Instagram Boosted Posts with WhatsApp CTAs

Back in September, Instagram announced a new way for companies to interact with potential customers. Advertisers can now take their WhatsApp accounts, and link them with their Instagram profiles.

When we do this, we can now create new boosted campaigns that’ll encourage those potential customers to message your company directly. It really is that straightforward. So let’s jump in, and I’ll show you how to set it up.

Before we can use WhatsApp in an Instagram campaign, you have to have a WhatsApp business account. So you might go to Google, just type in WhatsApp business, and most likely this will be the top result, the WhatsApp business app page. But as you see in the description on this page as well as the call to action, you can’t register via the desktop experience.

You will have to download the app on your phone. But it’s okay, if you want to research more information on WhatsApp business and what it can do for your company. I’m an iPhone user, so I’m going to jump into a different view, it’s pretty much me recording my iPhone screen and we’ll go through the steps on how you can register for the WhatsApp business app.

I’ve already opened the iTunes store app, I am in the iTunes store and you can see in the search bar, I typed in WhatsApp business. First result is an Apple search ad, and we have a few videos on those. So here’s a link to the playlist on Apple search ads, but now back to the focus on this video, the WhatsApp business. I’ve already downloaded on my phone, so you can go through that process, but I’m just going to click open.

Next, we can agree and continue, since this is a messenger app, you will need to enter your phone number. I’m going to add mine, hit done and then it’s going to confirm if the number is correct. This is my number, so I’m going to hit yes. Then you will get a confirmation code that you will need to enter to validate.

Here, I’m getting the option if I want to restore from iCloud, a lot of people watching this video aren’t going to have iCloud, so I’m just going to skip this process. Next, start filling out your business profile. Here is my company name, company category, you’ll probably want to add an image, but let’s just keep moving.

If you’re new to WhatsApp business, you can see how you can make your profile more robust, manage your hours and business information, you can showcase your products and services, and set up any automatic responses if you do have a lot of customers trying to reach out to you via this platform.

I’ll let you explore that later, so I’m going to skip this for now. I am registered, I have my WhatsApp business set up for paid media pros, but now we need to link this new account with Instagram. So now I’m going to open up my Instagram app.

So here’s a look at the paid media pros Instagram account. Just to confirm, this is an Instagram business account. This is not just a regular profile we created and just using it as paid media pros, we did register this for our business account, so you can see some of the different buttons that we have under our profile, as well as the professional dashboard that we see underneath our name at the top. Feel free to follow us there if you want, but we really don’t post much. So I’m just going to keep going with the video.

To start linking your Instagram business account with WhatsApp business, we’re going to click on edit profile. We see it’s the first button underneath our profile description. I’m going to scroll down a little bit, until we get to public business information, then I’m going to tap the contact options. The first two options are for our email and our regular phone number, but down below we see the option for WhatsApp business phone number.

Now, the first part I have blurred out right here is the same phone number we have set up in the regular business profile, that is because we are using the same phone number for this, as well as our WhatsApp account. So I can just tap on the circle right next to the blurred-out phone number, and then we see I could send the code.

If you’re using a different phone number for your Instagram business account and your WhatsApp business account, then you can clearly see the field where you can enter in the different phone number. For now, I’m going to send the code, and there it’s telling me the five-digit code was sent to the WhatsApp account, so now we got to hop back into WhatsApp.

Okay, now that we’re in WhatsApp, we can see that there’s a notification for the chats in the bottom right next to settings. So I’m going to tap on that, and there we see one of the codes. I’m going to memorize this five-digit code, head back into Instagram and enter it myself.

Now there’s another area I have to blur out, but my phone number is attached to the WhatsApp contact, so now I know WhatsApp is added as one of my contact options. So if I head back to my business profile in Instagram, I’ll click done and now I’m good to know that my WhatsApp account is linked with Instagram business. To confirm, we can click on the contact button, and as that pops up, we see the areas that users can message us. Just for confirmation, these numbers are visible.

