Instagram Stories should be a central part of a social media strategy for any business. It’s a fact that Instagram Stories which are published by businesses and brands will get more views than stories on regular profiles. Creating stories can be a fun and engaging way to attract and retain customers while building out your brand to a wider audience. Below we run through some of the most important reasons you need to be taking advantage of Instagram Stories today!
Improving brand visibility
Stories of users that you follow on Instagram will appear at the very top of your feed, and people that follow you will also be notified when you have published a new story, making them far harder to miss than regular Instagram posts. One study conducted recently found that posting up to five stories a day kept retention rates at over 70%.
Interacting with your customers and improving reach
Among all the social media platforms, it is Instagram where people engage the most with your content. Instagram Stories allows you to interact directly with your customer base, and this means you can better understand their needs. Asking your followers questions on your stories is a great way to get them involved, and you can then use this information to improve marketing and any products or services you offer.
Generating leads
The advantage of Instagram Stories is that it’s not just the people who follow you who can see them. This means that stories are discoverable, making them a fantastic marketing strategy to implement if you want to reach a new audience and express any idea you have through a more unique medium, while also showcasing any services or products in a really fun way.
Getting instant feedback
Even before you have launched a new product, you can utilise Instagram Stories to do some further market research and ask your customer base for some honest feedback. All you need to do to find out about your customers’ needs or preferences is use your stories to ask questions or polls that can gauge this kind of information.
Repurposing blog content
Repurposing content is going to strengthen the power of your blog posts or videos and create a more unified marketing strategy for your digital footprint. This will subsequently improve awareness around your brand and encourage a potential audience to be converted to customers by improving your chances of being remembered and heard.
The great thing about this is that if you have some content which has performed favourably on a different platform you can reshape and recreate the content to share through your Instagram Story. You can include some really nice photos in the stories and tell the story of your business through them.
Increasing the transparency of your brand
By showing some behind-the-scenes footage of your business you can provide your followers with an abundance of information on the people that operate the business and their individual personalities. Making a video with the whole team is always a good idea, alongside sneak peaks on what you have planned for the future.
Running Instagram story ads
Instagram Story ads allows you to use reach capabilities and targeting to make your ads relevant to the customers you want to reach. Instagram Story ads are typically used by brands to gather conversions and link clicks, as data has shown. You can also use software such as Creative Hub or Ads Manager to run ads on stories.
Increasing engagement on Instagram
The more you post on your Instagram, the more posts will show up in people’s feeds. Instagram is fast becoming one of the greatest places to market your brand digitally, gain a deeply loyal customer following, and build a strong community that supports your brand values and your business. It’s a highly engaging form of social media, and engagement leads to results!