As a marketer, you need to take advantage of Instagram stories to create engaging content that will draw in your target audience. Instagram is a powerful platform, with over 1 billion users, and around 500 million users using Instagram Stories. Instagram Stories offer a vast opportunity for marketers to advertise their brand, increase brand awareness, and engage with their followers.

Many marketers overlook Instagram Stories as mere ephemeral vanity fare. However, properly embracing Stories builds community and drives conversions through casual authenticity that fosters relationship-building beyond traditional posts. This blog post is here to equip marketers with the right tools and strategies to boost their Instagram Stories’ Creation and Conversion rates.

What Makes Instagram Stories Uniquely Valuable?

Stories disappear after 24 hours, causing confusion around their marketing utility. But their ephemeral nature enables real-time connections impossible elsewhere. Followers anticipating updates check your Stories throughout the day. So, when you publish a story, you drive immediate commenting and participation, unlike scheduled feed posts. Frequent participation forges community, strengthening bonds between creator and audience.

Additionally, Stories gain elevated visibility beyond committed followers. Instagram prominently features them via profile bubbles and directly in the main feed, bypassing the algorithm limiting feed posts. This expanded reach means visitors completely unfamiliar with you often discover content in Stories first when randomly exploring profiles in their network.

Showcasing authentic personality and behind-the-scenes transparency offered by Stories humanizes brands in ways basic bios or magazine-style photo streams cannot. Dropping some marketing polish to reveal real personalities builds trust and familiarity with cold traffic, encouraging following, engagement, and conversion over time through relationship-building.

What Does Compelling Story Content Look Like?

Stories uniquely spotlight personality, lifestyle, insights, and developments instead of polished marketing messages. This demands reconsidering traditional commercial creative approaches.

To enlighten and engage, craft Stories letting followers learn about, from, and with you:

Stories About You: Share personal tidbits, behind-the-scenes footage, passions, backstories, and vulnerabilities viewers can relate to. This perspective fosters emotional investment by demonstrating your “why” in an accessible way.

Lessons From Your Past: Broadcast industry insights, innovative tactics, unconventional ideas, and lessons from experience to position your expertise and unique worldview.

What you’re Learning Now: Document developing offerings and solicit feedback so followers learn alongside you while directly influencing the creative process.

Finally, avoid overly manufactured posts that reveal too much. Embrace imperfections because psychological research indicates they boost your likability by increasing perceived humility and approachability when expressed.

How to Maximize Stories Engagement

Creating phenomenal content means little if nobody sees it. Proactively engaging community members increases visibility while forging bonds, yielding higher-quality followers.

1. Be a part of the Social Community
Comment thoughtfully on peers’ Stories instead of mass-spamming emoji reactions. Thoughtful comments spur increased replies in return through reciprocal goodwill. This builds awareness and relationships while elevating your content’s algorithmic reach.

Don’t expect others to initiate reciprocal value exchanges, however. Regularly contribute, congratulate, thoughtfully discuss, and celebrate community successes without expecting applause for your work in return. This generous mindset earns compounding returns over time by winning hearts through selfless support, not calculated pandering.

2. Creating Eye-Catching Instagram Stories:
Instagram stories expire after 24 hours. As a result, it is essential to create content that will catch the attention of your followers and make them want to take action before it disappears. Here are a few tips to create eye-catching stories:

– Use bright and bold colors, emojis, and stickers to make your stories stand out.

– Use text overlays to reinforce your message and break up long paragraphs.

– Use Story Templates and filters to add different effects to your images and videos.

– Use Instagram Layout to create collages or combine photos and videos to tell a story.

3. Using Instagram Stories Features:
Instagram Stories offers a variety of features that marketers can leverage to increase their Stories conversion rates. Some of these features include:

– Polls: These are useful for getting followers’ opinions on your products or services, or for conducting market research. Leverage interactive stickers like polls and questions to effortlessly involve audiences. Simple binary polls provide easy commentary fodder, while specific questions invite opinions or enable anonymous lead generation by welcoming emailed signup requests.

