Instagram Stories for E-commerce Brands

Instagram Stories for E-commerce Brands

Using Instagram Stories for e-commerce should become a part of your marketing strategy if you are running a business on this social media platform. You see, around 500 million Instagram users interact with Stories daily and this amount must be significant for you. However, beside the huge number of users, there are also many other reasons for incorporating Insta Stories to your marketing. Particularly which, we shall reveal right now on the blog of one of the most reputable Instagram and IGTV providers InstaBF! Ready? Let’s get it started!

  • Stories are located at the top of all users’ screens on Instagram. In case your brand uses Stories frequently, it has big chances to appear in the attention of your followers. The same can’t be said about regular posts which get buried down in the feed. 
  • With Stories, you can share customer content and keep your Instagram feed’s aesthetic on top. Having faithful customers who love your products/services so much that they share their experience on their account is great! And it’s even better when you can re-share their Stories thus letting other followers know how happy you can make people with your production. But if you have dedicated much time and funds on creating a mind-blowing Instagram aesthetic, you needn’t post shared content on your account. Stories become the perfect spot for that! You share UGC without disrupting your feed’s aesthetic.
  • In 2019 people have started to value authentic content more than those polished photo-shopped images celebrities post. Despite this, no brand or influencer would like to appear unprofessional on Instagram and post unfiltered content on their feed. Right for this, you can use Stories. The latter is an excellent venue to share that less polished content your followers may expect. This can be behind-the-scene videos/photos, live updates of an event organized by your brand or which your team attended, etc.  
  • Stories bring the sense of urgency you can make use of. As every Instagram Story is actual only for twenty-four hours, any promotion you share here will be layered on the spot! There’s absolutely no need to remind about the urgency of the content you share as your followers will feel the urgency to act on their own. 

 

 

Using Instagram Stories for E-commerce

 

Instagram Stories have several mini-features each of which can give you the advantage to take for your e-commerce brand. These are:

 

 

Using Story Highlights to save and categorize Stories

 

Story highlights allow brands to organize their content better. This way you can create a Highlight for new product launches or another one for frequently asked questions. 

 

 

Using the Swipe Up feature to take your viewers right to the product page

 

The Swipe Up feature, which is available for Instagram users having more than 10k followers, eliminates the necessity for customer to exit Instagram to find your product on your brand’s website later. Once buying products becomes convenient, both you and your customers will benefit. 

 

Using Stories Polls to get thoroughly free insights into your clients’ opinions.

 

Instagram Stories Polls give e-commerce brands a fantastic opportunity to get feedback from customers entirely free of charge! Besides, making your fans more engaged means making them more likely buyers.  

 

Eight Ways to Collaborate on Instagram: Collaborating with Business

Eight Ways to Collaborate on Instagram: Collaborating with Business

If you are a brand on Instagram, you definitely know that challenges are inevitable when collaborating with other businesses or bloggers. However, this doesn’t mean conflicts can’t be avoided. With appropriate tactics and tools, you can set up a successful brand which has only positive negotiations with other brands. If you are interested in expanding your cooperation on Instagram, here in InstaBF, one of the most popular IG and IGTV providers, we are excited about helping you. To our mind, the best way of starting an efficient collaboration is approaching a brand with an amazing idea! You should always bear in mind that whatever you undertake and offer to a possible partner, should be beneficial for both of you. Moreover, that should also be valuable for the audiences of both of you. And if you have run out of ideas, we shall help you with some.

 

 

Collaborating with Businesses

 

In today’s article, we are referring to collaboration ways with Instagram businesses. Very soon, we shall cover the ways of collaboration with bloggers. Stay tuned!

 

Collaborative photos

 

One of the smartest and most effective ways of collaborating with another business on IG is pairing up with one that has a similar target market. Take flatlays with products of both of you, share on Instagram and tag one another to get the most bang for your money. This way you will not only save on the content shooting but also have much more interesting content and larger brand awareness. For instance, if you are a brand offering sweets, collaborate with one that offers tea or coffee. Don’t forget to mention one another in your captions.

 

 

Product Bundles

 

If there’s a brand you really love products of which, why not bundle them with yours?! Putting together a new offering, you could offer both your and your partnering brand’s products on your Instagram account and in your store. Just the same way, your partnering brand could add some of your products to its store. This can be a seasonal offer or a limited edition collection. Agree that this is a good way to share audiences and websites.

