Since its arrival, social media has become a major asset for the companies who have learned how to utilise it to their advantage. Not using social media for marketing your products or services might be the reason why your company is losing clients or not making much profit.
After the popularity of Facebook, Instagram is also on a similar rise, with more than 1 billion monthly active users. Riding on the wave of popularity, brands also earn a huge profit through advertising on Instagram. The advertising has significantly increased since the arrival of stories, back in 2016. The story feature allows a user to post a video or a photo, or a series of both which will automatically disappear after 24 hours. Instagram has gone one step further and improved the story feature by inculcating various features in it such as questions, polls, and sliding-scale voting. What’s more interesting is that anyone can make engaging stories with the use of colours, GIFs, stickers, text fonts, and more. You don’t even need an expert for it. If you are looking forward to creating a reputable online presence in the digital world, here are some marketing strategies which you must incorporate into your Instagram advertising stories:
Instagram provides plenty of options through which you can interact with your followers. To increase your brand’s social presence, interacting works a lot better than simply telling the followers about a product or service.
• With the use of Instagram polls, you can ask questions to your followers which they might be interested in answering. Even though the obvious choice is asking about products, services, and other facts related to your company, you can also choose an informal way and talk about general topics or aware your customers about trending issues. Asking them about current events, upcoming releases or any other relevant thing can also be of great help.
• What could be better than engaging with your followers in real-time Instagram’s live videos help you achieve exactly that. No matter the place you are in, as soon as you go live, all your followers will receive a notification so that they can tune in and see what you’re up to. In addition to this, your live story will be the first thing they will see on their feeds. Whether it is a Question and Answer broadcast, a company event or even a product launch, it surely is going to impact your customers. One thing you need to keep in mind is that misusing or overusing the feature can also lead to followers giving a negative response and unfollowing your pages. Thus, whenever you use it, make sure that you have a purpose in mind.
• Using hashtags wisely can also increase your engagement with followers while spreading important information about your brand. If you have a local brand, make sure that you use geotagging to digitally reach people who are within your business range. Whenever you enter a geotag in one of your posts, Instagram combines it with others which use the same geotag. Thus, hashtags can drastically improve your local exposure and boost your interaction with local followers.
Another popular way through which brands use Instagram, story takeovers help to increase following and drive sales. A takeover is similar to a collaboration between a business company and an influencer. For example, you can allow a local radio jockey to take over your Instagram stories for a day, providing you with added attention as the radio jockey’s followers would also be following your stories throughout the day. Even if some people are not interested in your products and services, surely some will check out your profile, website, and try a product/service due to the recommendation by the radio jockey. Takeovers from famous personalities who have a huge fan base can turn out to be very beneficial for your company. Here are some things you need to keep in mind while choosing an influencer
• The influencer’s social following
• The demographics they can impact
• The influencer’s interest in your brand
• The influencer’s relevance to your product/service
Paid partnerships work both ways as you pay the influencer. So, both the parties can get a boost in their revenue through takeovers. All you need to worry about is make the perfect choice.
Thus, rather than seeing Instagram as just a cool platform to show your company’s products, you should think of it as an opportunity to expand your business and reach more and more users.
