5 Reasons You Must Create Instagram Stories for Your Business | Resourceful Business

5 Reasons You Must Create Instagram Stories for Your Business

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Social media content is rapidly evolving.  

Back in August 2016, Instagram launched Stories to compete with Snapchat Stories. Stories were meant to help capture the daily activities of Instagram’s now more than 1 billion users worldwide, and unlike posts, Stories are short-lived–disappearing in 24 hours.

By January 2019, Instagram stories had grown in popularity to over 500 million daily active users (DAU), meaning half of Instagram’s daily users are on Stories every day. With important, interactive features and a less formal type of content, Instagram Stories have become essential for businesses that use Instagram marketing.

Here are 5 reasons you must create Instagram stories for your business:

Instagram Story stickers

Reason 1: Instagram Stories have interactive stickers

With Instagram Stories, you can add a sticker. Unlike Instagram posts, stickers allow users to tap and interact with your Story in creative ways. There are many types of stickers available including:

  • Donation
  • Quiz
  • Countdown
  • Questions
  • Music
  • Poll or Emoji Slider
  • Location
  • Hashtag
  • Current Time or Weather
  • Selfie

As an example, suppose you are thinking about keeping your business open late one evening of the week. You wonder whether your customers would come. You can create an Instagram Story and add an emoji slider with a thumbs up emoji. Ask, “Do you want us to stay open late one evening?” Customers that see your Instagram Story can slide the emoji to the right if they like the idea, and you get feedback directly from your customers.

Reason 2: Instagram Stories are more informal than posts

There is an analogy used by Bella Vasta, a Facebook Group keynote speaker, which she uses to explain the difference between a Facebook page and a Facebook Group, and the same analogy applies to Instagram posts and Instagram Stories. Bella equates a Facebook page to the front yard of a house–formal and public. Similarly, Instagram posts have a more formal, curated look and feel.

A home’s backyard is the Facebook group – a gathering of people with something in common, informal, more personal and friendly. Likewise, Instagram Stories are the backyard–informal and personal.

The value of Instagram Stories is they give a business tremendous versatility in how it can present content with some reserved for the more formal Instagram page and other content posted in Stories. Another unique feature of Stories worth mentioning is that unlike posts, you can add to your Stories. So, if your business is attending an event, your followers can watch a Story and see new additions to the Story while you are there.

Instagram Story Highlights

Reason 3: Instagram Story Highlights can help cultivate unique audiences

According to Instagram Business, 80% of Instagram accounts follow a brand. Not surprisingly, Instagram users look for Instagram Stories shared by their favorite brands, and Stories have a feature called Highlights – the circles that appear across the top of an Instagram page. These Highlights can be divided into content-related categories that are relevant for your business, and when Stories are added to Highlights, they do not disappear in 24 hours. One of our favorite Story Highlights categories is “Inspo” because we like to see what people in a company are reading, thinking about or doing for inspiration.

Here are some Highlights examples:

  • A hair salon may highlight different haircut styles
  • A retail store may highlight different seasonal clothing styles
  • A blogger may highlight different blog categories

Businesses should establish relevant Highlights categories so followers can discover new content in their areas of interest. Whereas Instagram pages do not allow partitioning of content by topic, Stories do via Highlights. Using Highlights effectively will allow a brand to cultivate unique subsets of their audience based on their content preferences.

Instagram describes its stories product as a way to promote the sharing of moments that don’t meet the higher bar of a traditional Instagram post. –The Verge

Reason 4: Instagram Stories re-enforce the business brand

An Instagram Story can serve as an extension of a brand’s footprint on Instagram. As with websites or social media posts, Instagram Stories should have a hint of the company’s brand guidelines – colors, fonts, tag lines. People that see Instagram Stories should recognize familiar aspects associated with the brand. Whether it’s a cameo of everyone’s favorite furry mascot in the office or a behind-the-scenes look at the setup for an event,  Instagram Stories give people a feel for the soul of the business while subtly reinforcing the brand.

marketing with Instagram Stories

Reason 5: Instagram Stories focus on moments and encourage sharing

An Instagram Story can reflect the little moments that occur throughout the day, and people love to feel part of someone’s journey. Instagram posts, on the other hand, allow businesses to build their brand’s presence in a more systematic way, include thoughtful written copy, tags, and imagery. When it comes to Instagram business pages, viewers expect a carefully curated feed that looks aesthetically pleasing.

Stories, in contrast, are spontaneous and current. The concept behind Stories is that people will want to capture moments and share them. Stories are ephemeral, and Facebook, which owns Instagram, hopes users will actively create content that is personal, relatable and captures the moment.

