In the beginning, brands weren’t sure about how Instagram Stories could help in promoting their campaigns. However, those days are long gone and today Stories are a major help for any Instagram business and perhaps every brand has found a way or several to exploit the feature to their benefit. If you feel enthusiastic about all this, InstaBF, your faithful guide in the world of Instagram and IGTV, will gift you with top tips concerning how to plan an Insta Stories campaign. Let’s get to work right now!
An Instagram Stories Campaign: What Is It?
Just like an ordinary Instagram marketing campaign, a Stories campaign aims at achieving a certain marketing objective by means of posting Instagram Stories. That objective can be as broad as building brand awareness, or as specific as generating sales for the new product release. Regardless of it, the key to running it successfully is creating top-quality and interactive content that inspires viewers to comment and share.
How to Plan a Stories Campaign
So, now when you fully acquire the importance of a Stories campaign, let’s see how you can plan it efficiently step by step:
Pick the Goal
The first step of your Stories marketing campaign should be defining the goals since the latter determines what type of campaign you need to run and what metrics will be required to track it. So, spend enough time picturing what you are going to achieve when it comes to an end. After this, think about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Whatever your goal is, it must be tied to numbers. For instance, if you aim at promoting a new product, think about how many units you want to sell. Actually, the more your Stories campaign is tied back to measurable results, the more palpable they will be.
Additionally, don’t forget about the metrics. How many likes, comments, shares, and views you gather still matters a lot.
Aim at the Target Audience
Once you have your goals set, it comes to determining the target audience. Depending on the purpose of your campaign pursues, your audience can include only the narrow subset of your current followers or it can be a broad one with Insta users who are not your followers, yet. To get on track easily, base on the following points:
- What type of content your ideal audience should engage with;
- Whether they prefer photo or video-based stories;
- What stickers they give preference the most;
- In what communities they take part;
- What hashtags they mostly follow.
Only after completely nailing down your Instagram Stories campaign goals and target audience, you can courageously pass to scheming the rest of the campaign.
Set the Timeline
The goals your Stories campaign has, influences its timeline, too. For instance, if the campaign is tied to a real-life event (an in-store sale, a master-class, etc.), the timeline of the Story completely depends on the event and usually stretches to a week at most. If the campaign is tied to a larger event (a Pride Month, for instance), you can set a longer timeline. Just be cautious not to let it go for too long or you run a risk of losing the steam.
Here are the parts to be based when setting the timeline:
- Pre-campaign hype (teasing it before the launch);
- The launch day (the day you post the main campaign content);
- Post-campaign follow up (continuing the conversations once the initial excitement has fallen by UGC, customer reviews, and so forth).