The original intention of Instagram’s Stories feature was to provide a competitor to Snapchat. Now that Stories has more than 500 million daily users, businesses are investigating it as a potential channel for spreading their brands’ messages.

Instagram Stories are short, self-contained posts that expire after 24 hours unless saved and included in a user’s highlights. Brands of all sizes now have a new method to interact with their audience and followers, thanks to the popularity of Stories.

Instagram Stories should be an integral part of your content strategy if you want to increase your brand’s social media engagement. If you want to learn how to use Instagram Stories to promote your company, here are five suggestions.

Five Ways to Make the Most of Instagram Stories For Marketing

Focus on demonstrations rather than explanations

You can think of Instagram Stories as a little TV station for your company, and it’s the perfect place to showcase your wares and spread the word about your brand. Because Instagram simplifies the process of interacting with visual information, it is an ideal platform from which to spread word of your wares.

You may promote your company or brand by sharing material like:

A sneak peek is a preview of an upcoming product or service.
Show your consumers how your team works behind the scenes by pulling back the curtain.
Launching a new product? Instagram Stories might be the first place you show it to the world.
Live blog any events your brand or business is hosting so fans may experience the action firsthand.
Open up a dialogue with your audience by asking them questions using the “Questions” tab under Stories.
You’re doing more than just uploading material when you include these in your Stories. By inviting the audience inside, you can demonstrate the quality of your company’s offerings.

Favourite stories can be saved

Each Instagram Story post is only available for 24 hours before it disappears forever. Instead, you may provide your followers and potential new audiences with easy access to the most relevant Stories you’ve published in the past by using highlights.
By using highlights, you may compile sets of stories that share a common subject or focus. After 24 hours, your followers and anybody else who stumbles across your profile may learn more about you and what you do by looking through your previous Stories.

Things like new products, team building exercises, product updates, and recipes are all good candidates for being bookmarked in Highlights.

Make Use of Style Guides and Templates

Although stories are engaging, setting your company apart from the competition takes more than just a few notable examples.

Determine the kind of content you’d like to utilise consistently across your brand’s marketing materials, and then design templates for them.

Pick a single font style to apply to all of your Stories and other content formats.
Establish your brand’s colour scheme or select individual hues to represent it.
Set parameters for formatting various content kinds.
Instead of using stock photos or generic icons, get unique icons made and utilise those as the cover art for your highlight collections.
Having a style guide and standardised templates also allows any member of your team, whether internal or external, to develop Stories for the company with no risk of diluting the brand’s identity.

Communicate with Your Audience and Clientele

The purpose of Instagram’s Story feature is to raise profile. Participating in Stories with your audience and potential buyers is one method to hasten this process.

While it’s great to have your own original material, user-generated content is an even better way to build trust and credibility with your target audience. For those who are prone to burnout, this is also a fantastic technique to ensure that they never run out of material for their Instagram Stories.
In order to engage your audience and potential buyers using Stories:

Promote customer-generated content that mentions your business or goods

You may use Instagram Stories to promote your business by soliciting video testimonials from satisfied consumers.
Recognise your most dedicated fans and followers by calling them out and tagging them in the post.
Use “Polls” to get feedback from your audience and then incorporate their thoughts into future postings.
If you have a brand influencer or a very loyal client who is prepared to produce original content for your company, consider hosting a takeover. Focus on People Instead of Things
In an effort to raise brand awareness, it’s tempting to get caught up in putting your business’s promotion front and centre in your Stories.

The human-centric perspective ensures that you provide useful information and strive to educate your followers and clients about your company and its offerings at all times. As a result, you should expect your content to focus more on informing and entertaining consumers about your products.
Share product demonstrations, answer commonly asked questions, and express gratitude to your audience for their support all through Stories.

Making material with your audience in mind will ensure that they continue to engage with your Stories.

Following the aforementioned measures can greatly increase your Instagram Stories’ exposure, interaction, and ultimately, brand recognition. Maintain a steady cadence of high-quality posts and you’ll see results in no time.