Post COVID Advertising – Facebook vs Instagram Ads

Throughout COVID-19 lockdowns across the country, many businesses saw increases to their online business, allowing them to keep trading while being unable to open their doors. What this has shown is that advertising dollars are now best spent online, on the platforms your customers most frequent.

In Australia, active users on Facebook sit around 13 million, while there are more than 14 million active Instagram accounts giving you plenty of opportunities to get in front of your target customers. These are the two highest-profile social media advertising platforms, and it is important to know which one is best for marketing your business, and how you can best use your budget as we move into a post COVID-19 world.

There are however some factors you need to consider to ensure you get the most from your advertising budget, as well as helping decide whether Facebook or Instagram advertising is the most beneficial for your business.

Profiling Target Audience

While both Facebook and Instagram have the ability to boost advertising towards your specified target audience, Facebook is slightly better when it comes to profiling audiences. Their profiles are based on a range of areas including the pages your audience likes, interests, age group and friends who are already interested in your content. It is easy enough to build targeted marketing strategies that allow your message to be seen by the right potential customers. Facebook also allows you to place multiple ads, reaching people where they spend their time.

How engaged are your audience?

One of the biggest advantages of advertising on Instagram is the advertising placement in Stories. With 400 million users across the globe watching stories on a daily basis, you are certainly going to get your product or service in front of an audience that is already engaged. Advertising on Facebook allowed you to target a specific audience that tends to already be engaged in what you are advertising.

You can use both platforms successfully, just by ensuring that what you choose to publish is done on the right channel – Instagram is great for live interactions, Q&A’s, and fantastic photos while Facebook is better used for text posts that blend in with your audience’s news feed.

Contact Usage and CPC

One thing that COVID-19 has brought with it is a jump in the usage of both Instagram Live and Facebook Live, with Instagram Live views jumping 70 percent in March 2020. The other benefit is the drop in advertising costs on Facebook. With businesses reducing their advertising spend, the cost-per-click (or CPC) has dropped over 35% in Australia and New Zealand. This presents an opportunity for businesses to get in now and start advertising to their target markets which the costs are lower – there is no doubt that once business is back to normal (or close to), prices will increase.

COVID-19 really showed businesses that circumstances can change so quickly and that they need to be adaptable to ensure they are still profitable. For many businesses, it meant taking their services and products online, while for others, it meant spending time upgrading their systems to deal with the increase in purchases.

As businesses start to move back to their normal trading, they need to be prepared to continue to connect with audiences on the social media and advertising platforms where their audiences are. Facebook and Instagram can both assist businesses, but it is important to evaluate which platform is working better to reach the targeted audience.

Also wondering if Google advertising is an option for you – then read our article on Facebook Ads vs Google Ads: What to Focus on in 2021