In the last few years, the idea of posting short-lived content has blown up on the internet. So I wanted to create some Instagram video guides, and this is one of them.
Even after the rise of short-video features like Reels, Shorts, and TikTok, Instagram Stories will always have a place in our hearts.
With a limited lifespan of 24 hours, social media stories and videos create a sense of urgency that encourages users to watch content.
Around half of the Instagram community (500 million users) create or watch Instagram Stories daily, and 96% of marketers see great potential in posting ephemeral content.
Our video marketing report highlights a few solid reasons why Instagram Stories are an effective marketing tool.
- 72% of people watch videos to learn about the product.
- 75% of users take action after watching brand videos on Instagram.
- 82% of people find it daunting to watch videos not optimized for the chosen position (most people hold their phones vertically).
In other words, Instagram story videos can help your business grow, and there are at least three reasons to give them a try.
- Stay current with trends: Video content consumption on mobile devices increases by 100% each year, making video creation a great way to meet your customers’ needs. Moreover, it enables your business to stay ahead.
- Meet your customers’ needs and wants: Today, people want to see more brand videos. With the popularity of online shopping, videos help customers understand your products and services better as they are dynamic and informative. When you create Instagram story videos, you increase customer satisfaction.
- Achieve your business goals: Doubtless, people love engaging videos. With the combination of interactive videos and multi-functional Story features, businesses of all sizes and niches have an opportunity to achieve their business objectives.
Now that you understand the importance of animated ephemeral content, let’s learn how to use Instagram Story videos to grow your business.
How To Use Instagram Story Videos for Business Growth
No matter what your business niche is, it’s more likely that you focus on achieving at least one of three main business goals—raising brand awareness, increasing brand loyalty and trust, or boosting e-commerce sales.
In this blog post, we will explain how Instagram Story videos can help your business grow.
1. Raise Brand Awareness
Practically every business aims at raising brand awareness.
The more people know about your brand, the more potential customers you can acquire.
If you want to reach your target audience, consider these three ways to use Instagram Stories.
Tell About Your Values
Did you know that 71% of customers want to buy from brands that align with their values? This means your brand values matter.
Moreover, it’s in our nature to spread the word about content we care about, allowing your business to reach more people.
Why? Social media users are more likely to share your video story in a direct message with their friends and family if it resonates with their values.
At first blush, it seems that having a 15-second limit isn’t enough to tell about your values.
Not only can you create a series of vertical videos on Instagram Story, but you can also add a clickable link to the full video on your website, providing interested viewers with more information.
Check out how WHOOP did it:
To inform its followers about its values, WHOOP launched a podcast and shared the news on Instagram Stories.
They also added a series of custom images with quotes and background voices that encouraged interested viewers to tap on the link and learn more about the company.
This strategy is an effective way to reach a broader audience, which helps build brand awareness.
Show Your Niche Expertise
With the spread of COVID-19, online learning has gained in popularity.
Digital education enables people to gain knowledge and improve their skills efficiently, leading to an increasing demand for informative webinars and online conferences.
If your team members share their tips and tricks at conferences, this is beneficial because it demonstrates your niche expertise and enables your customers to learn from you.
Moreover, it’s easy to take your phone and film an episode of the conference to spark interest in your business.
Here’s how Breadnbeyond did it:
You can add location stickers and tag people to bring attention to your Instagram video story and help people find content that resonates with their location.
Run Paid Ad Campaigns
With over 25 million businesses on the platform, it can be daunting for companies to reach their target audience unless they are well-known brands with a large following.
However, Instagram ads are one of the most effective customer acquisition strategies for targeting the right audience and increasing exposure.
When setting up ad campaigns, you can choose the right objectives to drive awareness of your company, product, app, or service.
Here’s how IMAX used animated IG stories to announce the final film in the Star Wars saga and interact with hooked users:
Instagram offers various business-specific features for Stories that help businesses grab attention, engage with their audience, and achieve their goals more efficiently.