– Swipe-Up Links: These are ideal for driving traffic or promoting your brand’s website or blog.

– Hashtags and Location Stickers: Adding these to your stories increases their visibility and helps you reach a larger audience.

– Countdown Stickers: These are perfect for announcing product launches, limited-time deals, and other time-sensitive events.

How to Optimize Stories For Conversions

With followers invested thanks to engagement efforts, thoughtfully incorporate strategic selling elements without excessive promotional tones.

1. Ensure your profile fully conveys your brand differentiation and industry expertise. Strong, benefit-focused bios drive exploring visitors to convert into followers quickly while clearly explaining how you can help them specifically.

2. BTS – Behind the Scenes: For major launches like online courses or challenge programs, you can seed interest by documenting their development behind the scenes. Let audiences influence final products through solicited feedback while building eager anticipation of release deals.

3. Strategic Success Stories: Describe exactly how you solve specific problems for ideal customers. Outline what is included, why your approach works, and what tangible results to expect. Weave in anonymous positive DM testimonials to further demonstrate credibility.

4. Finally, incorporate occasional motivational calls-to-action driving traffic to your website for sales. Instagram now enables links in Stories—use them. Also, promote email opt-in offers to retain casual visitors as ongoing subscribers and nurture them over time.

What type of Call-2-Action is best for Instagram Stories?

As a marketer, your goal is not just to have engaging Stories but to convert viewers into customers or subscribers. Your stories should have clear and concise Calls-to-Action (CTAs) that will prompt viewers to take action.

Some examples of Call-to-Actions include:

– Click the Link in Bio.

– Swipe Up to Learn More.

– DM Us for More Information.

– Shop Now.

Remember—not all followers see every Story. Consistently rotate different CTA elements across posts at strategic intervals so each viewer receives targeted exposure during their viewing session. This maximizes conversion rates by relentlessly covering your entire audience with diverse value stream access points.

How to Measure Instagram Stories’ Success

To improve your Instagram Stories’ creation to conversion rate, you need to track and analyze their success. Instagram offers Insights, a feature that tracks your stories’ performance and engagement rate. It analyzes data such as Impressions, Reach, and Exit rates to provide you with meaningful insights into your audience’s behavior.

From these insights, you can identify high-performing stories and analyze what makes them stand out. You can then use this information to optimize your Stories’ creation and conversion rates.

3 Tips For Instagram Stories Success

Beyond core content best practices, these tips further channel refinement strategies:

Enable Captions: Boost accessibility, context, and viewership duration by incorporating text captions for those sensitive to audio-only information. This also effectively doubles communication bandwidth through parallel delivery mediums.

Save Stories to Highlights: Curate evergreen highlights, gathering your most impactful Stories into categorized “pages” atop your profile for visitors to self-navigate. Treat this space like a supplemental website articulating your brand visually.

Go Live Often: Schedule frequent casual live broadcasts, allowing truly raw connection in the authentic moment. Transparency and vulnerability foster intense loyalty that is unreplicable otherwise.

The ephemeral Instagram Story uniquely bonds creators and communities through vulnerable conversational intimacy impossible on polished feeds. But achieving this requires bravely embracing discomfort around overexposure or oversharing fears. Those committing fully realize the rewards of amplified emotional engagement and accelerated growth over time.

It’s your choice. Cling to slickly packaged perfection or courageously reveal your humanity? One sustains the status quo while the other transforms businesses and lives. What feels right for your business?

Summary

As a marketer, you need to take advantage of Instagram stories to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness. Creating eye-catching stories is essential to catch the attention of your followers, and using Instagram Stories features will increase engagement and drive traffic to your website. Call-to-Actions will prompt viewers to take action, and analyzing your Stories’ success will help you refine your approach and optimize your creation to conversion rates. At LACED Agency, we’re dedicated to helping you develop and execute effective social media campaigns that connect with your audience, enhance your brand, and achieve your marketing objectives.