Introduction to Instagram Stories for Business
For a lot of business owners who are uncertain about social media marketing, their question is, ‘Why use Instagram for Business?’ That may be because these business owners didn’t know that in excess of 500 million people use Instagram Stories daily. Or that many of those Instagram users are on the lookout for new products and scoping the newest trends. In fact 58% of Instagram users responded with greater interest in a product or brand after they viewed an Instagram Story featuring that brand/product. Additionally half of those viewers visited the business website to purchase a product or service after viewing the product/service in IG Stories.
This kind of response has led over 4 million businesses to advertise their products & services and to highlight their brand on IG Stories each month. Instagram Stories offers businesses a lot of fantastic opportunities to raise brand awareness and highlight their products. In addition to its creative aspects, IG Stories also offers businesses helpful targeting features that work effectively to drive growth in overall traffic and conversions which of course leads to boosts in brand awareness.
The following are some Instagram tips for business. These are excellent examples of how to market your business on Instagram in order to leverage the array of great features with Instagram for Business. There are lots of benefits to using the most popular social media platform to grow your business.
How to Market Your Business Using Instagram Stories
There are a lot of outstanding features built into the Instagram platform that help businesses create buzz around their products and services and keep the ball rolling. Go to the Instagram business page to find some of these exciting ways to take full advantage of Instagram Stories for Business.
1. Polls
Polls enable you to write a question and customize two answers that your followers can choose from. IG Polls is an incredibly engaging tool that businesses can use to gather your audiences’ preferences on different topics, for market research, to get customer feedback, share vital information in the form of a quiz, or simply to interact with your audience, get to know them and have some fun! By increasing your involvement with your followers and letting them weigh in with choices, preferences and ideas, you will likely draw them closer to your brand and boost interaction.
2. Highlights
Most Instagram users use the Highlights feature as a way to build a show reel of their favorite stories. But the reason this feature is particularly exciting for business brands is twofold. First, businesses can pin IG Stories to the top of their profile. Because each IG Story is only live for 24 hours, using Highlights provides a way to extend the life of your stories by pinning them during those first 24 hours to your IG Business page.
Second, businesses can utilize Highlights to direct IG users drawn to their website to view previous IG stories. Pinning these stories to your business page with a flashy cover photo or illustration will draw lots of traffic, help them discover who you are, what you do and why you do it and expand brand awareness. Plus you can show them any number of products or services and turn your Instagram page into live action advertising!! Most IG business stories are created with the intent of becoming Highlights.
3. Questions
The question sticker is one of the latest features introduced to IG Stories. It’s another interactive way to engage with your audience when using Instagram Stories for Business. It offers you plenty of options, such as hosting Q&A sessions, collecting feedback or asking for ideas or preferences. Like with the polls, followers are willing to participate, which boosts the engagement.
4. Reaction Sliders
Another fun addition to your Instagram business page are Reaction Sliders. Because everyone loves to respond to Stories content, Reaction Sliders make it simple and fun to do that. That’s great for your followers.
Reaction Sliders are also terrific for getting immediate feedback on your Stories that can be tracked through an algorithm. They offer you great information about how people feel about your content and whether the impact is positive, negative, huge or nominal.
That’s what makes Reaction Sliders a terrific tool to boost your engagement with your audience and determine their responses to products, services, stories, brand and more!
5. Countdown
Instagram Stories has recently added the countdown sticker to its great features for brand promotion, increasing sales, creating excitement around contests and making press releases of information.
Because users can set countdown deadline reminders, the countdown heightens instagram stories engagement with your business. Your IG business account also receives data that reveals exactly who and how many in your audience are engaged!
6. Links
If your business is lucky enough to be in the group of businesses that have 10k followers or more, links are another great way to build your Instagram Stories engagement. These businesses have the ability to include external links in their Instagram Stories!
For those who aren’t familiar with Instagram, it doesn’t allow functioning links other than in your bio. (It is a method they use to keep you on their app, and it works). Which is why it is such a bonus if your business is able to include them in Stories.
This feature is especially effective because when combined with clear calls to action in your Stories,people know exactly why and where they are going when they ‘Swipe Up.’ Examples of clear CTAs include: ‘SHOP SALE NOW,’ ‘START A FREE TRIAL,’ ‘BOOK TODAY!’
7. Location Stickers
Instagram stickers are fun additions that get attention and add pizzazz to your stories. There is a wide selection of stickers to choose from when creating your stories. Some are more personal while others, like location stickers are business friendly and will identify the location of your story. An interesting fact from a few years ago is that posts that used geotagged location stickers received almost 80% more engagement.
8. Hashtag Stickers
When you add a hashtag sticker to your business’ Instagram stories it makes them discoverable by a bigger and broader audience. The marketing value of that is obvious! In fact research has shown that hashtags can increase engagement with your IG business stories by 12%.
9. Contests
One of the best Instagram tips for business is offering contests for your IG Business followers to compete in. Offer prizes for the daily, weekly or monthly contest winners who post the best pictures with your products or tell the best stories about how your products or services enhanced their lives, ALDO Shoes has a weekly contest with prizes for 10 people who send in the best selfies while wearing their shoes.
10. Promoted Instagram Stories Campaigns
Committing to run a promoted IG Stories campaign will implement another of the powerful tools Instagram offers for lead generation. The power behind this tool lies in its CTA capabilities as well as in its abilities to link and to take advantage of geo-targeting features. What’s more, the ads are far more interactive compared to conventional ads—they often feel much more natural as well.
Conclusion
We hope you know a lot more about how to market your business on Instagram than you did before you found this article. But still the idea of trying to learn a whole new marketing tool may still have you wondering why you should use Instagram for business. The good news is that you do not have to crack this nut on your own. Social media marketing (SMM) is a specialty of zö agency.
Depending on what you sell there are online social media marketing services like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc., that are crawling with your ideal clients. But often getting started on social media makes our clients nervous. That’s why we do all of the heavy lifting for you, identify the most ideal platform(s) for your products and help ease you into the brave new world of social media marketing. Contact us at zö.agency!
