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

5 Reasons You Must Create Instagram Stories for Your Business

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.

digital marketing audience targeting

Finding Your Ideal Customer Using the Power of Digital Marketing

An excerpt from Ann Mills’ presentation on digital marketing at Swap The Biz, Short Hills, NJ.

_________

You are on your way to a networking event.

When you arrive, you are surprised to find not one room but three to choose from–each filled with 50 people. Tacked on the door of each room is a sign with some information about each of the people in the room–ages, income bracket, and town. The information also includes whether the person is a parent and his or her areas of interest.

You look at the information on each door and think:

In Room #1, there are one or two people who seem like they might be an ideal networking opportunity.  

Room #2–about half of the people in the room seem to fit the profile of your ideal networking opportunity.

In Room #3, all 50 people fit your ideal networking persona. They are the right age, live in a nearby location, and they seem like people who might be interested in the product or service you sell.

Which room will you enter? Probably Room #3.

 

advertising mailer

In the context of marketing:

Room #1 with its 2 to 3 prospects is perhaps the equivalent of a mailer like this one about dining room sets. If you are not buying a dining room set, you’ll probably throw the mailer out. Even if you are buying a dining room set, you may not look at the mailer. If you’re the business that sent the mailer, you can’t be sure who actually read it, and as one print company executive said to me recently, “People pretty much open their mail over the trash can.”

Room #2 with about 25 possible networking opportunities is representative of a networking group. You have a higher chance of connecting and exchanging business with people in the room. They more closely fit your ideal networking persona, and you have more in common with people in the group than acquaintances you make outside the group.

Room #3 with 50 of 50 people seemingly possible networking opportunities personifies digital marketing and, in particular, a powerful tool we use called audience targeting.

What is digital marketing?

If you ask someone what digital marketing is, they will probably tell you that it is advertising delivered via a digital channel. It might be a website, Pay-Per-Click campaign (the advertiser pays for the ad only when someone clicks on it), remarketing campaign, email, social media post, or even a response to an online review. Weaved together, digital marketers create omnichannel marketing strategies.

However, that definition of digital marketing does not convey what is so important about it. Primarily:

  • A digital campaign audience is not guesswork.
  • Campaign results are measurable, actionable, and data-driven.
  • Marketing campaigns can be timed to maximize impact.
  • Digital campaigns can be changed and scaled quickly.

Let me give you two examples of the agility and versatility afforded by digital marketing:

A mortgage banker in New Jersey deals almost exclusively with clients purchasing high-end homes. In an effort to broaden his target audience of potential clients, a digital agency does an analysis of zip codes in Manhattan where residents typically pay four to five-thousand dollars in rent each month. Intuitively, it’s clear that many of these young professionals might be thinking of starting families as well. The agency develops a Pay-Per-Click ad campaign to market the banker’s services into specific zip codes in New York City where the high-rent-paying population lives.

A client with multiple retail locations in New Jersey has her online reviews on Google, Facebook, and Yelp managed by a digital agency. The agency notices that some of the online reviews are in Spanish and come to believe that it is perhaps a far more important demographic than had been previously realized. In addition to Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click campaigns targeting English-speaking people which are already in place, the agency turns Spanish-speaking living in the United States on as a demographic trait for her Google AdWords campaigns. In addition to posts in English, the social media agency also begins to add Spanish posts to her social media feeds. The agency then rolls out corporate overview videos–one with an English voiceover and another with a voiceover in Spanish.

The results seen by our digital marketing clients have been striking. One client has quadrupled sales. Another found that their seasonal summer dip in sales disappeared. One company was named to a prominent list of the fastest growing companies in New Jersey in 2017 and in America in 2018.

Micro-Moments

Google defines something called a Micro-Moment. A Micro-Moment is an intent rich moment when a person turns to a device to act on a need–to know, go, do or buy.

The power of digital marketing is that it allows your business to be present at those micro-moments in a way traditional media cannot. In so doing, your business can get:

the right message,

to the right people,

at exactly the right time.

________________

Interested in learning more? Contact us.

Hispanic customers

The Essential Customer You May Not Be Reaching

According to the United States Census Bureau, Hispanics are the largest minority in the United States comprising 17.6% of the population. By some estimates, in 2060, this demographic is projected to grow to 119 million people in the US, 28% of the population.

Today:

  • four states have populations that are more than 30% Hispanic
  • Spanish is second to English as the most-used language in the US, and
  • the US bilingual population is estimated at 11 million Spanish speakers

In digital marketing, Hispanics are an essential target audience hiding in plain sight. Hiding because they are often not considered in English ad campaigns, and marketing campaigns that target people who primarily speak English may not be accessing the Hispanic population living in the United States.

