Use Instagram Stories for your business to boost brand awareness, increase engagement and convert more customers.
Use Instagram Stories for your business to boost brand awareness, increase engagement and convert more customers. Let’s face it. Nobody likes being advertised to. How often have you sat through a whole ad on YouTube without clicking the Skip Ad button as soon as you could? You might even subscribe to the premium service of an app just to get the ad-free experience. The genius of Instagram Stories for business is that it doesn’t feel like advertising.
You tap to start watching a story of your friend’s latest DIY project, or a new piece of work from that artist you follow, and before you know it, you’ve watched all your friends’ stories, along with a bunch of promoted stories thrown in. And if they were intriguing enough, maybe you swiped up to check out what they were offering.
Designed to make you keep watching, Instagram Stories are a great place for your brand to get noticed, and if you’re not sure how your business might benefit, read on!
Make sure your Instagram Stories are on-brand
While your stories don’t have to be professionally designed to make an impact, incorporating elements from your branding into all of your stories will help you increase brand awareness, and make your stories stand out. Your followers will recognize your stories at first glance, and stop them from just swiping past!
Using your brand colors and fonts can go a long way in making your stories appear professional, on-brand, and memorable.
Use stickers and hashtags in your Instagram Stories to reach a wider audience
Stickers on Instagram Stories are GIFs and images you can use to add a bit of fun to the things you post. But some stickers do a lot more than add visual interest — like location stickers, mention stickers, and hashtag stickers.
With hashtag stickers, your stories become discoverable to audiences who search for, or follow the hashtags you include. If you consistently post quality content and choose the right hashtags, you could find yourself gaining a whole bunch of new followers!
Location stickers are of two types. First, the type that lets you tag a specific address or physical location — useful if you have a brick and mortar store you want to promote. Your customers and audience can use this sticker too, to tag user-generated content they create at your location. That’s a great way to get word-of-mouth going!
The other type of location stickers are city-specific stickers that show up depending on where you are. These stickers are clickable too, and using them opens up the possibility that your story gets curated into the larger city or location story that appears on the Explore page in Instagram. Not a bad way to get lots more views on your story.
Mention stickers allow you to tag people in your audience, influencers, or even other businesses in your story. Tagging the right handles on relevant content could win you a few shares that could multiply your audience exponentially.
Boost engagement on your Instagram Stories with polls, questions, sliders, and more
Your Instagram Stories should not just be about you talking to your audience. Engage your viewers with the tools so helpfully built into the Instagram Story setup.
You could create polls, asking your audience to pick between a few options, let’s say, for their favorite products. Smartly used, these polls could augment market research, and help you shape your business strategy.
And getting your audience’s opinion doesn’t stop with just polls, you can even ask them questions, and the Instagram Story feature allows them to type in their responses.
People love rating stuff, and you can get them to engage with your story by asking them to rate products, ideas, or anything else, using a slider rating feature built into Instagram Stories.
Promote the posts in your main feed, get more reach through Instagram Stories
For Instagram’s algorithm to boost your reach and show your main feed posts to more people, you need more followers to see and engage with it immediately after it’s posted.
The simplest way to make this happen is to share it to your Instagram Stories! Promoting your own content, your main feed posts in your Instagram Stories is like boosting the reach and engagement on posts, for free!
Instagram Story Highlights are a great way to drive traffic to your website
Instagram Stories are designed to disappear after 24 hours, but saving them to your Highlights preserves them on your profile for viewers to browse.
Of course, you won’t save all of your stories here, but picking important ones, and organizing them into easily accessible collections right below your bio on your profile page will let visitors find the content they’re looking for, drive traffic to your website (if that’s what you choose to do) or just give you one more opportunity to engage with your audience.
Social media is an important part of your marketing, and getting it right is crucial. Instagram Stories are just one of the many ways you can maximize the impact of your social media presence.
Mystique can help you build a social media strategy that works for your unique situation, to connect with the audience you’re trying to reach.
We invite you to schedule a 15-minute conversation with us to understand how you can make social media work to build your business.
We’ll learn more about your business, and share a few thoughts on how you could shape your social media strategy.
Worst-case scenario—- we both walk away just a little smarter than we started out.
Pick a time that works for you.
Schedule time to review your current situation with us and discuss possible ways to optimize your brand experience to overcome your business challenges and reach your goals. Even if you choose not to use us, you’ll walk away with some great ideas to implement in your business today.