Instagram stories are fun, bring out your creative side and are easy to make! But stories can also be really helpful when you decide you want to use them strategically within your social media presence, to boost your engagement, reach a larger audience, and establish your brand’s position.
Keep reading to know how!
Before we get into the details, today is World Martini Day, so here is reminder to unclench your jaw, take a breath, relax your arms and if you can, pour yourself a cold one, (it doesn't have to be a martini) if it is and even if it isn't, cheers! enjoy the blog.
5 ways to increase your Instagram story reach and their impact:
🍸 Include them in your social media plan: When planning your social media goals and formulating strategies to achieve them, make some room and assign some work to your stories. What is it you want to achieve? Brand awareness, audience engagement, customer retention? Once you've set a goal, customise your stories to move towards it. Remember, you're changing their goal not how creative they are, so keep them as quirky as you want, as long as they send out the right message. When you define your goals, it’ll be easier to understand how stories fit into your marketing plan and everyday you will learn how to use them more effectively.
🍸 What glitters is...your on-brand story: The thing about stories? They don’t stay on your account longer than 24 hours. They are like tiny snippets of your business, behind the scenes etc. So if you want your story to put out a gravitational force like glittering gold, (reference to the point title) you need to make them relevant to your brand & keep them quite original, so they catch your target audience's attention. When stories are on-brand, creative, catchy and aesthetically appealing, they can achieve their purpose within the time that they remain posted.
🍸 Put them in the highlights: You need to highlight your stories, but not every story needs to be in your highlights. Just the stories that really speak for your brand and are relevant to current promotions or content that you may want to draw attention to. As we said in the previous point, they last for a short time, so highlights give you an opportunity to keep the important stories where your audience can come back and engage with them on their time. Which is why having too many stories within your highlights can lead to confusion & mindless ‘tap forwards’. Keep your highlights preppy and edit them when necessary, so they feature stories that are relevant and important.
🍸 Capture the real stuff: Stories offer you a blank canvas and you can talk about, boomerang about, and post about whatever you think your audience would love. While this freedom is cool, you need to stay focused, capture the real stuff, stuff that matters; like your products, new launches, tutorials etc. Stories can be about anything that you feel would drive your customers to take the action you are looking for. From blog alerts to promotions, use stories to give a spotlight to what’s important. Tag your products, link your blogs, drive your audience to your website to check out merch that you just dropped, promote your videos, the list is endless. Just remember to do it all in your brand’s aesthetic.
🍸 Influencer marketing: Consider branded partnerships aka influencer marketing. It’s in, it’s fun, it’s attention grabbing. Your audience is most likely going to stay on your stories longer if they see an influential person on them. That being said, it is important to find influencers that align with your brand, vision, and target audience. Take overs, collaborations, reviews, micro-workshops, etc. are all great ways of engaging your current followers and also driving the influencer's followers to your page when they promote their partnership with you on their socials. Adding Instagram influencer marketing into your overall marketing strategy for Instagram can help to increase your brand awareness, grow your follower base, and drive sales.
Tell Us if you use these tips to create a strategy that involves stories as a medium to achieve your social media marketing goals. We'd love to hear it!
WRITTEN BY
Ruth Pereira
Ruth is the Content Writer & Media Executive at Social Donut 101 based in India.
She is a design, writing and pizza enthusiast and has a hard time resisting cake.
Comments