There are simple ways to broaden your marketing campaigns to include this influential and growing customer demographic. Here are three campaign tweaks that can bring this essential target audience within reach:

1. Include the Spanish language in Google AdWords campaign settings

If your business uses Google AdWords campaigns, within Google AdWords, one of the settings is Languages. It’s defined as the language of the sites where you want your ads to appear. When deciding where to show your ad, Google looks at a person’s recently viewed pages, his or her language setting and the language of recent search queries. Therefore, even if you are running an English Google AdWords campaign, it makes sense to add Spanish to your Languages settings; otherwise customers who have their Google Search Settings configured to show search results in Spanish may never see your ad. This audience is looking at and reading ads with the primary copy in English every day.

2. Target the Hispanic demographic using Facebook ads

There is an easy way to target the Hispanic demographic while configuring your Facebook ads. When creating an audience, under Interests > Additional Interests, you will see several options under Multicultural Affinity.

You can target the Hispanic audience and specify whether the household is bilingual, has the dominant language of English or Spanish, or you can simply choose Hispanic (US-All) for a broad sweep. The Hispanic (US-All) segment currently targets over 35 million people.

Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook Ads Manager

3. Add Spanish posts to your social media

Especially for location-based businesses, create occasional social media posts for Spanish-speaking consumers. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have a user-friendly TRANSLATE feature for posts. You can keep Spanish messaging straightforward, and reflect copy from your English posts. The trick is to keep the copy simple but remain true to your brand voice. Services such as Google Translate and Bing Translator work pretty well with simple sentences, and using them avoids the need for a human translator.

The Hispanic population in the United States is an essential, influential audience for business. With a few minor changes or additions, your marketing campaigns can start to engage with this demographic in a more consistent, mindful way. That’s a win-win for marketers and customers alike, or perhaps we should say, ¡ eso es ganar-ganar!

social media ads

4 Reasons You Should Be Using Social Media Ads

More than half of online adults (56%) use more than one of the five major social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn  Pew Research Center, 2016

In 2015, we wrote about the broad trend away from traditional media to digital marketing, and the data behind the shift is staggering. According to Forrester’s latest forecast, “Investment in paid search, display advertising, social media advertising, online video advertising and email marketing will pace to 46% of all advertising in five years” and approach $120 billion by 2021. As companies turn to digital marketing to reach potential customers, social media ads are a powerful part of their marketing arsenals. A “new media” advertising tool that combines audience targeting, user engagement, and measurability, social media ads are a marketing knockout punch. Here’s why:

1. AUDIENCE TARGETING: Your message gets to the right people

I was once asked to explain Facebook audience targeting, and in particular, why a business should do a Facebook ad as opposed to a traditional ad in the local newspaper. The question came from someone familiar with Facebook as a personal social media platform, but not at all aware of what it could do when marketing a business. I asked her,

“If I offered you the opportunity to market your business with a flyer that only went to people who had an interest in your product, could afford your product, and lived within driving distance of your store, would you do it? And, if I said I could take your flyer and put it on the kitchen counter of only the people you believe would want to see it, what would you say?”

She said, “Of course, I would do it. Who wouldn’t?”

To me, paid social advertising that uses demographic audience targeting is like putting a flyer on the kitchen counter of a potential customer. The range and versatility of targeting options available help digital marketers hone in on a very specific audience. Using filters such as interests, job title, net worth and geo-targeting, marketing dollars can be utilized efficiently, effectively and easily reallocated with the click of a button.

Some examples of custom audiences we have recently created for our clients include audiences that are:

  • local and geo-targeted within a 10 mile radius of numerous cities where the business has stores
  • local and in Manhattan with an interest in buying a new home in the suburbs
  • local, within the tri-state area and Florida
  • international and interested in accessing a locally-based product electronically

The specificity with which marketers can reach and get information to an audience with paid social media ads makes them a cost-effective, versatile marketing tool not constrained by physical distribution channels.

Facebook emojis

2. CONVERSATIONS: Social media ads engage an audience and broaden reach

The power of social media platforms lies in their ability to engage an audience with the brand, and social media ads can turbocharge audience reach. Social media advertising will put content in front of your target audience, and people will interact and react with emojis, comments, likes and shares. Your audience can ask questions, and you can answer them – suddenly your content has prompted a conversation.

Another example of a two-way social media interaction is user-generated reviews. Online reputation management is a growing field and business owners often receive online business reviews on their social media pages. Customers will post a review and a business can acknowledge and answer it – another type of conversation. In contrast, once a print ad is distributed, there is no way to tell how many people have read it, who read it or if it has successfully resonated with anyone in the target audience.

