Sports Marketing Examples: 12 Campaigns That Scored Big
Looking to captivate your audience's attention but running out of Instagram story ideas?
We've put together a list of 21 different Instagram story ideas and template options to help you quickly and easily generate more impressions and conversions.
Let's dig in.
Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit Instagram story templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:
An Instagram story is a unique Instagram post that resembles a slideshow. Each slide can be made of photos, graphics, or videos and contain music, voiceovers, interactive links, stickers, gifs and so much more.
Stories are typically direct and filled with high energy as each slide only lasts a short period of time. Images will be displayed for 5 seconds and video posts will be shown for 15 seconds before automatically advancing to the next portion of the story.
Instagram has well over a billion users and approximately 86.6% of Instagram’s users post stories daily, according to Sprout Social and Statista.
Instagram stories drive a lot of traffic and engagement because of their position within the app. Story posts are the first interface loaded on the Instagram app directly below the header.
Instagram stories will automatically disappear 24 hours after posting. While this may seem like a bad thing, this characteristic essentially guarantees that all the content in a story will be fresh and up to date.
Instagram Stories is now one of the most used features within the platform and presents a unique opportunity for you to engage with a large audience.
Instagram stories are a powerful way to share your new content with your friends and followers. Creating impactful stories from scratch may seem like a daunting task, especially if you have to post regularly.
If you are running out of ideas for Instagram stories, or are just starting out and have no idea where to begin this is the article for you.
Here are 21 ideas and templates to get your Instagram stories rolling.
If you are looking for information on other types of posts, check out our complete guide on how to create great Instagram content.
Let’s jump right in.
A short Instagram story about your brand can help raise awareness about your business. Even if your story does not directly lead to a conversion, getting your audience familiar with your brand is a huge win.
A HubSpot study found that it takes around eight touch points with a brand before a sale is even considered. In addition, over 80% of all clients research a brand before making a purchase and 90% of people buy from brands they follow on social media.
This means that your brand needs to have a strong online presence and be transparent on social media platforms.
Simply showcasing your brand to a large audience is an important first step. It is crucial to show your audience who you are, what you do and where your audience can find you.
An easy way to generate impressions and raise brand awareness is to create a social media post on a daily basis. Consider using a professionally designed Instagram story template to make this an effortless ordeal.
To ensure you're getting the most out of your posts, check out this guide on optimal image sizes on Instagram.
Create an Instagram story that highlights a specific product or service. Don't be discouraged if your post does not produce direct conversions. One study found that it may take anywhere from 7 to 13+ interactions with your brand before a true sales lead appears.
Instagram stories are a great way to show and tell your audience what products or services you offer.
Use a product template for Instagram stories to easily make your product stand out from the crowd. Before posting a story, be sure to add a working link that drives traffic to your product or service.
In digital marketing, it is important to show what problems your product or services solves. Your audience needs to be shown how your product solves a specific solution.
Presenting statistics in a relevant and easy-to-remember way can help convince your audience they need your product or service. If your audience feels they would be fine without your product, chances are they will not feel the need to invest in it.
Try using an infographic template to share important information with your potential customers. Using animations within your infographics will draw the user's attention to specific pieces of information.
By showing your audience their need for your product, your chances of producing a conversion increase drastically.
Instagram story is a great place to make announcements and posts regarding new releases or changes to your brand. Instagram stories can be used to generate hype for an upcoming event or product launch.
Does your brand have an upcoming sale or change? Let your audience know by posting an Instagram story with the latest news.
While it may be tempting to just post a still image and call it a day, we recommend animating your post or creating a video post. Motion tends to attract the human eye more than color does and can add curb appeal to your post.
Consider adding a voice-over to make an enthusiastic sales announcement. Adding music to your post can also help create positive vibes and push your audience that much further down the conversion process.
If you'd like to learn more about digital marketing on Instagram, take a look at our complete Instagram marketing guide.
Interaction with your followers is one of the key ingredients in making, creating and maintaining a social media presence. Asking your followers questions drives up engagement. This is one of the most common types of engagement posts.