 

 

IG Market Day

 

Virtual market days are immensely popular on Instagram and businesses collaborating with one another on this day benefit greatly. On an IG marketing day, businesses with similar target audiences join into groups and offer special discounts for the whole day. You, as a part of that group, have to share what each other business offers on your grid or Stories throughout the entire day. And other businesses include yours in their content. This way your products appear in front of new audiences.

 

 

IG Stories Takeovers

 

Perhaps the quickest way of collaboration on Instagram is IG Story takeover. Usually, it can be coordinated in a matter of minutes. On the basis of this lies the concept of creating mutually valuable content and sharing it on a set day on your stories. If you and the brand you cooperate with have similar target audiences and both of you love making awesome Instagram stories, this way is the best for you.

Five Instagram Story Stickers Great for Your Business

Five Instagram Story Stickers Great for Your Business

Instagram Stories stickers are a wonderful means of adding personality and much fun to one’s stories. Yet, they are also fantastically useful for Gram businesses. Regardless of your goal, whether that’s driving traffic to your website, building brand awareness, etc., you can use these stickers purposefully. Let’s review five grandiose Instagram Stories stickers your business can benefit from significantly here, on InstaBF’s website. This is the service that can provide you with as many likes, comments, views and followers for an Instagram or IGTV account as you may need! And all that on surprisingly beneficial conditions!

 

 

Location Stickers

 

Instagram location stickers are a great means of getting more views and higher engagement in your Stories. Once you tag a story with such a sticker (a cafe, a neighborhood, etc.), it will instantly get in the public stories feed of that exact location. Hence, once someone searches for that location, your story will be displayed, too. Just make sure those sticker tags are relevant. Be very strategic about any location you are tagging. Instagram Stories location stickers are perfect for:

  • Increasing the number of views and raising engagement;
  • Growing the discoverability of the story;
  • Driving attention to the physical location of your business.

 

 

Mention Stickers

 

Mention stickers are used for stating collaborations with other brands or reposting UGC. This way you will both notify the account about your mentioning and build your own community. By the way, the mentioned users may repost your story or share it with their followers.

So, Instagram Stories mention stickers are best for:

  • Highlighting influencer campaigns and partnerships;
  • Highlighting other accounts.

 

 

Hashtag Stickers

 

The role of hashtag stickers is much like that of location stickers. Whenever you tag a story, people can see your post on that hashtag’s page. Besides, once an Instagram user taps on your story’s hashtag sticker, he will immediately be transported to the page of other stories with the same tag.

So, hashtag story stickers are amazing for:

  • Raising the discoverability of your story;
  • Receiving more views and higher engagement on your Insta stories;
  • Highlighting your branded hashtags.

 

 

Poll and Emoji Slider Stickers

 

These stickers are widely used for surveying your target audience about their likes and dislikes, interests and desires. Poll stickers imply getting results of votings, while emoji sliders allow dragging the slider right or left and submitting their own response. These two stickers are broadly used for:

  • Collecting feedback on your services/products;
  • Crowdsourcing ideas;
  • Entertaining followers;
  • Gathering significant information.

 

 

GIF Stickers

 

Instagram GIF stickers can help you create more engaging and attractive content. Currently, there are multiple quality GIFs available on the platform as a result of the collaboration between Instagram and GIPHY. Businesses can greatly benefit from these expressive and fun stickers as they will upgrade the shots of products, accentuate CTA and links. Here are the main purposes of using GIF stickers for promoting your brand’s stories:

  • Bringing a visual flair to stories;
  • Driving brand awareness;
  • Accentuating call-to-actions and links.
Best Time-Saving Online Tools for Your Instagram Business

Best Time-Saving Online Tools for Your Instagram Business

No matter whether you are new to running a business on Instagram or you have already managed to go up the mountain and are back, there are always some new tools that can change the game. They are definitely worth your while. However, it may take quite much time to find those life-changing and time-saving tools unless you are following InstaBF’s blog. By the way, we are the service that offers several packages of IG and IGTV likes, comments, views and followers on inexpensive costs. In fact, we have already selected several new software options that can bring back to you your spare time. Use them along with other time-tested applications and you will promote your business significantly!

 

Mailshake

 

The first online tool worth considering is Mailshake. With the help of this tool, you get much more time to reap the rewards of your marketing campaigns instead of chasing those users which might even not care about your business! Use the tool to plan out targeted email campaigns with brief sequences. Just recall how many times you kept on chasing up an Instagram influencer or a PR agent to collaborate with before you finally understood no deal was to be made.

