Team AdfluenceWhenever I see brands ready to invest in Instagram stories, one simple question comes to mind – Why would brands want to invest in content that would disappear just after 24 hours. And even if they do, should they include these self-disappearing content in their Influencer Marketing Strategy?
Well, a part of the answer lies in the performance of this content. As per official Instagram data, there are 500 million active users of stories alone, making it one of the most well-loved social media features. Almost every Instagram influencer today is using stories as the primary means of promoting Brands. What’s even more interesting is that around one-third of the most viewed stories come from business accounts!
The other part of the answer lies in the nature of the content itself. 80 per cent of all Instagram users are drawn to stories due to the transient nature of the stories. People don’t like the feeling that they’re being sold something all the time. They want to feel connected to the brands and get an ‘insider’s peek’ into their world. Instagram stories allow brands to do that, using it to promote all kinds of things, ranging from events, shows, products, and services to behind the scenes activity, client interaction, and even day to day routine. Because if there’s one thing true of marketing, it’s that stories sell really, really well.
However, if both of the reasons do not compel you to start partnering with influencers over Instagram stories, here are a few more that might convince you to include them in your influencer marketing strategy:
1. Interactive Tools
Have you ever come across an Instagram story with fun stickers or polls or hilarious AR filters? Couldn’t resist participating, could you? And why not, they are pretty engaging. Instagram stories with interactive elements connect the audience with the brand and help them see beyond MRP, discounts, offers, price tag and whatnot. That’s why, as part of their promotional strategy, brands should ask influencers to make their stories as interactive as possible.
2. Valuable Insights
In partnering with influencers, engagement isn’t all that brands get out of it. You also get a lot of data into audience behavior.
Instagram business accounts provide audience insight not just for posts, campaigns, and ads, but also for stories. So, when an influencer posts a story, you can gauge it on a different parameters, which include ‘Shares,’ ‘Replies,’ ‘Sticker Taps’, ‘Impressions’ and more. While ‘Link Clicks’ via ‘Swipe Up’ lets you see the number of viewers who visited your website through the story, ‘Views’ and ‘Impressions’ help you understand the size of your audience. You can even see the number of exits, forwards, or backwards on a particular story!
With the influencer report containing the results of the same metrics, you can also estimate your influencer’s audience size and the number of people seeing the content posted. These insights also provide important data about your follower’s preferences, their likes and dislikes, which can guide future efforts at content creation and market strategy.
3. Effective CTA
In addition to smooth engagement and valuable insight-cum-market analysis, partnering with an influencer with more than 10k followers gives you the added edge of having an effective CTA, aka the ‘Swipe Up’ feature.
The feature allows brands to add a URL of choice to a story, and all the followers could visit your website by… well, just swiping up. It’s the easiest way to get your followers to your website or a landing page and drive up sales.
UK’s Bloom and Wild, with its 234k followers on Instagram, paired up with a couple of influencers including UK-based content creator, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard (247k followers). The campaign was aimed to promote Bloom and Wild’s dresses with one interesting offer – that Bloom and Wild would offer £10 off for Jessica’s followers. The campaign included feed posts and Instagram stories with swipe ups, which led to a huge increase in the sales for B&W, along with increased follower count for Jessica.
4. Repurposing Influencer Stories
Instagram Stories allow users to tag other accounts in them. And when an influencer you’re working with tags you in their story, you should repost it by clicking on the ‘Add To Story’ button, adding your own text and hashtags to it.
Why?
Reposting an influencer’s story has a number of benefits. One, it improves content creation efficiencies (like time and cost) and, without putting in a lot of effort, you get content to share on your platform. Secondly, the influencer’s authentic and unpolished content makes the brand appear relatable and helps strike the right chord with your audience. And that could very well lead to an increase in your brand’s engagement. Now, who wouldn’t want that?
5. Instagram Story Takeovers
As a brand/business owner, the idea of someone else handling your business may be unsettling. But Instagram takeovers have wildly grown in popularity as it adds an element of excitement and novelty to any brand’s Instagram marketing and content generation strategy. Let’s see a relevant case of Wilton Cakes.
Wilton Cake, an immensely popular cake decorator in the USA, has more than 2.5m Instagram followers, 772k YouTube subscribers, 53.2k Twitter followers, and more than 827k Pinterest followers (with 10m+ monthly viewers). For some, Wilton Cake is already a huge internet force in itself, with its beautiful feed and aesthetically pleasing photos.
However, it relies heavily on influencers, too. In a recent Instagram handle takeover, the account was handled by self-taught cake maker Rachel Fujihara (@frostedfujicakes), who has a massive 168k Instagram followers. Rachel posted a series of videos in a tutorial on making a three-layer, Halloween-inspired cake, and the results spoke for themselves!
The Instagram takeover resulted in an accumulated 398k likes and views AND more than 620 comments for the Instagram page of Wilton Cake Decorating, way more than the usual traffic figures for Wilton Cakes. In addition to a hefty engagement, the cake decorator also got a ton of content to repurpose from the hashtags used.
6. AR Filters
Brands are dying to make an ad, any post or any story, more engaging than ever. And because of this, a lot of brands are trying their own personalized AR filter on Instagram Stories. From UberEats (Eats in a Blink), Pepsi (#SwagStepChallenge) to Lifebuoy (#LifebuoyKarona), every brand is in a race to use AR. And this is justified by the engagement and reach that AR brings.
For example, the Eats in a Blink campaign by UberEats was played by over 1 million people in India itself. And all of this was possible, because of collaborations with celebrities and micro/macro-influencers. Using AR has been made relatively easier for brands as the Facebook-owned platform Spark AR Studio now lets users create their own interactive AR filters.
Keeping these compelling arguments aside, is the fact that Stories only last for up to 24 hours still bothering you? If it is, you can always use the ‘Highlights’ feature, which allows you to save your stories from disappearing into the abyss forever. If you’ve partnered with an influencer, and the campaign goes really well, you can ask them to save the stories in the highlight for a certain duration. Pin the story into your highlight section right below your bio. This way, you’ll be able to showcase the partnership and the awesome content even after the 24-hour mark. You can even have separate highlights and name them based on the type of content for easier viewing!
Influencer marketing is a vast pool, and stories by themselves are a whole different game as we’ve seen. But there’s no denying that the two make a great combination. So, with this newfound knowledge, go forth and share your story, with Instagram stories!
