Instagram Story Ads to Boost your Marketing
How to use Instagram Story Ads to Boost Your Facebook Marketing
Why brands should be paying attention to the strength of Instagram Stories Ads as a marketing channel.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or in today’s terms, not logged into your Instagram account, you’ll have noticed a trend. That being an increase of business ads popping up amongst the ubiquitous videos of your friends eating, going out and showing off the fact they’ve managed to find a last-minute deal to a sunny beach destination, in your story feed.For marketers, this is a fantastic opportunity to begin experimenting with immersive, full-screen adverts. They benefit from all of the targetings features available through the platform, enabling the creation of truly personalised adverts.
These are run through the marketing API, so you’ll have access to all the usual video metrics you know and love in your ads account.
You’ll therefore have the immediate ability to measure performance and optimise campaigns. You’ll also be able to remarket to those who’ve engaged both on the general Instagram and Facebook feeds.
This will only be improved with the reach objective for adverts being rolled out, which is music to the ears of the data-driven crowd. You’ll be able to eliminate those less successful videos in favour of giving those with the most engagement the most screen time.
What Have the Results Been?
Given that just over two thirds of Instagram users follow a business, you won’t be surprised to learn that 33% of Instagram stories are already occupied by advertisements. And the numbers are staggering. We’re talking 300 million people using stories every day. It’s a bit of a no-brainer.
Amazingly, a third of Instagram’s most viewed stories are those created by businesses.
It seems that in this age of lazy thumbs, the format in which stories are presented, i.e. they play on a roll or are skippable at the touch of a screen, is far more effective. More effective than the laboriousness of scrolling through a Facebook feed, teaming with your friends’ content alongside content from every page you liked over the last few years.
Perfecting your Instagram story ads now will stand you in good stead for what will inevitably be the rollout of adverts on Instagram’s new IGTV platform. This will be launched on 20 June 2018.
This is linked to from within the Instagram app, as well as being available in the Appstore as a standalone platform. The crucial change will be that users can upload videos of up to one hour, versus the current 60 seconds.
How to get started with Instagram Stories
A good way to get the creative juices flowing is by taking inspiration from the thirty or so brands that Instagram trialled the stories for business functionality with, prior to opening access to the marketing community.
We liked how Tokopedia, one of Indonesia’s largest ecommerce platforms, obtained a 54% increase in the app installs so crucial to their business by cramming their ad with content, but somehow managing to keep it engaging with fun visuals.
The ad designers had a clear vision in mind: to increase Android app downloads by the 18-40 crowd, and this clarity of vision allowed those creating the ad to capitalise on the summer retail sales season.
Virgin Holidays really embraced Instagram’s native features and took to filming in portrait mode like a fish to water and the result left viewers with a seamless experience whilst scrolling through stories, that could easily be abrasive with an excessively ‘commercial’ advert.
This was evidenced by an amazing 5x video completion rate compared to previous campaigns and a fantastic 2.84x higher return on ad spend.
Furthermore, Facebook are investing heavily in Stories content solutions, and are rolling out third-party content integrations that can share directly to Instagram stories (GoPro users rejoice!). There is therefore a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to the production stage.
How to cut the noise and stand out
- Keep in mind that Instagram stories are only available for 24 hours so use this to your benefit. It will work brilliantly with your limited special offers, influencer videos, weekly deals announcements, event teasers, or you could perhaps launch a campaign that would view like a sitcom, with a different story each day. Alternatively, you might post a new story once a week, creating anticipation within your customer base that will make them curious to learn more about your brand.
- Be creative and use a mix of tools that will help your story to stand out. Delve into the world of boomerangs, superzooms, stickers, face filters and animation. This will add some humour to your stories and integrate your content within the context of the platform.
- Think about your use of sound – Instagram reports that 60% of users view stories with the sound on, versus those on Facebook who average at about 22%, meaning you’re essentially three times more likely to be able to engage viewers with sound on than you would if you ran the same ad on Facebook, and this again contributes to the effectiveness of the platform for immersive media. This is a great selling point for those who like the option to be as creative as possible. You’d be well advised to take inspiration from the experts, so perhaps start with the big players and check out Apple’s Instagram Stories campaigns, which use a mix of hypnotic natural sounds and high-quality photos to great effect.
- Take advantage of interactive quizzes and think outside the box – BNP Paribas, a financial institution, used the Swipe Up call to action to suggest that preparing for a driving test with BNP Paribas is as simple as swiping up on Instagram, and in doing so broke the mould of generic retail banking advertisements and captured the attention of millennials.
- Don’t forget that with Instagram stories, relevance is key. So, make sure your ads are thoughtfully targeted to your chosen audience.
- Remember: if you think video creation is too complicated, you can convert your carousel ads into Instagram stories by creating slideshows, so there is no excuse really!
- Don’t be afraid – instead, adapt.
How to create your Instagram stories
Instagram have made this easy for us and the Stories functionality rather accommodatingly now supports all feed photo and video dimensions – you can even try your hand at carousel ads for Stories.
You’ve got 5 seconds to make an impact with a photo and up to 15 for a video. The integration of the carousel ads format is of great assistance to those wanting to tell a story across the card options.
Instagram accommodates for experimentation using the Instagram Stories mock-up in the Creative Hub. You’ll find comprehensive guidance for this on Facebook’s Business pages.
Facebook suggests the follow dimensions for ads in stories:
- Recommended Resolution: 1080 x 1920
- Minimum: 600 x 1067
Business Ad Stories are up to three cards, with the same specs as Instagram stories, and you can use mixed media. You’ve one of multiple CTAs to choose from and bear in mind you’re paying per impression per card, rather than for the whole carousel ad.
So, you could in theory end up with 3 times the cost you’d expect for a single photo ad.
Slightly frustratingly at the time of writing, you can’t view your impressions per card but following Facebook’s footsteps this is unlikely to be a long time coming. The risk is reduced, however, given that the stories only last 24 hours, after which they self-destruct.
Trepidation about producing the perfect video is a little unmerited; after all, your ads appear amidst those of the people your customer is following, so blending in might be to your advantage, so don’t stress if you aren’t able to achieve Blue Planet video quality.
The quality of your content, nevertheless, will be of paramount importance in this instance as you need to grab your viewer’s attention within the first few seconds of the ad being displayed.
Given that mobile was the only medium that gained a larger percentage of global advertising expenditure in 2017 (with a 44.5% increase year on year taking it to $112bn, or 20.6% of global adspend), a focus on mobile advertising should be a core part of your marketing plan.
Instagram, having recently hit a staggering 1bn users remains at the forefront, and is especially relevant to businesses wanting to target the 18-34 age segment, which makes up 61% of the app’s usage.
This means that, for most of us, it’s a rather large blip on the radar.
When we know more, you will too, so do follow us on our social media channels using the links below to stay on top of our blogs.
Ready to jump-start your Instagram Stories? Leave it To Filed.
Try Demo – Filed, Marketing Software
Follow us on Instagram for blog updates – Instagram, Filed AI