Creating Instagram ads takes time and money, but it’s a proven way to ensure your video reaches the right audience and helps your business grow, making it a worthwhile endeavor.
2. Increase Brand Trust and Loyalty
Modern customers have numerous options on the market, making it challenging for them to select the best product for their needs.
Most people buy from brands they trust, so brand loyalty and trust play a key role in customer acquisition and retention.
There are several Instagram Story video ideas to help your business increase brand trust and loyalty.
Introduce Your Team and CEO
No matter your business sales model, whether B2C or B2B, your customers want to know the people behind your brand.
Most customers love behind-the-scenes content, as they feel special when they get a glimpse behind the curtain.
For your business, this means gaining trust and loyalty.
When introducing your team and CEO, there’s no need to invest the budget into creating overly polished professional videos, as customers crave authenticity.
For example, SPDLoad often shows its team and office atmosphere.
If your team works remotely, you can ask your colleagues to take photos, crop them, and turn the images into videos.
It’s one of the easiest (and cheapest) ways to create Instagram Story videos for business growth.
Organize Q&A sessions
Customers want to ensure that your product or service meets their needs and wants before making a purchase decision.
Thus, they may have various questions. To ease their worries, it’s a good idea to organize Q&A sessions where people can get answers to their questions.
If your website has a live chat, you can ask your customer support representatives to compile frequently asked questions and send this list to the marketing team.
Marketers can invite experts to answer them via Instagram Story videos.
To gain exposure, it’s a good idea to team up with niche Instagram influencers and ask them to promote your Q&A session.
Therefore, you can possibly attract more viewers, just like in the example below:
The example mentioned above is not about Instagram Story videos, but rather a great way to promote a Q&A session and increase video views.
Once you’re ready to host a Q&A session, you can either go live or create a series of Instagram Story videos and save them to your Highlights so your customers can watch them at their convenience.
Feature Video Customer Testimonials
One of the most effective ways to increase brand loyalty and trust is to showcase your satisfied customers, who can then recommend your product to their friends and family.
In other words, customer testimonials work well.
However, to take your business to the next level, you must feature video customer testimonials.
If your customers make videos about your business and tag you, that’s great. You can repost their Stories like Keap:
But suppose your customers aren’t ready to create video testimonials for you.
In that case, it’s a good idea to review a candidate database and identify loyal employees who are ready to become your brand advocates.
Once you start featuring video testimonials, customers draw inspiration from these videos to try your products and then share their thoughts about them. Win-win!
3. Boost E-commerce Sales
The days when Instagram was a simple photo-sharing tool are far behind us.
With various monetization ideas on Instagram, this platform enables users to earn money on the app.
If you have products to tell, you can also boost e-commerce sales with the right Instagram Story videos. Here are several ideas on how to do it:
Show Your Products in Action
It’s no secret that e-commerce marketing relies on eye-catching visual content to showcase products from different angles.
This is a proven way to help potential customers determine whether sight-unseen featured products are suitable for them.
With Instagram Story videos, you can show your products in action without boring your customers to tears.
To catch their attention, you can add border patterns, make video collages, and add text in trendy fonts.
These days, you can do that with mobile editing apps.
For example, you can create a teaser video to spark interest in a new product launch. Check out how H&M did it:
H&M also goes the extra mile by describing the collection, tagging the featured model, and linking back to its website so that viewers can learn more about the collection.
Share Deals and Offers
When people follow your business on Instagram, they will likely love and support your company.
This also means they are existing or potential customers ready to purchase.
But if you want to encourage impulse buying, consider sharing deals and offers.
They create a sense of urgency, and people tend to make purchases faster.
With the right content curation tools, you can find relevant content ideas for your business and integrate them into sales campaigns.
Then, repurpose them into videos for Instagram Stories.
Let’s take a look at Sephora. In honor of its 50% sale, the company made an Instagram Story video that encouraged viewers to tap on the clickable link and learn more about products on sale:
Instagram Stories disappear within 24 hours, so when you tell your followers about time-limited offers and deals, they fear missing out on lucrative opportunities.
