We all have grown up listening to stories from our grandparents or parents. They have been an integral part of our growing-up years. This is one of the reasons why hearing the word ‘stories’ excites us.
Instagram has intelligently introduced its stories feature and provided us with a platform that is easy to use, reaches a large audience and is user-friendly. Stories are a fun way for brands to increase traffic and build brand awareness.
You can grow your brand and reach out to more people if you follow the strategies used by big brands. Following are the reasons why any business should be using Instagram stories as their social media strategy:
1) Increase Brand Awareness:-
One of the best ways to spread awareness about your brand on Instagram is by using its Stories feature. Instagram Stories is a powerful marketing tool that every brand relies on. Stories last only for 24 hours and have been successfully used by brands to increase brand awareness and generate traffic.
Using hashtags in stories is a great way to build awareness about your brand. People who search for a tag that relates to the hashtag will be led straight to your page. Using hashtags is a great way to draw in customers. Another great way to build brand awareness through stories is by using links. Links can be used to direct people to your website, where they can get a detailed understanding of your products.
When using Instagram Stories, you should use a storytelling pattern. You can do this by using multiple posts for your story. This way, you will get more engagement from your followers. This engagement will help your Insta Story become visible to more people.
2) Engagement With The Audience
Having creative stories on your timeline will encourage your followers to engage with your content. You can do polls and take surveys to understand your followers better. You can ask them questions of different kinds that make them share their interests or some personal experience.
Engagement with the audience allows brands to come across as trustworthy and genuine. It is a great way to showcase your concern for the people. This will help people build a relationship with your brand.
Creating a good communication strategy should be a priority for a brand. Engagement with your audience will help you increase the number of your followers.
Link stickers can also be used on your stories. These link stickers let you keep track of your metrics. These metrics can be used to optimise your click-through rate. These link stickers also allow the audience to engage with your stories.
3) Increase Followers
As stated above, Instagram stories can be used to increase your follower count. Having a good quantity of followers will help you reach more people on Instagram. A creative story will reach more people and will help you gain followers.
There are lots of creative ways you can use to create exciting stories. A good story has to be something that people can love. Creating an Instagram Story that people can relate to will make them stay interested. This will also result in better engagement.
Instagram regularly gets updated with new features. When used creatively, these features can help you increase your followers. Brands make use of these features to keep their audiences interested.
4) To Recieve Feedback
One of the advantages of using social media is that you can directly talk to people. You can ask them questions and check how your product is being received.
Brands that rely on the customer’s feedback are the ones that stay on top of the competition. Before social media, people would have to wait a long time to understand how their product was being received by the public. This would mean they would have to waste a lot of money and effort. This situation has changed since the birth of social media.
Businesses can now receive feedback on their products in an instant. They can then make changes to their products and make them more user-friendly. This way, they don’t only drive their sales up but also build a healthy relationships with their customers.
5) Reach A Wider Audience:-
You can use Instagram Stories to reach a wider audience by using location stickers and mention stickers. When marketing, it is important to reach as wide an audience as possible. Instagram is one of the best places to do so.
Location stickers can be used on your Instagram stories to help you reach an audience of a particular city or a place. You can tag a restaurant, a museum or your home town etc. People can search for a live story on Instagram for a particular location. By using the location sticker, you help your account to grow by getting it featured in that location.
You can also use the mention stickers in your stories and tag people who have a good reach. Brands usually do it by tagging an influencer or a celebrity they have hired. This helps them reach a wider audience.
6) Real-Time Marketing:-
You can use Instagram Stories for marketing in real-time. Real-time marketing allows brands to get insights into their products in real-time from their clients.
For those who don’t know, real-time marketing is about collecting data and making decisions based on the information on things that happen in that instant. Unlike marketing based on pre-planned strategies, real-time marketing focuses on staying on your toes and creating a strategy based on instant feedback from the clients.
You can collect instant feedback about your products and services through stories. You can also post about some events and get more people interested in attending that events.
Real-time marketing is more successful than traditional marketing because of its flexibility and accuracy. Getting some real-time feedback from your customers will also help in increasing engagement. It also builds a better relationship between a brand and its customers.
7) Run Ads On Stories:-
Brands use Instagram Stories to run Stories ads. These story ads can be made to run for a long time. You can also optimise these ads according to your requirements.
You can use Story ads to target and reach people you would like to reach. Story ads are followed by links that will help you increase your conversion rate.
The CTR or click-through rate for video ads is higher than the CTR for picture ads. If you are interested in using story ads, you should post them in video format to get more clicks and engagement. According to a study, Instagram Story ads get 44% higher reach, 78% more clicks and are at 45% less CPC or cost per click as compared to Instagram feed ads.