Instagram Stories: How Brands Can Leverage for Better Engagement with Audience
It is no secret that Instagram is one of the most engaging social media platforms today. According to Instagram Business, more than 500+ million Instagram accounts use Stories every day, including 4 million business Stories ads every month. Branded Insta stories are a piece of cake for businesses to showcase their brands and happy clients in action.
Instagram gives creative freedom to brands for an engaging storytelling experience. Brands can present valuable, helpful, and industry insights for their audience that build trust among the prospective buyers.
Why should brands use instagram stories?
Stories brings human experience (HX) quotient to your brand
Most of the Instagram Stories are informal and extemporaneous, so viewers feel a kinship to the brands. Contrary to popular belief that marketing should have refined and flawless content, Stories are purposefully missing the perfection for raw and more humanized experiences. Behind-The-Scenes (BTS) stories are one of those examples that connect effectively.
Brands can use Stories for a human-like interaction with the audience within the brand’s personality, voice, and persona.
Endless engagement landscape for your brand
Instagram Stories open up the endless scope of engagement for brands to blend ‘features’ into ‘Stories’ in a perfect harmony of fun. Brands can use quizzes, polls, music, #hashtags, custom stickers, and @mentions to engage with the audience.
You just need to bring a little bit of creativity, and you are all set to engage with your followers
How brands and businesses can use instagram stories?
Brands and businesses are crushing on Instagram stories for brand promotion and engagement. They can leverage Stories in awesome ways for engagement. Whether you are a seasoned marketer or a newbie, these Instagram Stories ideas will help you for Instagram marketing strategy.
1) ‘How-to’s’ and tutorials are great way to start
The Slideshow-like sequential format makes Stories perfect for ‘How-to’ and tutorial content to educate your audience. The bite-size educational content can easily replace the blog and traditional video. From makeup, fitness, fashion styling, and beyond there are endless ideas.
2) Be playful with questions, quizzes, and polls
You can create an excellent bond with followers via polls, quizzes, and questions. Furthermore, Stories are the perfect feature for constant conversations with your audience.
In the above example, a fashion brand effectively uses Stories to engage followers and keep effortless conversations.
3) Engage your followers by the announcements
A smart way to keep your followers intact is to make announcements on Instagram Stories. Brands can involve followers about deals, offers, new product launches, exclusive offerings, and more.
Here, Story enables followers to tap on the latest arrivals to view product information and get the upcoming products
4) Exclusive offers, promotion, and time-sensitive deals
Just like your Instagram promotional posts, Stories can also be a perfect fit for exclusive offers and time-sensitive deals to grab your audiences. It works best for conventional ‘brick-and-mortar’ stores and new-age e-commerce to cover a large audience group. Insta Story comes with a built-in shoppable link so viewers can buy right away from the Story.
The above example
of an Instagram Story shows a clear call-to-action to buy the brand’s exclusive
deal. It focuses on the time-sensitive best offer for viewers with a shoppable
link in it.
5) Show ‘User-generatedcontent (UGC)’ and customer pictures
User-Generated-Content is one of the most authentic posts on your Stories. Most brands show Stories using their tagged customer photos as the UGC. One of the exciting advantages of Stories is that brands can share space with their customers without clogging up their own feeds.
Starbucks uses its Instagram Stories to showcase UGC and encourages customers for more engagement. Instagram Stories deliver what most brands seek in their marketing strategies.
Useful tools that will help you in your business growth and brand building:
Conclusion
To build your brand identity, presence, and engagement, Instagram Stories are the perfect feature. It reaches most of your target audience and connects with followers. Brands can get the most of their Instagram marketing strategy with Stories. It is one of the best social media platforms to engage, audience reach, build brand awareness, sales, drive traffic, and more.
If you are among the one who is also in search of the better engagement reach, then Locobuzz can fulfill your engagement reach. The holistic social media management suite monitors the online conversations happening on various social media channels. Moreover, the top-performing stories can be helpful to take further business decisions.