Great for branding, audience targeting and connecting with your tribe, Instagram Stories are a must for your social media marketing toolkit. If you’re interested in creating an Instagram Story strategy but don’t know where to start, contact us.

5 MORE Signs Digital Marketing is Replacing Traditional Media | Resourceful Business

5 MORE Signs Digital Marketing is Replacing Traditional Media

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In a previous blog, 5 Signs Digital Marketing is Replacing Traditional Media, we wrote about the signs of the digital marketing transformation unfolding around us. From disappearing office addresses to uber thin fonts and interactive documents, all the signposts were telling us that marketing as we knew it was being upended. What began as a slow and steady stream of changes has become a rising flood that has now enveloped the media landscape in its entirety.

As the sea change continues, we thought we would share 5 MORE signs digital marketing is replacing traditional media.

1. Digital ads overtake television ad spend

In 2017, digital ad spending in the US surpassed traditional TV ad expenditures for the first time–much of the shift driven by mobile. In fact, eMarketer projects, “By 2020, [mobile] will represent 43% of total media ad spending in the US—a greater percentage than all traditional media combined.” As Millennials, in particular, migrate to video and online streaming of their favorite programming, digital ads give marketers the platform and versatility to target them. Traditional television ads are comparatively random in their audience reach, and overall television viewership is declining in the United States as well. A study by Omnicom Media Group found that “…in 2016 the smartphone replaced the TV as the device most watched by Millennials,” and there’s even a new marketing nickname for the 22 to 35-year-old demographic that eschews traditional television–the Unreachables.  

PEW Research Center estimated newspaper circulations

2. Newspaper circulations decline sharply

The recent Pew Research Center Newspapers: Fact Sheet notes that the estimated total circulation of U.S. daily newspapers has fallen precipitously since the early 1990s. The decline extends to both Sunday and weekday circulations. By the numbers, total estimated circulation of U.S. newspapers halved to circa 31 million in 2017 from 62 million in 1990.

Although digital newspaper circulations are not easy to gauge, the estimated number of unique visitors to the top 50 U.S. online newspaper sites appeared stable in 2017 and saw double-digit gains both in 2016 and 2015. The growth in digital newspaper readership is in sharp contrast to the trend in physical newspaper circulation.

3. Not just office addresses, but offices disappear

Remote working is here to stay. Not only are more employees working remotely, but they are spending longer periods of time engaged in remote work as well. In Freelancing in America 2018, Upwork noted that 56.7 million Americans, or 35% of the workforce, now freelance, and the number of Americans that are freelancing has increased by 3.7 million people since 2014. As the freelancing revolution takes hold, multi-channel digital marketing is adept at targeting a mobile labor force used to working in different spaces, on multiple devices, and in the cloud.

“Audiences continue to abandon traditional media, and ad dollars follow.” –eMarketer

4. Business cards fall by the wayside

I recently attended a business dinner with 15 other marketing professionals, C-Suite executives, and startup co-founders. When I asked a few attendees for business cards, each had the same response–I don’t carry business cards anymore. One person told me his company did not want to pay for physical business cards. The digital age has ushered in the concept of “connecting,” and in fact, after dinner, several people connected with me on LinkedIn. There are also numerous business card apps so people can exchange their contact information digitally. It is estimated that 88% of physical business cards are thrown away within one week of people receiving them which explains why even marketing oneself has gone digital.

5. Digital ads use keywords to identify potential customers

According to Google Benchmarks and Insights, Google display campaigns–image-based digital ads–reach 80% of global internet users. Not only do Google Ads have incredible reach, but they have sophisticated, data-driven audience targeting tools. The ads are driven in part by keywords, words or phrases relevant to an Internet search. These keywords are one component of the algorithmic calculation that determines relevance, a critical metric that forms the basis for which digital ads a person sees.

Broadly categorized into three types, keywords help digital marketers identify and hone in on specific stages of the buyer’s journey with a level of precision not possible using traditional media. Briefly,

  • Navigational keywords go to a certain website or destination, often a company name or brand
  • Informational keywords help the user acquire information (how to, compare, information about)
  • Transactional keywords prompt action (buy, get, contact, sign up)

Based on cues such as keywords, digital marketers can efficiently fashion ads for the multi-stage buyer’s journey and optimize the audiences that see the ad.

So, there you have 5 MORE signs digital marketing is replacing traditional media. At Resourceful Business, we continue to evolve our marketing strategies to respond to the rapidly changing marketing landscape and the challenges that accompany it.

If you’re interested in learning more about how digital marketing can grow your business, please contact us.