So you’ve been doing a pretty good job of posting content to your Instagram feed for your business, but are you using Instagram Stories? If using Instagram Stories seems like just one more thing to keep up with for your marketing strategy, we get it. But with a little bit of planning, we promise you’ll notice how the feature can be beneficial!
Some good news to start with for all you biz people – a third of the most-viewed Stories on Instagram were created by businesses! This means customers are definitely engaging with the brands they love using the Stories feature.
So, what are some of the ways you can use Instagram Stories to engage your audience? Begin with the end in mind. What are your goals? What should your customers take away from your Story, and what do you want them to do next? Once you have an understanding of your IG strategy goals, you can begin thinking about creating engaging content. We’ve got some tips and ideas below to help you get the juices flowing:
Plan your content ahead of time
It’s a good idea to think about content for Instagram Stories as you would scheduled TV programming. You can even create recurring “episodes” each week so that your audience has something to look forward to (think Ask Me Anything, showing off product features/reviews, a look behind the scenes/a day in the life, influencer takeovers, etc). Planning your content and how it will flow will create a more addictive and consistent experience for your viewers.
Get creative
Using Stickers, geotags and hashtags strategically can help you increase audience engagement. The feature also includes tools for drawing and face filters to keep the creativity flowing. Pull it all together to give your content some pizazz by combining text, pictures, videos, stickers, doodles, interactive polls, and more!
Drive traffic to your website
Drive traffic to your website by adding links to your stories and taking advantage of apps that allow your audience to shop your products like this one from Shopify. If you’ve noticed the “Swipe Up” link feature only occurs on certain accounts, it’s because they’ve either got more than 10K followers or have verified accounts. But never fear because as with most things on the internet, there are hacks to get around that!
Test content ideas before posting them on your Instagram Feed
You can use Stories as a testing ground for the posts on your feed. If a story is received well (you get positive comments and you don’t have a high amount of drop offs), you can consider posting it on your feed. The “throwaway” format (Stories only last for 24-hours) makes it easy to show the less stylized content that you may not post to your feed.
If you’re looking for some super specific ideas to engage your Instagram audience, this article is chock full of them! If you’re thinking that your entire marketing strategy needs an overhaul, we’d love to help! Contact our team.
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