Studies show that images drive more engagement than text and people nowadays are getting more and more “visual” than ever before. Then how can we imagine that an image-based social media platform like Instagram shall not help you bring a huge ROI for your business? With more than 300 million daily users, Instagram Stories is becoming one of the go-to social media content types for brands. Stories are more relevant than ever, and the growth has propelled more users to demand content in short bursts, changing how brands are crafting their content strategies.
Why should you use Stories?
Stories are the perfect enhancement tool for your Instagram branding. They populate and display differently than your regular Instagram feed and also have the added benefit of being easier for users and potential customers to interact with your brand.
Stories can allow you to go into detail about a sale, promotion or giveaway, or you can add sneak peeks to a new blog post or product. Also because this type of content is time sensitive, they create a psychological sense of urgency for the user.
On top of that, when users interact with your content, the Instagram algorithm begins to weight your content higher for that user, meaning you’re more likely to show up in their feed whether you posted a photo within minutes or hours of them logging on to the app. With consistent posting, brands can close the gap on current missed opportunities and generate new followers.
How can brands benefit from this feature?
What’s very interesting about this feature of Instagram is that you can create real and natural experiences for your community in more than one way that will benefit your bottom line.
Drive brand awareness
Using Instagram Stories to drive brand and product awareness is a great thing to do. Grab the attention of your audience by using catchy images and videos which showcase your brand identity prominently and this is a great way to trigger buying decisions in them as well.
Easily connect to users
There is no need to invest time and effort in creating an extremely aesthetic graphic to communicate with your audience. Instead, connect instantly with your followers without waiting for that perfect image or video. And the best part? Your “story” will connect, reach out to the right people and do the job in 24 hours. It helps you focus on community building, for which you have to be personal and real.
User-generated content
This is how brands can ask their audience to create content for them. User-generated content is the most influential form of social media marketing. So go ahead and encourage your audience to get creative and share their stories with you, which you can post.
Offers and discounts
Use Instagram Stories to announce any offers or discounts you are offering. Using catchy images and text will help you to grab the attention of your audience and guide them to your web page where they can get the details about that offer or can directly buy products under that offer.
Tips and tutorials
You can share tips and tutorials on how to use your product, with real-life examples. You can post tutorials as images or just short step-by-step videos too. This will be very interesting to your audience and they might decide to try your product after seeing the uses and benefits.
Live videos
Live video can be an amazing tool for fostering engagement and connection with your audience. It gives companies and brands the capacity to show the real, human side of their business in a way that curated and highly designed posts do not, and establish a sense of authenticity around your message.
Story ads
We can’t really talk about successful Instagram marketing without talking about Story Ads. Any digital marketer knows the power of a sponsored, strategically targeted social ad and now, you can extend those powerful paid ads to Instagram Stories.
What makes Story ads stand out from other social placements is the immersive, full-screen experience that you don’t get almost anywhere else.
Are you ready?
Whether you want to increase brand awareness, drive conversions, foster engagement, or just get people talking about your business, Instagram Stories provide effective tools for almost any marketing objective. With the count of users growing daily, and more features being added all the time, we don’t see Instagram Stories going away anytime soon, so all you have to do is start planning your Stories campaigns!