Based on internet sources data, on an average day, 500 million users actively engage with Instagram stories. Out of your total followers, approximately 10-25% of your audience checks your story daily. These numbers are impressive for a business to grow by leveraging the real power of Instagram stories. But the question is HOW?
In this blog post, we will provide you with the 9 best ways to use Instagram stories for your business growth and stand out among 200 million business accounts on Instagram. Based on recent data, almost 90% of the Instagram audience follow at least 1 business account, and 81% of the Instagram audience use it for researching good products and trustworthy brands.
In terms of paid ads, 4 million businesses spend money on just Instagram stories ads to drive sales. This shows the potential of Instagram stories in brand building, business growth, and revenue generation.
Benefits of Using Instagram Stories for Business
Instagram stories are a short-term post that stays at the top of the feed for 24 hrs. The best part: a story doesn't hide in endless scrolling or swiping as in Reels or Posts. This increases impressions and ultimately your business presence. Some other useful benefits of Instagram stories for your business are:
- Auto Notification to Followers by Instagram
- Direct access with the Profile Ring feature
- Cut off the competition to grab attention
- Features and Updates to make Instagram stories engaging
- Sparking conversation and building connection
- Outbound Link to redirect traffic to your store
- Tagging and Collaboration on Instagram stories to work with collaborators
- Allows all types of content to make your stories interesting.
All these benefits and features can be achieved organically in 10 different ways we are going to discuss in this blog post.
1. Use Stories as Notifier
Instagram Stories stay online for 24 hrs from the time of posting. This can be your best notifier to send daily notifications, offers, and updates about your business. Moreover, if you are consistent in your daily posting, Instagram will auto-notify all followers when you add a story. There are certain things about a business you can post every day on stories:
- Product showcase: You can show one product of your business every day
- Offers: You can post any special deals and offers for your audience to build engagement.
- Exclusive deals: You can utilise the Instagram close friends feature to notify them about exclusive deals
- Upcoming events in your business
2. Instagram Stories for Engagement
Instagram Stories can be your engagement driver to spark new conversations with your audience and build new connections. Instagram provides quiz and poll stickers to invite your audience to start a new personal one-to-one chat with you. For a business, connections build trust, and trust brings sales. Here are some ideas you can try on your business account:.
- Help Support: Invite people to ask about any problem they face while using your product and services.
- Feedback: You can collect honest feedback for your product and may post some of it as your story
- Vote for the best: Ask your audience to choose their favorite service or product from the given options.
- Play a Contest: To boost sales, you can play a quiz contest by giving the winner a big offer.
- Future suggestions: Ask about which product, services, or content they want to see next.
- One-to-one guidance: provide exclusive services to someone who replied to your story.
3. Instagram Story Carousel
We all have seen carousel posts on Instagram, which are a series of 10-20 images in a slider format. Although Instagram Stories don't have the same sliding interaction, they are somewhat similar, but instead of sliding, you need to tap left or right to see the next image. You can use this interaction to create an Instagram story carousel.
A story carousel can be very effective for telling a long story of your business in little chunks. In the end slide, you can ask them to take action, like clicking a link or following your account.
4. Reuse and Repost
Instagram allows you to share your own and others' posts to your Instagram stories. This feature can help you collaborate, give a shout-out out or reuse your best-performing content. Reusing your content helps you be consistent when you don't have new ideas for your content.
Some cool ideas for reposting could be as follows:
- Throwback photos
- Sharing the likes milestone
- Sharing the total follower milestone
- Time-lapse of all posts till today
- Reel remix with new captions
5. Instagram Story Trailers
Instagram stories can be used to create trailers of your full-length videos or carousel. You can create a small trailer with a timer to notify your audience about your new post. This increases the engagement rate on your post.
6. Limited Period Offers
Instagram stays online for 24 hrs from the time of posting. You can use this feature to give a limited-period offer until that story expires. It will create FOMO and urgency among your audience, which increases the chance of conversion.
A limited period offer could be anything like a voucher discount, BOGO deal, or free meal. You can ask your audience to reach out to you or place their order before the story expires. You can apply this strategy once a week, so they will actively check your story every day for new offers.
7. Product research with Stories
You can create a poll to ask your audience which product or service they like the most. For example, you can create a split image of two products with a Poll sticker to let them vote for the one they like. This could be a great method to test multiple products before investing money in inventory.
Polls can also help you understand the pain points of your audience through their votes. You can create a set of questions and let them vote on one question per day. This gives you enough data to analyze your customer behavior and take the right decisions.
8. Getting free impressions
Instagram stories can be your Free option to get impressions on your business ads. Though we have meta ads for this purpose, if you don't have a high marketing budget, then it's better to post your ads as a story to get free impressions or maybe clicks as well.
You can also post daily reminder stories or ads, which can keep your potential audience warm until they convert. If your business has any weekly events or monthly offers, you can post "days to go" stories to hook up your audience, till the event date.
9. Collaborations
Creators are collaborating on Instagram stories even before Instagram added collaboration features to its platform. It's more like an exchange of stories by posting a story and tagging each other's accounts. This helps creators reach a broader audience beyond their niche scope.
Recently, Instagram added collaboration features that let you invite collaborators to your content. Such a type of story appears on both Instagram profiles, giving you exposure to a larger audience.