
Like Twitter and Linkedin, Instagram is also known as the biggest hub of business for everyone. It is one of the easiest, most popular, and busiest social media platforms. Users want to engage with the brand in the most personalized and valuable ways. Nowadays short-form video content is quite viral and stories are here to take away all the glamor and interaction.
Instagram stories are the ideal platform to drive engagement and sales by directly communicating with the audiences through different ideas. Many celebrities, influencers, and businesses use this platform to target their audience and persuade them to stick to their accounts.
Let’s delve into Instagram strategies for business and how useful they are to drive sales and boost engagement.
What are Instagram Stories and Why are they Useful?
Instagram stories are basically the feed content completely separate from profile content and usually disappear after 24 hours. They act as a slideshow that requires 7 seconds for photos and 15 seconds for videos to appear on the user’s screen. When someone uploads a new story, the orange and purple ring appears circling the profile picture to signal the followers.
You can save your stories through highlight features that never disappear and stay with you on your profile right above your regular feed. Followers can directly connect with you through DM, or you can share polls, surveys, and questions for quick conversation or feedback. You can also hide the DM option in settings if you are not comfortable with replies.
What Makes Instagram Stories a Powerful Marketing Tool?
Instagram is already a big name in Social Media but since the birth of Stories in 2016, it created a huge impact, even users from all over the world directly connect with their favorite through stories. In fact, the average number of feed posts has declined since stories are the major source of building potential customers and gaining better reach. 70% of people look at Instagram for their next purchase and new arrivals, and 50% of consumers have directly visited the website through Instagram stories.
You can assume that boosting engagement through Instagram stories has quite a high rate if millions of people are using Instagram actively. You can increase Instagram likes to increase your brand promotion and allow other users to interact more. Humanizing your brand and getting real-time and active feedback from your target audience is a great opportunity for businesses, so if you are not working on it you are probably missing your major source of promotion.
10 Strategies to Use Instagram Stories for Businesses
Maximize the use of Instagram stories to improve your business growth with these helpful strategies:
Demo or Tutorials
Format your stories and engage with the audience by creating how-to, tutorials, behind-the-scenes, and step-by-step so they can actively engage with you and learn more about new things. This can develop a sense that the user is committed to providing such solutions which are considered as common problems. It helps you build an emotional connection and eagerness to learn more about solutions.
You may create bite-sized educational content that is incredibly engaging, from recipes to beauty recommendations. These are a simple substitution for conventional videos and blog postings.
Make Announcements
Generate curiosity with highly engaged content so the audience sticks to your brand. Ask questions to keep them engaged about what actually is coming from your side and what is your plan for followers. This is actually very smart for you to keep your audience in the loop about what your business is up to.
This announcement could be anything like launching a product, making a formal statement, asking for feedback, being ready for sale, posting teasers of upcoming events, or any other thing that makes an impact.
Share User-Generated Content (UGC)
Sharing content generated from users is one of the main and top methods to gain followers and allows them to directly engage with your brand. You can repost their content on your story to develop a sense of trust and credibility that the brand is not only helping people to improve their lives but also encouraging others to purchase their products.
No doubt higher reviews of any business profile automatically encourage users that the brand is authentic. People significantly buy Instagram comments to boost engagement and build their brand's credibility to promote active participation among users.
Share a Blog or Article Link
Creating links to your blogs, articles or newsletters is the major source of interaction, people who are interested in your brand tend to read more about you and instantly click on the link directed to your website. Create a piece of engaging informational news types of content so users can directly learn more about what actually you are up to.
People usually speculate about the hot and latest news so in this stance you can provide some insider news that can lend you to deliver more and boost more engagement, but don’t throw yourself into controversies or politics.
Mention and Engage
Mentioning other users like influencers, customers, employees or even other brand accounts can increase fascination among users about what is actually going to happen. Will others reply? Will the challenge be accepted? Just not in the form of a challenge you can promote each other's content and products by reviewing them and giving your honest feedback. In a promotional way, you can challenge others to promote a song or dance step, so others communicate well.
This is the most common method for promoting films and songs among celebrities and influencers. Even buying a product or purchasing something from a specific brand fosters a sense of reliability that people are actually using such products and providing valuable feedback upon asking.
Feedback
Allowing direct feedback from users can help you build your brand credibility and help you foster your communication with the audience directly. You can post polls, surveys, reviews, questions, and direct answers to all the questions asked in your DM by your followers. You can also share positive reviews, testimonials, sample posts, and product users from your customers.
This will build trust and authenticity to allow users to interact with you. When you ask for feedback they actively participate through honest reviews in such activities to foster your brand promotion.
Countdown Contests
Create a sense of urgency among your followers to actively participate within 24 hours as the countdown begins. Further, you can prepare them through storytelling about your products in a highly active manner that they actually wait for the actual day to arrive. This boosts your creativity brand promotion with visual style and tone of voice making it easier for users to take necessary action.
The countdown sticker is an excellent tool for businesses to advertise contests, sales, and announcements. Ask your followers to hurry up before the challenge ends,
Analytics and Insights
Examine the effectiveness of your Stories on a regular basis to determine what is working and what needs to be improved. Adapt your plan as a necessary action and get a clue, Are my stories helping me to keep engaged with the audience? How often should I publish them? How engaged are people with my stories of feed? Which type of stories should I publish more?
Such questions help you generate more liable stories for user engagement and promote your actual vision and goals. In this way, you can resonate with your audience more accurately.
Story Highlight
Create Highlights just for Stories so that users can turn your Instagram page into a booklet with an attractive cover. As a business, you may use highlights to introduce yourself to visitors who are new to your page, explain what you do and why you do it, and showcase your services. Pinning your post can also enable you to learn more about brands through stories.
Showcase testimonials and feedback as a top priority to develop and strengthen credibility. This strategy is well known for its efficacy because it not only draws in a larger audience but also establishes your company as a trustworthy choice.
Reaction Slider
Use reaction sliders and stickers to elevate yourself from formalities and improve your growth while asking about their opinions and reviews while targeting your exact audience. Reaction conveys Instagram's algorithms how engaging and useful their content is and how actively users are participating in their questions.
This is indeed a very good tactic for brands to increase engagement and build a stronger connection. Most of the time brands use this feature to ask for direct opinions in order to improve their products or whether there are any changes required.
Additional Tip For Using Instagram Stories
- Get creative with visuals
- Use hashtags (where applicable)
- Share exclusive content
- Keep stories short and user-friendly
- Run contests
- Utilize live streaming and save it as a highlight
- Tell stories
Wrap UP
Businesses may use Instagram Stories to promote their products or services, engage their audience, and ultimately reach their goals in marketing. Incorporating these strategies can make a huge impact in building your authority and credibility to create an everlasting relationship bond with your audience.