Instagram Stories originated as the company’s response to Snapchat’s Stories feature by releasing a functionally identical offering on Instagram. With over 500 million daily users, marketers are beginning to investigate Stories as a method of expanding their brand’s reach.
Unless they are stored and highlighted using highlights, Instagram Stories expire after 24 hours and are not shown in the stream. Stories’ widespread adoption has boosted awareness for businesses of all sizes and introduced a fresh channel for interaction with their fan bases.
If you want to increase your brand’s social media engagement, you should start using Instagram Stories as part of your content plan. Here are five ways to use Instagram Stories to spread the word about your company.
Five Ways To Use Instagram Stories To Raise Your Brand’s Profile
Use examples instead of explanations
You can think of Instagram Stories as a little TV station for your company, and it’s the perfect place to showcase your wares and spread the word about your brand. People are naturally drawn to images, and Instagram makes it simple for them to interact with those images, giving it an ideal platform from which to promote your products.
To promote your company or brand, you can share material like:
A sneak peek is a preview of an upcoming product or service.
Behind the scenes, lift the veil and demonstrate to them how your organisation is run.
Launching a new product? Instagram Stories might be the first place you show it to the world.
Live-blog any events your company is hosting to show your fans and followers how much fun they are having.
Favourite stories can be saved
Each Instagram Story post is only available for 24 hours before it disappears forever. Instead, you may provide your followers and potential new audiences with easy access to the most relevant Stories you’ve published in the past by using highlights.
You may use highlights to compile sets of related or themed Stories that you’ve bookmarked. After 24 hours, your followers and anybody else who stumbles across your profile may explore your archived Stories to discover more about you and your work.
Things like new products, team building exercises, product updates, and recipes are all good candidates for being bookmarked in Highlights.
Develop Schemas and House Styles
A company may easily stand out from the competition by being innovative, being unique, and sticking persistently to a particular theme or style.
Determine the kind of content you’d like to utilise consistently across your brand’s marketing materials, and then design templates for them.
Pick a single font style to apply to all of your Stories and other content formats.
Establish your brand’s colour scheme or select individual hues to represent it.
Set parameters for formatting various content kinds.
Instead of using stock photos or generic icons, get unique icons made and utilise those as the cover art for your highlight collections.
With standard templates and a clear set of guidelines in place, any member of your team, whether internal or external, can develop Stories for the company with little risk of compromising the brand’s image.
Communicate with Your Audience and Clientele
The purpose of Instagram’s Story feature is to raise profile. Engaging your audience and clientele in your Stories might help speed up the process.
While it’s great to have your own original material, user-generated content is an even better way to build trust and credibility with your target audience. And if you’ve ever been burned out, this is a terrific method to keep your Instagram Stories from getting stale.
Using Instagram Stories as a means of communication with your audience:
- Publish user-generated content that features your company’s name or products.
- For inclusion in your Instagram Stories, solicit video testimonials from your satisfied customers.
- Recognise your most dedicated fans and followers by calling them out and tagging them in the post.
- Use “Polls” to get feedback from your audience and then incorporate their thoughts into future postings.
- Takeovers should be organised if a brand influencer or a particularly loyal consumer is ready to produce exclusive content for your company.
Focus on the Individuals
It’s easy to get wrapped up in generating brand-promotional material for your Stories, but putting people first is the best way to raise brand awareness.
By putting your audience first, you can guarantee that your brand’s and your consumers’ content will continue to be useful and informative. This means that you may focus more on product education and consumer interaction in your content.
You may use Stories to share product demonstrations, answer commonly asked questions, and show your appreciation to the people who have supported your company and engaged with you.
Putting your audience first while creating content is the best way to ensure they continue to engage with your Stories.
Follow the aforementioned procedures to increase your Instagram Stories’ engagement, reach, and exposure. Maintain a steady cadence of high-quality posts and you’ll see results in no time.