Your Business Guide to Better Instagram Stories

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How do businesses make the most of Instagram’s incredible potential? Here’s our guide to making better Instagram Stories for your business.

Launched back in August 2016, Instagram Stories are no longer new, but their prevalence shows no signs of wavering. A month later TikTok launched, and the notion of short, hand-crafted stories became a  permanent fixture of the social media landscape.

Businesses have long seen the benefits of short-form marketing, and Instagram Stories are the perfect vehicle for sharing candid, revealing, and authentic aspects of a brand that perhaps customers wouldn’t  otherwise see.

So, in 2022, how do businesses continue to make the most of this awesome asset? Here’s our guide.

Why Are Instagram Stories Useful to Your Business? 

1. Instagram Stories Have Prime Real Estate 

Exposure is everything. What’s neat about Instagram Stories is whenever you post a new one, they immediately appear at the top of your followers’ feeds. This prime real estate on the platform gives them pride of place, and prominence in the minds of your customers. 

2. Instagram Stories Are Easily Consumable 

By definition, Instagram Stories are short, just fifteen seconds in length. They can be tacked together to form longer narratives. However, their power is in their brevity. Given attention spans are short, this gives you the perfect opportunity to say what you need without tying down your audience.

3. Imperfections Are Valued 

Unlike other forms of marketing, Instagram Stories often look and feel more handmade than feed posts. This is intentional, and gives you an opportunity to be more candid and authentic than the manicured, pixel-perfect marketing you have to create for other channels. Use Stories for behind-the-scenes (BTS) moments, to announce upcoming events, or to uncover some aspect of your business that may not get captured elsewhere. Equally, given they’re only available for twenty-four hours, if you make a mistake or the content doesn’t hit how you’d have hoped, it doesn’t really matter. You can try again without much consequence.

4. There Are a Plethora of Ways to Engage 

There are a multitude of ways to engage your audience built into your channel. Music, posing questions, sharing photos or videos, making statements—all of this is covered with the tools of Instagram Stories. Use them liberally for an authentic feel that resonates both with your brand and other content on the platform.

5. Instagram Stories Have Significant Reuse Potential 

Getting the most use out of your content is key as it allows you to create less but go further. Recently, Instagram permitted Stories to become Reels.

Reels are longer form content, like TikTok videos, that allow for a deeper, more involved experience. If you find that your Stories can be crafted together to tell a longer story, and if that story would have value to your audience, then you can use the same content in both places—win-win!  Although Instagram Stories only appear on your followers’ feeds for twenty-four hours, you can memorialize Stories as Highlights on your business profile. These live in similar circles on your business profile above the main content of your feed. Should a customer come to your profile after the Story has finished, if you’ve tagged it as a Highlight, you can still expose that content to that customer. Stories can be strung together in Highlights to center around meaningful topics, giving the same content extended value.

Building a Content Strategy for Instagram Stories 

Despite all this differentiation versus other channels, it’s still important to create a content strategy for the channel in the same way that you would for any other marketing collateral. 

You have several things to consider: 

1. Inform, Engage, and Educate 

Before anything else, your content has to have a purpose and meet many objectives of your business. Without this, you may be creating fantastic content, but it won’t have the desired effect.

As with any marketing, your content must either inform, engage, or educate your audience. Preferably, you’ll be able to cover more than one of these in each post to imbue the most value for your audience.

2. Raise Your Brand Awareness

No matter what the purpose of your content, raising brand awareness or recognition of your brand should always be in the back of your mind. Ultimately, you want your audience to associate whatever your message is with your brand. That way next time they think of you before the competition.

Think about your brand and its key facets. What is its USP? How is it different to other providers? If you can answer those questions, then you’ll be able to insert your brand into every post, thus bolstering your  brand’s appeal. This could be through tone, personality and mood, or through brand visuals and layout, or a combination of both. Each piece will lend itself to a different aspect of your brand, but given the brevity of the content, don’t try to pack in every element every time.

Keep it simple—edit, edit, edit! If you think you’ve nailed it, edit it again! Less is definitely more.

3. Increase Revenues or Conversions 

Instagram Stories have amazing tools for jumping off to other places where your brand lives, be that your website or your overall profile on Instagram. Each piece of content should give your audience the ability  to decide whether they want to proceed, and make it super easy to do so.

Think about how Instagram Stories can further increase traffic to your sales channel, and use the inbuilt tools within the channel to get your audience there as quickly as possible.

4. Consider the Resources Available to You 

Whether you’re a one-person operation or a Fortune 500 company, Instagram Stories will be a viable channel for your business. But, your resources will likely look different dependent on which you are.

Think about your ability to commit to the channel. As with any marketing, consistency is key, so don’t overcommit if you’re already stretched. Instagram Stories are easy to onboard as part of your marketing strategy.

That said, ensure you consider the frequency with which you can release content, and the fidelity to which you want to create the content itself. These will have a bearing on how quickly you can turnaround content.

As said before, brevity and handmade content are the cornerstones of Instagram Stories, so don’t overthink it or overwork it, but also don’t commit to ten new pieces of content a day if you can’t make it happen.

You set the rhythm for your audience, and any changes to that could have a detrimental effect on your purpose and goals.

5. Measure Your Success 

As well as solid creation tools, Instagram Stories also comes with several inbuilt analytics. They may be fairly rudimentary, but they’re enough to get you going.

Whatever analytics tools you use, ensure that you regularly check how the stats are looking, and use this feedback to guide future content. This constant honing will eventually get you to the point where every  piece of content is a surefire winner.

That said, data can only take you so far. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that a post with fewer views or reactions is inferior to one that blew up the week before. At the end of the day, the opinions of your  audience is all that matters, not the number of likes you receive. 

Combine the two to give you the most honest account of what’s working and what isn’t.

The Sky Really Is the Limit

In social media terms, Instagram Stories are coming into old age, but their efficacy and their potential has never wavered. As a short-form channel, they’re perfect for pithy, engaging content. Give your audience a taste of what to expect, draw customers to your company, uncover some unknown but important aspects of your business, or even convert to sales.

Get creative and discover the potential of this key marketing channel for your business.