobbe when she Instagram users expressed interest in buying a handcrafted rocking chair she had designed.)
The company’s top countries for advertising, in order, are the U.S., Brazil, U.K., Australia and Canada. Advertisers range from e-commerce, entertainment, technology, gaming, retail and consumer packaged goods companies. Instagram ads drive a 2% lift in offline sales, and 70% of performance campaigns generate meaningful boosts in online conversion or mobile app installs, according to an Oracle Data Cloud study and an internal Instagram study, respectively. Levine said that in the past year, users have taken 1 billion actions on Instagram ads, such as searching, shopping, visiting a website, telling a friend about a post or downloading an app. About 75% of users say they take an action after being inspired by an Instagram post.
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