Instagram Stories can tell your brand story, actively work on visual storytelling, engage your audience, showcase behind-the-scenes events you’ve organized, or engage users in a survey (that’s an important point).

What are the characteristics that can help you with marketing for your business? Why use Instagram Stories? Here are the reasons why you should use this tool.

Test on Instagram

Your audience’s opinion is always essential. With Stories, you can test the ideas you have had, but you are not 100% sure if they work and see what reaction you get from your audience, both through surveys and private messages.

Direct traffic

Either on your site or a landing page, thanks to the link in the stories, you can directly bring your followers to your site and perhaps convert them into customers. With a well-designed strategy, Stories can help you achieve your desired goal.

Influencer marketing

Instagram Stories are a great way to run such campaigns, whether you’re the influencer or a business.

Examples of well-known brands using Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories now have 400 million daily active users, and a large portion of that audience chooses to view Instagram Stories created by brands. Brands have produced a third of the most popular stories, according to Instagram.

So, to understand how you could achieve similar success through your Instagram Stories strategy, let’s take a look at five examples of brands on IG that have managed to keep their content from being overlooked by their followers.

Interactive Airbnb tests

Airbnb’s Travel Tuesday series uses professional photography and user-generated Instagram content to bring inspirational travel ideas to your Instagram community. However, instead of just displaying the images of beautiful travel destinations worldwide, the company transforms each photograph into an interactive questionnaire.

Viewers are asked to identify the specific destination shown in the story through the survey feature. (Instagram offers a variety of apps and filters that can help you create a similar effect.) Then, viewers are asked to “come in” to activate the embedded link to direct them to the company’s website.

Vogue Magazine

Vogue magazine uses the feeds of fashion brands to attract more followers. Also, do fun things, like shoot in the fashion week photoshoot and do a mix of things tied to special occasions.

In this way, the UK account of the fashion brand has doubled to 2 million followers in the last year. Additionally, Vogue’s Instagram account had nearly 850,000 video views during February, thanks mainly to how she has improved her Instagram Stories.

Mercedes Benz

Mercedes-Benz Cars UK collaborated with Facebook Creative Shop and created a campaign for IG stories Resulted in 2.6M reach, 9-point increase in ad recall.

Mercedes-Benz uses all their creativity for marketing; they are just like their vehicles: smart, forward-thinking and meticulously designed. So when it came time to launch the new GLA compact SUV, Mercedes-Benz looked to do something suitably bold: create a one-of-a-kind ad campaign using Facebook and Instagram together.

The results show that advertising on both platforms can perform better than a campaign on Facebook or Instagram alone, especially when the brand and direct response advertising are combined:

People who saw only brand ads on Instagram and Facebook (and received no advertising when clicking on the website) generated 54% more clicks. When Facebook direct response ads were added to the campaign, Mercedes-Benz saw a 580% increase in site visits.

IBM

IBM has used geo-targeting Instagram Stories to its advantage in the past by creating special filters for its industry events. His stories have garnered around 246K unique viewers with an average completion rate of 46%.

If you want to be successful with your Instagram Stories, be sure to tell a story that will impact your audience. Incorporating polls and links into your accounts is a sure way to increase engagement on this social network.

If you engage your audience through different calls to action, you can also measure your followers’ engagement with other metrics than just impressions.

For most brands facing increasing pressure to determine ROI from social media, additional metrics such as Instagram traffic are essential.

Instagram Stories for Brands