 

If you were offered the opportunity to market your business with a flyer that only went to people who had an interest in your product, could afford your product, and lived within driving distance of your store, would you do it?

3. CONNECTIVITY: Customers can connect with you via social media ad CTAs

According to a Pew Research Center report, “Nearly two-thirds of Americans are now smartphone owners, and for many these devices are a key entry point to the online world.” The use of smartphones has been a boon to the connectivity afforded by social media and the migration towards social media ads with clickable call to action (CTA) buttons. 

Here are just two examples of how social media ads can be used by a business:

  • A company posts a sponsored Instagram ad, and it includes a button that says, “Learn More.” When people tap the button, they are taken to a landing page where they can request a demo, watch an explainer video or start a free trial.
  • A local business creates a Facebook ad promoting a free consultation for a new service they are offering. People that are interested tap a CTA button that says “Sign Up” and fill in a registration form for the consultation.   

Versatile and engaging, social media ads connect businesses with potential customers and can convert them into viable leads with an array of clever CTAs.

targeted social media ads outpace traditional media

4. MEASURABILITY: You can track, analyze and recalibrate social media ads

Social media ads can be configured to target an audience of choice either demographically, by interest, or geographically. Once an ad is live, marketers can track and analyze an array of social analytics from impressions and click-throughs to the number of reactions, comments or shares. On Facebook, you can even track click-throughs to directions, a phone number or action buttons. If an ad is actively engaging people, marketers can move more dollars to the campaign and use a similar format in future.

Another important aspect to social media ads is they can drive visitors to your website, and you can track this information in your website’s Google Analytics data. There are visitor acquisition metrics, and one of the referral sources you can analyze is social media. An added bonus is the availability of numerous pre-configured dashboards in Google Analytics which put key metrics in an organized, visually appealing dashboard. So, in a way, paid social advertising is even better than putting a flyer on the kitchen counter of a potential customer, because it is backed by data that tells you if the person actually read the flyer!

When it comes to advertising, social media ads are a game changer. They offer audience targeting, conversations, connectivity, and measurability – four powerful reasons to ensure you add them to your marketing bag of tricks in 2017. Interested in learning more about social media ads? Work with us

 

social media management

Why Social Media Management Takes a Village

The numbers are staggering.

According to The CMO Survey, since 2009, social media spending by businesses has increased 234%. Currently, at just over 10% of marketing budgets, it’s projected to double in the next 5 years.

Hands down, social media is the area of digital marketing where our agency receives the most questions. Clients ask about changing algorithms, the ad creation process, and audience targeting. In a recent conversation with one of our clients about our social media management process, she expressed her amazement at the many layers to our approach, and it made me think that perhaps our process would be useful to others.

At Resourceful Business (RB), we have found that simply put – social media management takes a village. The process is fluid and complex, and to execute it well, we must PLAN, THINK, COLLABORATE, and MEASURE with rigor and consistency.

Here’s what we do:

PLAN the content that drives social media

Step 1: Rotate the focus and types of social media posts

Every business has different facets to their brand, and marketing should use these defining aspects to reach different audiences. Our social media team will develop a content calendar that looks at what types of social media posts might optimally represent the brand and put these different categories into a rotation. For example, each week we may create one inspirational quote, link to a past blog, curate one article we like, create a new visual for some aspect of a blog or even build a quiz. On our internal content calendar, we will plan these posts out several weeks in advance for each client, so they can be put into rotation with consistency.

content continuum

Step 2: Use the content continuum

Digital marketing content is on a continuum. At RB, we are in the camp that believes there are three categories: lightweight, middleweight, and heavyweight. Social media is lightweight content, but it is intricately linked to both middleweight and heavyweight content. In fact, social media is often used to leverage middleweight and heavyweight content and push it out to new audiences in novel ways. When we create social media content, our team is always thinking about how it relates to other content on the continuum. For example, if we have a great blog, we might take the key points and create a visual infographic from them. That visually enticing infographic might take off on Pinterest or LinkedIn SlideShare. The point is that content, including social media posts, is not created in a vacuum but rather as one piece of the content continuum.

THINK about the target audience

Step 3:  Identify the social media platforms used by the target demographic

Social media marketing is an incredibly powerful tool, and what differentiates it from mass market tactics is the ability for customers and marketing practitioners alike to define and target a specific audience. Social platforms give many audience targeting choices from geographic location to interests, job titles and even type of mobile device.