A quick and easy way to receive responses from your Instagram story is with the questions sticker found in the pre-post settings of the Instagram story. This allows your audience to write a direct reply to your story.
Be prepared to respond to your followers as 1 in 3 Instagram stories results in a direct message according to Instagram's official page.
A quiz in Instagram stories is a multiple-choice interactive sticker placed on top of your post. A quiz gives the one posting the story a more controlled dataset, as it limits the audience's response to only a few options.
While at first glance limiting your audience’s responses may seem like a bad thing, multiple-choice questions relieve your audience of the stress of creating a customized response.
Using a quiz Instagram sticker can also help prevent your data collection from being corrupted by spam or unsolicited responses.
A quiz is an easy way for your audience to effortlessly provide valuable input into your business decisions.
Instagram polls are a type of interactive sticker you can add to your Instagram story. This allows your audience to respond to you with a binary answer.
Polls ensure that your audiences’ answers are directly related to the question. Using a poll sticker also makes it easy for your audience to respond to a prompt. The chances of your followers interacting with your post increase as little time is needed and almost no creativity is required of them.
All in all, polls are a great way to gather large amounts of data from your followers in a fun and interactive way. Periodically post a story with a poll to keep your followers aware, informed and engaged.
As your influence on Instagram grows, more and more people will want to know more about you and your company. Being authentic and transparent is very important to most people, especially when it comes to companies.
Consider making a video that answers some of the most frequently asked questions of your company.
One study shows that 13% of people are more willing to help a company if they believe that the company supports a good cause.
Show your audience how your company produces a net good for society. By answering and interacting with your followers' questions, you show that their voices are heard and their opinions matter to you.
Being overly honest may come with a cost. The same study cited above showed that over 60% of people would boycott a company that went against their political views. Be honest, but not so honest that you isolate an opposing political party supporter.
Let your customers become acquainted with your company by showing your followers how your product is made. A brief video that gives a look behind the curtain of how things are made can help create a sense of trust in your product and company.
These short clips do not have to reveal company secrets but should give a small look into your company's production process.
A successful “how it’s made” video should establish trust in your expertise, but also assure your audience that there are no shortcuts taken, only high-quality products. Nothing wins the trust of an audience like showing them how the product is made or designed.
When creating professional short videos, it is important to have the correct tools for editing HD videos. Check out our complete list of the best video editing tools so you can create professional videos for your Instagram story (or just use Visme).
Be sure your social media account includes informative videos that showcase how your company's product is superior to the competition.
Creating a short video revealing what happens behind the scenes at your company is a great way to build brand fidelity and generate traffic. A “Behind the scenes” short video should focus more on the people, culture and values of the company more than the product.
Behind the scenes videos personify your brand, making your products more approachable and memorable.
These types of videos make your company appear less like a mindless corporate machine and more like an approachable small business. Consider making a short video where your employees or partners explain what they do and what life is like from their perspective.
These videos do not need to be drawn out or fancy but should give an authentic look at what an average day at the company is like.
Storytelling is a key aspect of creating a successful Instagram story. Take a look at this article to learn more about how to create visually compelling stories on Instagram.
Instagram stories are a great place to announce sales and discounts for your brand. According to Forbes, about 66% of all internet shoppers use social media to aid in their product purchasing process.
The Instagram story platform is an amazing place to make announcements about limited-time offers as the story post only last for 24 hours by default.
Not only this, but Instagram stories has an interactive countdown sticker that lets you set a time limit within the post that keeps track of the remaining time for a sale. This creates a sense of urgency for your followers to buy while they can and encourage them to keep a close watch on your social media page.
Create a sales post or discount post using a high-quality template to ensure that your followers engage with your content.
Creating a contest on Instagram is a fun way to drive up interactions and create a trend. Create a challenge or contest and have people respond by creating their own post with a corresponding hashtag. This links their video to yours and increases the outreach potential.
By default, your Instagram stories reach only your followers.
By encouraging others to post on their own Instagram storyboard, these posts will reach all of their followers as well.
Contests are a great way to incentivize interactions and generate posts that have a much larger reach than a single post from your profile would.