So the next step now that we have these two accounts connected is to boost one of our posts, pretty much creating a boosted campaign within Instagram. So I’m going to click on add tools, and then you can choose your post. Right off the bat, Instagram is recommending promoting the top post, I’m probably going to stick with that one, but notice the other option underneath we can choose a different post.

So the one that they were recommending just happens to be the most recent one, but we can scroll through the few options that we have. In your case, you probably have way more organic options to choose from and just select whichever one you want. I’m just tapping around right here.

So I’m going to stick with this one and just tap next, and then we’re going to select a goal. In this case, we’re talking about WhatsApp, so I’m going to want more messages. When we do that, we get a secondary message telling us to choose a specific messaging app. I’m going to tap on that one, and since we already set up WhatsApp, we have options.

Trying to push more messages via WhatsApp or just regular Instagram direct messages, and as you can see, it’s one or the other, you’re going to be optimizing towards one goal. I’m going to leave it as WhatsApp, I can’t proceed from here, got to go back one more step.

Now we see my option is chosen, I can edit it if I want to, but we don’t, so let’s tap on next, and next, we can define our audience. This is going to be fairly similar to what you do if you set up something within Facebook business manager, or should I start calling it meta business manager, whatever.

So first, you will want to find if you’re in any of these special categories, we fall under marketing so I don’t have to select any of those, and then choose how you want to select your audience. First is automatic, similar to a follower lookalike. Now Facebook Ads what you see right here is a previously defined audience that we had within Instagram; it was used for a totally different campaign type.

So just to show you if I tap on this one, you can see we already created an audience and saved it for anyone interested in Facebook advertising. But what they’re letting us know is that interest targeting is not available when we’re pushing for more messages as our campaign goal. So right now, I’m not going to be able to use this type of audience targeting.

If I look to create my own, I can still target locations and I can still edit age and gender, but that’s it, I don’t get any other interest targeting I can layer onto that. So that means I’m going to cancel out of this, and realize that automatic targeting is pretty much the only option that we get, unless you really want to go broad with just a very narrow geographic targeting, then you’re probably like why’d you make me go through all that. Just to show you, you may see other options, but you can’t use them, pretty much just stick with automatic, so I’m going to go with next.

Next, we can select our daily budget with the duration of the campaign, pretty easy to slide this over, I knocked it down a little bit. Going to keep the duration the same, our budget’s low, our duration is low, and we really don’t have a ton of Instagram followers, so our reach isn’t going to be huge, makes perfect sense, I’m okay with it, I’m going to tap next. The final step is to review everything.

Let’s get a little preview and see how it looks in the feed, there’s the new call to action. They’re not going to go to my website, they’re not going to fill out a lead form, they can message me on WhatsApp. Whoever’s managing your WhatsApp business account, will get the chat notification so you can start instantly interacting with potential customers, or actually maybe current customers.

Let’s go-to stories, even though this creative is definitely not formatted for stories. Doesn’t look the best, but clearly calling out the WhatsApp message, and then explore. Pretty much what we saw from the feed standpoint, so it looks the same. Looks good to me for putting zero effort into it, but then you can confirm your destination, blurt out the number that we’re using for WhatsApp, confirm the only audience option that we get.

There’s our budget, there’s our duration, and then you can see I jumped ahead a little bit, just to skip the part where I just select my billing information. But now my review is done, and I can boost the post.

Here they’re saying our app is going to be reviewed, it could take up to 24 hours, maybe longer, odds are it’s usually running within that day. Once your ad is running, you can see at the very bottom there’s an option to view insights. Right now, it’s just the organic interactions that are showing up. So I’m going to take note of this for a decent before and after, and that’s pretty much it.

You see how easy it is to link your Instagram business account with your WhatsApp business account, and then set up a boosted post campaign within Instagram using the ad tools on your profile, to encourage users who may be interested in your brand to shoot you a message.

I will definitely admit, this type of campaign is not going to be for everybody. But if your target audience uses WhatsApp and you’re looking to expand engagement on Instagram, this is a perfect combination. In many cases, a one-to-one direct message type of response could build up great rapport with potential new customers having that one-on-one engagement experience.

If you have any questions or run into any setbacks with linking your accounts or trying to boost this specific campaign, let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez