Instagram is introducing two new marketing tools to offer businesses new ways to add advertising to the social network. These tools work via reminder ads and by adding ads in search results.
The goal will be for brands to be able to remind users of future events or launches.
The first point is that ads will appear in search results for people actively searching for businesses, products, and content of all kinds. Thus, they will appear in users' feeds before any other content.
Instagram is partnering with brands like Starz to test a new ad format that makes it easier for businesses to advertise, remind and notify people about upcoming events or launches they might be interested in.
Reminder ads, which are launched to all advertisers as an option in the feed, help advertisers build awareness, anticipation, and consideration for upcoming moments. People can opt-in for convenient reminders and receive three Instagram notifications a day before, 15 minutes before, and at the time of the event.
The second marketing tool announced by Instagram will be a functionality they are starting to test, which aims at adding ads in search results to reach people actively searching for businesses, products, and content.
The ads will appear in people's feeds when they tap on a post in search results. So they plan to launch this location globally in the coming months.
The launch of this new ‘ad results’ functionality has been greeted with a lukewarm welcome, as many users believe this could be detrimental to their user experience.
For some experts, while the search result ads seem like they might be making the user experience worse, the second new ad type, called “reminder ads,” is mostly unintrusive and won’t change much about how ads are already used in a user’s feed.
Essentially, ads will show up as usual while a user scrolls the app, but ads for events will have the option to send users reminders via push notifications as the event gets closer.
In practice, it’ll work like this: a user might see an ad for an upcoming event that now has a banner on it that says “remind me.” If selected, the user will get three push notifications: one a day before the event, the next 15 minutes before the event starts, and the final one as the event begins.
Because reminder ads are opt-in, they shouldn’t change much about how a user experiences ads on the app currently unless their addition means that even more ads will be flooding feeds.