As a result, they are more likely to make the purchase.
Publish Explainer Videos
The power of explainer videos is exploding. Today, 95% of customers watch explainer videos to learn more about products and services.
After watching explainer videos, people better understand how to make the most out of their products.
This content is particularly suitable for SaaS businesses to showcase the variety of their benefits and convert more customers.
If you’re not in this field, you can try many other ways to provide compelling videos.
For example, DepositPhotos created a series of videos that not only explained how to create seasonal color palettes for businesses but also offered relevant photos to download.
The company also promoted its stock videos, which could make the video production process easier and cheaper for businesses of all sizes and niches.
How to Create Compelling Videos for Instagram
Next, we’ll talk about video content for Instagram.
Different from Stories, Instagram videos (also often referred to as Reels) don’t disappear after 24 hours.
They stay on your feed so that audiences can access and watch them at any time to get information.
Everyone on the go can access a short video, get informed, entertained, and/or inspired, and move on with their daily activities.
You may have one minute to capture your audience’s attention, but you can do this!
All you need to do is create focused, creative, engaging, and maybe even a bit “off-center” content.
A Classic Example
One of the most famous examples of an engaging explainer marketing video is that of Dollar Shave Club.
Take a look at the iconic video from the razor company below:
In less than 90 seconds, the video told the company’s entire story and the value of its product/service to fill a need.
It’s funny and informative, and it speaks to its target audience in their own language and tone. And guess what? It costs a total of $2500 to create.
Therefore, this video went viral within hours and was the catalyst that launched a multi-million dollar company.
Wouldn’t you love the same results? I bet you would.
Although you may not achieve the same results as Dollar Shave Club, creating amazing videos for your Instagram account can substantially increase your followers, boost conversions, and skyrocket sales.
So, let’s take a look at how you can do just that.
1. What Stories Do You Want to Tell?
Here’s the thing about video: You can tell a much more complex story with it than you can with a photo, even a carousel, which used to be so popular on Instagram.
You can feature a product, create a “how-to,” tell your company’s story, feature team members, show your social responsibility, and more.
Make a list of all of these stories and keep adding to it as new ideas emerge.
Remember that each story you tell has a specific goal, such as brand awareness for potential customers, relationship-building, explanation, or education.
Each goal should translate into a specific action that you want the viewer to take.
You need a call to action. Select a single call-to-action (CTA) for each video and make it clear.
2. What Stories Are Your Competitors Telling?
Check out which ones are performing well. How can you tell similar stories about your company and make them even more engaging?
Also, check out the most popular videos on Instagram across all industries. You’ll pick up some great ideas.
3. Know The Audience
If you’ve been involved in digital marketing for any amount of time, you understand the importance of crafting content in a style and tone that connects with your audience.
Obviously, you are not going to talk about “bad-ass” adult diapers to senior citizens.
On the other hand, a company like Red Bull can and should use this tone and style.
As you write your script and plan the visual content, ensure that you stay true to your brand and your audience.
4. Speaking of the Script
Writing a script is far different than writing a blog post, an ad, an email, or a traditional social media post.
First, you have only 60 seconds to tell your story. Every word counts.
And those words must exude enthusiasm and energy unless, of course, you are selling caskets.
Scriptwriting is an art. Therefore, you may be well advised to hire a professional.
There are numerous online writing services that offer scriptwriting departments. You can try Classy Essay or Grab My Essay for starters.
There are also freelancer sites, like Upwork. If your budget is tight, these are good options.
A note here: Sound on Instagram is muted by default. This can be an issue if your viewer is unsure how to activate the sound button.
You can add captions (which are always good for the hearing-impaired, anyway).
In addition, if you’re not sure about writing the script, you can always read our script writing cheat sheet or download the Explainer Video Script Handbook.
