Scientific Reasons Why Instagram Stories Are So Effective For Marketing
Recent scientific research has uncovered that there is a reason why we are such Instagram fiends, with the average user scrolling for around 30 minutes each day. Here are a few revelations that help to explain why the platform is so compatible with us humans!
Sharing Stories is physically rewarding
It’s pretty clear now that many of us (250 million people to be precise) love using the tools that Instagram has to offer, watching friends, influencers and brands update their Stories and offering us a window into their lives.
According to a Harvard study, 30-40% of human conversation is devoted to disclosing information about oneself. The study concluded that the act of sharing feelings and thoughts with someone can activate the areas in the brain that are associated with reward.
People love faces
The Stories that grab the user have been proven to be those that involve faces. Georgia Institute of Technology and Yahoo Labs researchers looked at 1.1 million photos on Instagram and found that pictures with human faces are 38 percent more likely to receive likes than photos with no faces and 32 percent more likely to attract comments. CalTech researchers found that neurons in the brain store information about recognisable faces, whilst images of objects, bodies, and group images were harder to retain information about. If you’re looking to grab your users’ attention, consider trying to implement more faces into your strategy – why not take pictures of your employees for ‘employee of the month’ or as part of a blog article such as ‘5 things about Joe Bloggs’.
Real-time events bring people together & build suspense
Stories are narratives that are unfolding in real time, which, as with breaking news, can create suspense and excitement. You can tease your audience with Stories, showing snippets of something exciting happening in your business like a product launch or unveiling. What’s more, we love to share experiences as they’re happening. Musicians in particular have been utilising this strategy, with Arianna Grande and Shawn Mendes going live with live concerts before album releases, for example.
Why Not Transform your Instagram profile into a storefront?
Making sure your profile is geared towards grabbing the attention of potential shoppers is the first step to increasing sales. Make sure your bio gives a call to action and includes contact information and a website address. Incentives like free shipping or discount codes are also a good way to capture the attention of people who come across your page. Make use of Instagram Stories to share new offers and news.
Give your profile personality and strong branding
Your page is an extension of your website and seeing as the latter is branded, why shouldn’t the same be true of your social media channels? Use the same colour patterns for your highlight albums and maintain some consistency when it comes to the composition of your images to offer some sense of uniformity. The type of hashtags you use are also an opportunity to give your brand character. Develop hashtags that are unique to your brand as well as using some more popular and wider-reaching example used by other brands in your industry.
Convert interest into a sale
Instagram business accounts allow you to tag your products in posts, giving you the chance to add your products via Shopify or other shopping cart. Your shoppers will then clearly be able to see product and pricing information. Use the copy in the post to close sales by using angles such as time of year or national/international days of the year to entice potential customers to purchase your products.
Use Instagram advertising to promote products
So you’ve created your storefront – now it’s time to start marketing it using Instagram ads. Click on the ‘Promotions’ button and choose the posts you want to promote. This works in the same way as Facebook’s ‘Boost post’. You can target audiences according to age demographic, location, gender etc.
If you’re looking for your business to thrive on Instagram, contact us here at HookedOnMedia, We can help you find your audience and optimise your digital marketing strategy to best sell your product or service.
