Insragram or Snapchat? Is Snapchat dead? When Instagram introduced Instagram stories recently, everybody was worried for Snapchat and even started comparing with it but the best thing about Instagram is its huge user base. Almost 3 Billion people are using Instagram worldwide which creates a big market place for marketers.
How to use Instagram for Marketing?
Before I start talking about how to use Instagram stories to increase the conversion rate, one thing marketers need to realize that the same feature may reduce the number of people going through the original posts publishing on their wall (also called news feed). This means that the sponsored ads might not get as many viewers (and hence less number of clicks) as it used to get earlier. But still, these are the early days to predict any thing for the original posts.
Instagram allows to create 30 seconds video or picture post; both can be decorated with text and different size and colour pen tool. The Instagram stories comes at the top of the news feeds (post wall).
You will see the circle on the profile picture of the person to whom you follow when you will visit his profile. By clicking on his profile picture, you can watch his stories.
You can upload as many stories on your profile which will be available to view by all those people who follows you for next 24 hours. Following ways you can use to get more conversion using Instagram stories:
1. Put meaningful stories: It is not so important how many times you are using the stories but what kind of stories you are uploading is more important. You can put 2 types of stories –
(i) Knowledge sharing: Create short stories in which you can share some knowledge about the product or industry to which your company belongs to. For example, you can record a story portraying why every kid should use your product for better health and ask them to click the link in your bio to know more about it. This will increase the traffic on your landing page.
(ii) Promotional: You must be using sales oriented posts on Instagram every now and then. Create the stories promoting your product or service and again ask the user to click on the link in the bio to avail the offer.
2. Drive the attention to your post on their news feed: Like Twitter, people find it difficult to keep the pace with the updates they find from the people they follow on Instagram. If you follow many people who are the regular users of Instagram then you might find it difficult to see each and every post uploaded by all of them whenever you check your Instagram news feed. You can create stories to tell them why they should not miss ‘watching’ your post in your profile OR you can create a story what benefit they can get if they are going to watch the post you have uploaded. Once they are going to your profile to see your post, from there you can take them to the link kept in your bio.
3. Ask the followers to send a message to you from story: Every story uploaded has “Send message” text at the bottom. Clicking on that you can write a message to the story teller. Create the stories by which your followers can interact you or they can send you the message. For example you can run a contest and can ask for the answer in the message box. The sent messages you will get in your direct message ‘inbox’. After receiving the messages you can declare the winner in your news feed.
4. Check the analytics: Once you upload your story, you will start seeing the number at the bottom of your story. You can swipe up to see how many people have viewed your story and who were they? From here you can also download the content of your story to your phone. Based on the number of people who have viewed your story in last 24 hours, you can decide to upload the downloaded story on your regular Instagram post or not. If you find more people viewing your story, always use the same story in your regular post upload to get more visibility for more time and to more people. Like this, you are increasing the reach of your post content to more and more followers.
5. Refine the strategy periodically: While you are uploading more stories daily, your followers see all the stories at the one go. They will see the horizontal lines at the top of your stories to see how many stories you have created in last 24 hours. For all the stories uploaded, you can check how may people have seen your story at the bottom of each story. If you see that after few stories (say 2 or 3) the number of viewers are decreasing, it can be the indication of the fact that either they do not like the content of the story or they are not so interested to spend their all the time watching single person’s stories only. You can try to know the reason behind drop-offs of the viewers by changing content types and playing with the number of stories.
Conclusion: Like Facebook, Instagram is also changing its algorithm and hence it becomes so crucial to keep your news feed at the top all the time. There can’t be better reason to create engaging stories to stay on the top in the list of your followers, always!