5. Who Is the Actor?
If your video is animated or the voice is just background, you may need voice-overs. If not, you need a live actor.
Again, these may be jobs you want to outsource. Your tone of voice and style must match your brand and message.
In the Dollar Shave Club video mentioned above, the company owner was the “actor.”
Fortunately, he was perfect for the part and pulled it off well.
Remember, you also need to consider the message and demographics of your audience when choosing live actors.
Diana Adjadj, Marketing Director for Trust My Paper, uses both animation and real people.
“I have found that animation works well for explaining our products and processes. But our audience also wants to see the people behind the company – there’s a trust factor in our industry. So, from time to time, we feature one of our writers – it’s about relationships.”
6. Cover Photo is Critical
When Instagram was only photos, you spent a lot of time creating or finding pictures that “connected” with your target.
Your video will also need a cover photo. This photo should capture your video’s larger message and cause scroll-ers to stop their thumbs and take a second look.
If you don’t pick one, Instagram will just provide a still shot of your first frame.
Now, the Technical Parts
If you have a newer smartphone, you have all the necessary equipment to create amazing videos.
Of course, you’ll also want some good editing tools, and there are plenty, even for beginners.
And remember this: while you can certainly outsource video editing or hire a professional video company, your own work can often seem much more genuine—something today’s consumer appreciates.
Here’s how simple this process is, using either of the two options:
1. Using a Pre-Recorded Video
Pre-recorded videos are the best option for your Instagram content if you want it to be a bit more polished and presentable.
Before uploading the video, you need to spend more time and effort editing it to make it even more compelling.
This type of video is great for building a know, like, and trust factor with your audience on the platform. Here are some handy ways to create pre-recorded videos on your Instagram:
- Create the video, edit it, and save it to your library.
- Open Instagram and click the + sign, located in the bottom menu.
- Switch to “videos.” This should open the video library you have on your phone
- Choose the video you want to post.
- You’ll get some options for making square filters and cover photos (if you haven’t already). Apply these as you wish.
- You’ll be prompted to write a caption – come up with one that is compelling.
- You can even add a location. Suppose, for example, you took a video of your team participating in a community charitable activity. Add the location.
If you want to improve the video editing for Instagram videos, we’ve compiled excellent tools to help you out.
Check them out: The Complete List of Video Marketing Tools.
2. Live-Streaming On Instagram Live
This is an excellent option if you want to film something in real time and add your own narration.
Perhaps one of your team members is demonstrating the use of a product, your team is participating in a walk for a charitable cause, or you’re hosting a “pet day” at the office.
Since the audience knows that the video is being recorded in real time, live videos are created to foster engagement.
Your audience can say hello, ask some questions, and more.
So, here’s how you do it:
- Open the app.
- Click the camera icon in the top left of your Feed screen.
- Scroll to Live at the bottom of the screen, then click.
There you go. Now you’re live.
You will not need editing tools here—it’s all in real-time, and you just want to capture the moment.
Although it may be challenging for those who haven’t tried it before, you can start now to determine whether it’s suitable for your business.
3. Technical Specs
Instagram has made it easy to shoot videos directly from your smartphone and then upload them to the platform hassle-free.
However, the primary concern is that you must adhere to the correct Instagram video format, size, aspect ratio, and specifications to provide your audience with a pleasant viewing experience.
So, no matter how brilliant your video content is, the audience won’t watch if you ignore the technical specs.
Keep these in mind:
- Video format = MP4
- Length = 3 – 60 seconds
- Size = no size limit, but 50MB is recommended
- Orientation = square, portrait, or landscape
Have Some Fun!
Instagram Stories and videos are effective tools for businesses of all sizes and niches.
They should invest time in creating compelling stories and videos that drive engagement, increase reach, and help their business grow.
Ultimately, creating videos should not be a stressful or agonizing experience. You are not trying to produce a box office hit here.
In fact, Instagram videos are, by nature, pretty casual—viewers expect that. Don’t shoot for perfection—shoot for engagement.
