Instagram Stories started out as the company’s way of competing with Snapchat by introducing a similar feature on its platform.However, it looks like they’re more than a fad – over 500 million daily active users use Instagram Stories, ignoring the brands that use Instagram Stories brand awareness missed.
Instagram Stories are bite-sized pieces of content that don’t appear on the feed and typically disappear after 24 hours unless they’re saved and highlighted using. Thanks to its many users, Stories allow brands, big and small, to increase awareness, brand awareness, and engagement.
To take advantage of this cool Instagram feature, we’ve listed five ways to use Stories to increase your business’s brand awareness.
Five Ways to Increase Brand Awareness with Instagram Stories
show, don’t tell
Instagram Stories is like a mini TV channel for your business, and you should use it to showcase what your products, services, and brand are all about. People are more associated with visual content and are more likely to engage with such content.
Some of the content you can use to showcase your brand or business is to post:
- voyeur
- Behind the scenes that your customers don’t usually see,
- Product announcements and releases of new products
- Live blog for events organized by your brand or business
- Questions and Answers
With these types of content in your stories, you are pulling your followers into your business world they will appreciate and be able to relate to.
Save Story as Highlight
One limitation of Instagram Stories is that they have a time limit — they disappear after 24 hours. However, Instagram Highlights provides a way for your followers or new audiences to browse important stories you may have shared in the past.
With Highlights, you can create collections to save stories or content that talk about the same topic or belong to a topic. That way, after 24 hours, followers and new audiences following your profile can browse past stories to learn more about who you are and what you do.
Create templates and style guides
Stories are great, but being creative, unique, and consistently working on a chosen theme and style will quickly set your brand apart.
To do this, identify the type of content you want to consistently create for your brand, and develop templates that you will always use for that content.
- Choose a font type to use for all stories or different content types
- Define brand colors or choose specific colors you want your brand to associate with.
- Define styles for different content types
- Redesign your Highlights cover to use a custom-designed icon as your Highlights cover image instead.
Another benefit of having preset templates and style guides is that anyone on the team, internal or external, can create a story for the brand without breaking consistency.
Interact with followers and customers
Instagram Stories is designed to increase awareness and visibility. One way to speed things up is to involve your followers and customers in your stories.
Original content is great, but user-generated content will give you a higher relationship score with your target audience and increase your trust and credibility with your brand. For anyone experiencing burnout, this is a great way to avoid running out of fresh content for Instagram Stories.
Interact with your followers/customers through stories:
- Featured posts about your brand or product by customers or followers.
- Ask your customers for video recommendations that can be reused in Instagram Stories.
- Shout out to loyal customers and followers.
- Use polls in your stories. Your followers can reply to these, and their replies or questions to your polls can become the content of new posts.
- If you have influencers associated with your brand or super clients willing to create content for your business, make an acquisition. You can agree on topics and number of posts before the acquisition.
Adopt a people-centred approach
It’s easy to get addicted to creating content to promote your brand through your stories, but you should stick to a people-centric approach to building brand awareness.
A people-centred approach lets you focus on what helps and seeks to make your followers/customers aware of your brand, products and services. So your content will be more about product education and customer engagement.
Use Stories to post tutorials about your products, address some common questions your customers have, and thank your followers and customers for sticking to your brand and getting involved.
Creating human-centric content will keep your followers coming back to your stories because they get value from the content you post.
Use the steps above to skyrocket your brand awareness, awareness, and engagement on Instagram Stories. Be consistent with the quality and quantity of content and watch the magic happen.