Sprout Social has an excellent blog outlining audience segments and which social media platforms they use. Depending upon the platform, there are distinct variations in user age, income, location, and education. One interesting contrast, for example, is that Snapchat attracts a young crowd with 71% of users under the age of 25. On LinkedIn, only 23% of users are between 18 and 29. Not surprisingly, if we have a client that is targeting a young audience, a LinkedIn company page may not be a marketing priority.

Facebook organic reach

Step 4: Establish the role of paid social

The organic reach, audience reach not related to a paid ad, of different social media platforms varies considerably, but certainly, strategic boosts, ads or promotions are an essential part of any successful social media strategy. A case in point is that by some estimates, only 2 to 7 percent of organic Facebook posts reach followers. The decline in organic reach on Facebook has been trending since 2012 when Facebook changed its algorithm to reduce the number of organic views. In fact, one of the real challenges of social media management is algorithms can change at any time.

Therefore, any social media strategy must include a component of paid social to widen its audience reach beyond what can be attained organically. In addition to selecting which posts will be boosted or promoted each week, a member of the RB team must create the ads in the social media portal. This process includes budgeting, audience targeting and tracking metrics after the fact.  

COLLABORATE to ensure social media excellence

Step 5: Use social media management tools

One of our essential social media management tenets is that the more team views and eyeballs we get on our client content before it goes out, the better it will be. That philosophy drives RB’s use of a number of collaborative social media management platforms. Some examples include Schedugram for Instagram posts, Canva for visual creation and post edits, Hootsuite for scheduling posts and Google Docs for collaborative social media documents such as a list of relevant hashtags.

One of our essential social media management tenets 

is that the more team views and eyeballs we get on our client

content before it goes out, the better it will be.

Step 6: Gather multiple team inputs for “agency quality” social media posts

A social media post that appeals to one person may not appeal to another, so an engaging post or image is an art and by no means a science. However, some aspects of a social media post which contribute to its strength include relevant hashtags, well-written copy, an absence of typos and crisp imagery. These factors can be controlled, and our strategy is to gather multiple inputs from our team in these areas to maintain a standard of social media excellence.

Here’s an example of our Instagram post creation process. RB team members play different roles throughout the workflow:

  • In Canva, begin with the Instagram Post design type template so the image is sized correctly
  • Add an image to the Canva template, typically sourced from numerous free stock photo sites
  • Overlay the client’s logo as a watermark in the corner of the design
  • Write the post copy and hashtags in two different Canva Team Stream comment fields
  • Reference the source of the image in another Team Stream comment field (RB team use only)
  • Solicit comments, edits and changes from different members of the RB team
  • Once approved, add the image and copy to our social media client queue in Schedugram

social media ROI

MEASURE social media impacts and then refine the strategy

Step 7: Define and track social media Return on Investment (ROI)

For any marketing strategy, it’s essential to look at the Return on Investment (ROI). Social media is no exception, and broadly speaking, ROI for social media can be viewed against many different metrics – audience reach, website inbound marketing traffic, or as a viable lead acquisition source.

Each month, our clients receive a report which shows social media engagement by platform. The RB team looks at many metrics (likes, shares, comments and top performing posts) and user growth. If there is a paid social strategy in place, we will look at top performing organic posts and boosted posts. More broadly, we look at month-to-month trends per platform, across different platforms and analyze the impact of social relative to key statistics in Google Analytics. As the year progresses, RB will examine trends and patterns over a longer trajectory.  

Step 8: Continuously refine the social media strategy

With consistent reporting in hand, our team will talk to clients and refine the social media strategies in place. Some recent examples include a shift of paid social dollars into more Instagram ads and away from Facebook ads. This particular business was very visual, and we saw Instagram users grow rapidly and overtake Facebook users within a few months. In addition, the type of follower we were attracting with Instagram aligned with the target audience the client desired. Another example is a doubling of Facebook ad dollars for one client as the Facebook user growth continued to climb and attract users that were converting into new clients.

“It takes a village.”

The old African proverb, “It takes a village,” alludes to the notion that the broader community is involved in the raising of a child, and today, the saying suggests collaboration is essential for a task at hand. When it comes to managing social media for clients, it’s an important maxim. Although a person can put an Instagram post up in seconds, it makes far more sense for client social media management to take a “village” approach, one that incorporates process, rigor, and accountability.

Plan, think, collaborate, measure – and throw in a great team. These are the essential elements of social media management excellence.

________

On occasion, RB may use an affiliate link in its blog and receive some form of compensation should you purchase a specific product. RB will only use an affiliate link for a tool we actively use ourselves and recommend as a resource.