So, if you are working alone on your Gram business, Mailshake can become your best friend in utilizing your time wisely. It will put you in touch with particularly those influencers or PR specialists, who respond to your email. Looking exactly like you are responding in real time, the pre-programmed adjustable emails will be sent out in a timeline.  

The tool is payable.

 

 

Linktr.ee

 

It’s definitely a hard thing to promote various things on Gram and simultaneously track the progress your marketing has. Linktr.ee can become a useful solution in such situations. This tool allows creating a custom landing page based on the brand colors you’ve been using and sending it to Insta users instead of the traditional link they can find in your bio. This way it becomes possible to link to many pages involving the booking page, pricing page, or email opt-in landing page. Just imagine how convenient that will be to use a single easy-to-copy-paste link to direct followers to your target pages!

 

 

Go Postie

 

Are you working alone on your Instagram business and can’t afford any human workers, yet? Do you feel exhausted? Well, Postie can become your savior. This tool will help you automatically create email content and promote your brand even more efficiently. Whether you use this tool for only a part of emails or all of them, be certain your clients will like the way Postie interacts with them – it’s not a hard sell but a friendly chat.

 

 

Acuity Scheduling

 

Whether you run your business on Instagram, Facebook or any other social network, you will greatly benefit from Acuity scheduling. This is a multi-functional tool that will help you manage your DMs, book clients in for a service, invoicing and payment for your services/products. Other benefits of this Instagram tool for saving time on marketing include customizing client questionnaires, setting up various booking types and prices for them, scheduling email reminders both for yourself and your clients, etc.

 

Strategies to Sell Out Your Event on Instagram

Strategies to Sell Out Your Event on Instagram

Instagram is broadly used by people around the world to discover brands and businesses. The multi-million Insta profiles of businesses active on a daily basis make the platform a grandiose one for developing. Just the same way, any event organized and promoted well on this social media gets the opportunity to grow their audience only adhering to a few steps. These are:

  • Post content that can draw the attention of target users;
  • Make it straightforward for users to get more information about the event and the purchase of tickets;
  • Encourage Insta users to use your tags and post at your event thus driving more people to check on your event.

 

This is the “flywheel” of every successful event discovery. However, to put it into motion, it’s necessary to first engage event goers on Gram so that they do their part in the cycle. How? InstaBF, a credible IGTV and IG provider, is going to reveal it right away!

 

 

Engage People to Grow Your Audience

 

Most Instagrammers get inspired by the content posted by businesses. According to the statistics, one-third of most-viewed IG Stories are posted by particularly businesses. And events here even have an advantage over businesses – live experiences are significantly more photogenic! Hence, if you are promoting an event, make certain you post lots of engrossing content. Make every part of your event vivid through IG live and recorded videos, images, Stories. Once users realize they can get a colorful glimpse at the action, they will yearn to get more.

Start teasing your audience weeks or even months beforehand. Build excitement and hint them about the exceptional experience your event promises them. By the way, the two-thirds of every business profile gets visits from non-followers. And an authentic and interesting content posted on a regular basis is a sure way to convert these visitors into followers.

 

 

Turn Followers into Ticket Buyers

 

Once Instagrammers following you engage with your content they will want to experience your event themselves. Unfortunately, interest doesn’t mean buying tickets. To achieve this, first of all, make buying tickets right from a smartphone an utmost easy process. For this:

  1. Insert a URL on your Insta profile that connects the profile to ticketing or registration. Make certain your followers won’t have to navigate all over your website homepage to find where to buy tickets.
  2. As Instagrammers come from mobile phones, it’s important to optimize the payment process so that it is displayed and operated well on mobile devices.
  3. Create a “Get Tickets” button right on your Insta profile.

 

 

Encourage Instagrammers to Share Their Experience

 

People love seeing others’ unique experiences on Instagram and other social media. And even one person’s post from a fantastic event can inspire several friends to learn more about it and follow the Instagram account of that event. In fact, around 48% of event visitors attend festivals and shows just to have content to share on Instagram knowing well it encourages others for a discovery, too. This is a unique flywheel on its own. So, with this said, there are four steps (some need investments) that will help you engage your Insta following. These are:

  1. Contests drawing users to post their own images from your events and tag new friends;
  2. Collaborations with influencers, vendors, speakers and sponsors to post about your event;
  3. Creating photogenic scenes at your venue to encourage Instagrammers to take photos and post them;
  4. Creating hashtags that your followers and Instagrammers interested in your event can use to post about your festival or event.  

 

The more followers talk about your event, the faster your promotion flywheel will spin, thus growing the interest and attendance to your event!