PART 2: The beginners guide: Instagram stories

With over 500 billion Instagrammers viewing Instagram Stories, ⅓ of the most popular stories viewed are from businesses! Instagram Stories provide a company with a new way to reach a larger target audience, in return, this means a new strategy for a sales funnel! 

Instagram stories offer a company several different options from ads to IGTV, and after 10K followers, a company can “unlock” new potential with links inside IGTV and stories! All of this is done with one platform! Yup, and an Instagram marketing service will still post to your Instagram feed. You essentially get twice the posting!  

Now, how does all of this deal with a sales funnel? 

How will you track it? 

The first step in all of this is a system to track all of this data. One of the best ways to have this setup is with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free system that any company can access with a simple login created. Once that is created, Google Analytics can track where consumers are coming from. When a company is searching to increase their sales or lead conversions with Instagram Stories, it is important to play around with the stories. 

The issue with Google Analytics is that it  will not tell you if it was Instagram or Instagram Stories, but you should create a custom landing page that the link from the Instagram Story goes to. This allows for a company to directly track where the traffic is coming from and if consumers are purchasing products or contacting the company. 

The next step is to follow through with those stories into the sales funnel. 

Stories to other content 

Great, the stories are a success! Engagement is going great and people love the stories, but now what’s next. How does a marketing team keep their company's brand in front of that person? Follow them and continue to build off that content. The next step is to hold a live video and build off the original story! 

Invite them to continue reading or viewing the rest of your stories. Swipe up to view the website or link your products! From there, SAVE those Instagram stories to your Instagram Highlights. 

Instagram Highlights live permanently on your Instagram Page. While we say they live permanently, you can edit and remove specific stories if need be. A company can save any of their stories to their corresponding highlights that are set in place! It will show content from years ago to yesterday! This continues to nurture the light nudge and allows for that interested consumer to learn more on a specific product without viewing your actual feed first! 

The most important factor of this is to ORGANIZE the content based on what makes sense! Check out our example of our highlights:

All content that is uploaded is categorized so that a consumer can find the exact stories or content that is of their interest! This helps a consumer to self identify what part of the sales funnel they are in. Are they still trying to figure out what exactly is SEO? 

Are they ready for a website? Maybe email marketing? Hey, maybe it is time to contact the company! This helps to create a self-awareness with the consumer. 

What’s working? 

Each story that is posted has its own analytics attached with it, while the analytics are not the most in-depth, it does provide a marketer and company what is being viewed and what is not working. This allows for better curated content which enables the company to continue to target the correct audience. 

If the audience is not viewing, interacting or taking action from the story, it might be time to hit the drawing board again! 

For help with Instagram marketing services and understanding how to implement an ROI to the process, contact us today!