When it comes to growing your ecommerce business, have you considered Instagram Stories? Not only can they help generate traffic and sales, but they also build engagement and customer loyalty too. So it’s a win-win situation for content marketers.
With that said, let’s learn what Instagram Stories are, how they work – and how you can use them to promote your store.
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What Are Instagram Stories?
Instagram Stories are collections of photos and 15-second long videos that last 24 hours after they are published. Stories show up at the top of your feed (on your phone) and to the right of your feed (on the desktop version).
You can also see a user’s current stories by clicking on the coloured ring around the profile picture, and the highlighted ones (which are older than 24 hours) by clicking the buttons below the bio. The stories can be published directly from the app or from your camera roll. What’s more, you can add text, emojis, and stickers on top of the images to make them more appealing.
Quick tip: The Stories Highlights feature is a useful way to choose the best stories you’ve published and show them in a way that your followers can get fast access to the most important information.
We recommend that you keep your business account public, this way, you can share your stories with everyone.
Keep in mind that the purpose of this tool is not to get likes or comments (which are disabled). The goal of your stories should be to raise awareness and create loyalty. In other words, if people enjoy your stories, they’ll come back and watch more.
Such loyalty increases the likelihood that people will act on your stories. This means you can have them filling a survey, swiping up to visit your site, and even making a purchase right from their feed.
How To Create An Instagram Story
To create a simple story, click on the “+” icon on the top left corner of your app.
Quick tip: To move faster, just swipe left in your home screen.
Once you’re in the Story camera, take a photo or record a video (like you regularly do). Once this step is done, you can use a set of filters, text, and drawings to make your photo more interesting.
Next, click on the bottom check sign and select the audience for which you want the story to be promoted – and you’re done.
How To Use Instagram Stories To Promote Your Business
Instagram Stories provide a wide range of features that can help you leverage your user’s purchase journey.
If you take a look at the stats, you’ll learn that, in the US alone, 25 million businesses use Instagram. Most surprisingly, 72% of Instagram users have indicated they have purchased a product they saw on the app. Considering the 1 billion monthly active users, that’s a lot of people willing to buy a product thanks to the app.
So why not try to tap into this large audience for your own business?
Attract Traffic To Your Store
Let’s say you have a product you want your followers to see. To guide your followers to the buying page of this product, you start by introducing it in your stories. Next, you make full use of the swipe up feature, which is a smart feature introduced by Instagram for businesses.
Keep in mind: This feature is only available to business profiles with more than 10,000 followers. If you don’t have that many followers yet, check out this guide on how to generate 10,000 followers on Instagram.
This allows you to include a link behind the story and people can activate it by swiping ...
