How to Drive Sales with InstaStories

Over the past two or three years, Instagram Stories has become the most popular part of Instagram – and brands are using them to drive sales. Though Instagram was basically designed to be a ‘quick’’ photo-sharing platform, new trends show people paying more attention on curating a feed instead of uploading something at the moment. Due to this reason, Instagram Stories has become the ideal place to share content that is a bit less curated and more raw. 

Would you want to know how to use Instagram stories to drive sales?
Read our brief guide to do so.

How to drive Sales with Instagram Stories

If you’re not making use of Instagram Stories for business, you could be missing out on a great opportunity. Because there are over 500 million Instagram users sharing almost 1 billion Stories each day. According to a survey ⅔  of people say they’ve become more interested in a business, brand or product after seeing it in their Instagram stories.

Using Instagram Stories is incredibly beneficial for your brand as it provides your audience and potential customers another way to contact you. Whilst you may have followers interacting with your feed, a lot of your followers can’t see your content because of the way the algorithm works or because of different time zones.
But Instagram stories provide you a chance to get engaged with your potential clients even  more often than a feed post.

11 ways to drive Sales with Instagram Stories

1. Be Creative with Your Instagram Story Designs

Although Instagram Stories are designed to be more in the moment, even so you can put a certain element of design into them. Whether you use the Instagram Stories features or any third party app to design them, people are more likely to watch your Story if it looks well designed and attractive to them. 

2. Show Behind the Scenes of Your Business

People really love to watch behind the scenes of your business. Whether it’s your day to operations, a look at your manufacturing process, or even rehearsal  – people love having this kind of insight.

It’s a fact that your followers are hungry for a look behind the curtain, but only 22% of brands and companies regularly share updates that feature the behind the scenes of their proceedings, making this a great way for you to stand out.

3. Encourage People to Interact

There are numerous different ways you can encourage people to interact with you through Instagram Stories, including asking people to vote on a specific subject, asking people about their liking for a video product or an image using a slider bar, or asking questions that you can reply to publicly.

It’s very easy to see how you could use all these functionalities to not only increase engagement and post reach, but to conduct research on product development, create buzz around a new product launch, or get users to feedback about your product.

4. Repurpose User-Generated Content with Stories

If you’re a well-established brand, people will share content that features your products and services on their Instagram Stories. If they do this and tag you, then you are notified by direct message and Instagram provides you an option to share it to your own account. This is an excellent way to spread your content, without having to create the content yourself. And it’s a great way to have social proof for increased trust and sales

5. Promote New Product Release and Offers

If you don’t want to make use of your main feed to promote launches, releases and offers regularly, sharing these in Stories is a great substitute. Promoting offers and product releases on your Instagram stories feels authentic as it gives you a chance to directly link to the product or sale using the swipe up feature (for those having 10K followers or having verified account).

Stories also give you a chance to be more creative as you can use the feature to create a series of images and videos that once played in the correct sequence, act like a mini advertisement for your brand.

6. Partner with Influencers

Partnering with an influencer is another great way to get more reach for your brand, especially as they’ll be sharing the content they create on their own personal platforms too.

To hold a successful takeover, simply find an Instagrammer who is influential in your niche, and see if they agreed to take over your stories for the day. 

No doubt influencers will charge for this service. but it can be worth the investment if they’re driving qualified traffic (that is, potential customers!) to your account. 

7. Share Testimonials to Increase Your Credibility

Instagram Stories is the great place to share any testimonials or recommendations your business receives from clients. Whether they’re user-generated and shared directly from someone else’s profile onto yours, or they’re anything you’ve curated and created from testimonials you’ve received – sharing these can really help increase your trustworthiness within the industry, and specially, with your customers.

8. Use Location Tags and Hashtags

If you want your stories to be seen by people who do not yet follow your account, you have to use location tags and hashtags. If people click on a location or search for a hashtag, they’ll be able to see a selection of Stories that has been tagged using them. It’s a great way to increase your visibility based on your tagged location.

If you’re wondering about how location tags and hashtags will make your design look, you could try making them really small or hiding them behind other elements. 

9. Add Swipe Up links

Although this functionality is only for those that have more than 10k followers or have verified Instagram accounts, the swipe up feature is the ideal strategy to drive traffic to your site. It’s important to remember not to use this on all stories as it removes the message feature from that particular story, but if you’re talking about a specific product, service or blog post, then there’s no harm in directly linking to it.

10. Use Product Stickers on Instagram Stories

Similar to the way you can add product posts to your Instagram story, you can also add a shopping sticker to your Instagram Stories, allowing people to purchase without having to navigate to your link in bio and find the item to purchase. Set up product posting and you’ll have the option to include a linked sticker for easy in-app shopping!

11. Create polls 

Every company wants to know what their target market really wants. And with the “Polls” feature of Instagram Stories, you get valuable clues as to what would be benifitial and what wouldn’t.

Ask your potential customers a question by creating a poll. Customize your answer choices, then post it on Instagram Stories. As soon as the poll ends, you get to see how many chose first option over second, this over that.

Polls not only lets you engage with your followers in an appealing way, it also allows you to do some simple consumer research before launching a product or service.

Conclusion:

If you are not using Instagram stories to drive sales, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
Because posting a Story is an ideal way to step away from your carefully curated feed and show off a different side of your personality. It’s freedom, whimsy, and spontaneity all wrapped into one neat package. Read our other brief article about Instagram stories to get a more in-depth guide about it.