More than half a billion people use Instagram Stories every day. They are a fantastic, fun and creative opportunity for brands to connect with their social audiences, grow engagement, build awareness, and drive traffic to e-comms and websites.
There is not really a secret formula to determine what works for your brand, but according to Facebook’s own stats, here are the best tips and tricks to create effective Instagram Stories to wow your audience.
Creative elements: According to Facebook, 56% of the brand’s sales lift can be attributed to the quality of the creative. Make engaging, artistic, and effective stories!
Speed: Grab attention with an impactful first frame. Consider using speed as an element to maintain their attention.
Sound: 80% of Stories with voice-over or music drove better results than ads without.
Branding: Due to the speed that users go through Stories, it's important to make brand elements unmissable at the beginning.
Call to action: Campaigns that emphasized a CTA (like ‘swipe up to shop’) drive 89% more conversions than those that don't.
Static + Motion: Campaigns with a mixture of static images and animation have an 86% chance of driving higher value than video or static-only.
Although your Stories don’t need to follow these guidelines, consider this as a useful guide to gain your audience's attention.
Shopping in Stories.
Instagram continues upgrading its services to give businesses more possibilities to drive conversion directly through the platform –quickly becoming a shopping destination unlike anywhere else. Recently, they added product stickers to Stories, so you can easily integrate products into your content. When a shopper taps on a product sticker, they'll be able to see additional product images, details and similar items, as well as a link to the business's mobile site to make a purchase.
Building a thoughtful Stories strategy.
Ok, so now you know the basics of how Instagram Stories should look and sound like, but do you know how to create a well-rounded strategy around them? You have to understand how to use them to the best of your advantage to keep audiences engaged on your brand's journey.