Sharing content generated by your users is a great way to interact with your followers. Whether it be an unboxing video or a response to one of your contests, sharing user-generated content is a great way to make your users feel more like a community.
Showcase your userbase and build trust with your clients by showing off your user-generated content.
Sharing testimonials or reviews of your product is an easy and effective way to showcase your brand and social media account.
Word of mouth marketing still reigns supreme as one of the best forms of marketing. Sharing user-generated content is a free way of advertising your user base to build brand trust and fidelity. One study showed that moms are 38% more likely to buy products that are liked or recommended by other moms on Facebook.
Testimonials and reviews can be created by a hired production team for a relatively low cost. However, many companies are opting for a more relevant, handheld cellphone shooting style as it appears more natural and authentic.
A bonus to letting your client reviews be created by users is the reduced amount of effort it takes to create a story post. Aside from selecting a review to post to your story, the review is already made and edited for free.
If you do need to edit a user-generated review, either to shorten a post or add links, consider making the post’s overall design match your existing story designs.
For more help designing Instagram stories, check out our full guide to designing Instagram stories.
Ensure you obtain permission to edit their posts and assign credit to the original poster.
An Instagram story that gives a preview of a new product, design or service always attracts attention. Nothing generates hype like giving a sneak peek into your brand's future plans.
Excite your audience by letting them get a taste of what's in store for the future. Aside from simply announcing the launch of a new product or service, give a small preview or hint as to what your brand's next big thing will be.
Before going off and giving your audience a preview of the secret plans of your company, be sure you have permission to share this information and that all “classified” information is not leaked.
If you are running out of ideas, your user-base is a great place to ask for suggestions for posts. Asking your audience for their opinion via Instagram stories is a quick and easy way to get feedback from people who use your product.
Because your followers are the people who use your product or services, they may give more insightful information about your product or information than a standard focus group.
Create a simple post asking your audience what they would like to see. If you would like to effortlessly create animated story posts, consider using an Instagram story template like this one from Visme.
Letting your audience share their input and opinions directly to your profile provokes them to think meaningfully about your company, product or service. This type of organic interaction helps grow traffic and create loyal followers.
An Instagram story video can creatively show your followers how your product can make their daily lives better. Creating a short video montage with useful tips and tricks your product can do has the potential to generate tons of views and traffic.
According to Google, how-to videos generate more attention than any other content category on YouTube — even more than music clips or gaming.
If you truly want to captivate your audience's attention, create instructional videos showing how your product can be used to its fullest extent.
Even if your audience may not own your product yet, they can see how your product works and how it would improve their daily routines.
Instagram story is a great place to post a link to your newsletter or website. From here, your Instagram followers can subscribe to your email lists and stay up to date with all the latest news and promotions in a personalized way.
Newsletters are also a great way to personally deliver news and announcements directly to a customer rather than a general announcement on Instagram.
Periodic promotional emails towards a repeat customer is one of the most effective marketing strategies in digital marketing.
Instagram stories can be used to drive traffic to your site by linking to blog posts. Sometimes there is so much information that needs to be said but can not be contained to a single social media post.
Linking to an external article gives more in-depth information to your audiences about your product or service.
By creating a link that generates traffic to your site, your website’s ranking in Google will be a bit higher in organic searches.
This means that when a person searches for similar products or services, Google will rank your site closer to the top results as a more visited site will be ranked higher than sites that has low traffic.
Consider linking your website's blog in an Instagram story with a brief overview of the content of the blog. This provides SEO (search engine optimization) for you and valuable information for your followers.
Instagram story is a great place to give a shout-out to other brands that inspire you or your team.
Mentioning other brands that you admire or recommend shows that your company has a “personality” of sorts and helps earn the trust and favor of your followers.
By showing your followers good brands that improve their quality of life, you show that your company cares for your follower's quality of life without being directly motivated by financial gain. This gains brand fidelity and is a great way to increase your follower's engagements.
Don’t be afraid to shout out a mention to other brands, tools or services that you can get behind and support.
If you are an affiliate of a company or brand you are mentioning, be sure to disclose your relationship with the brand to your audience. You may find yourself in legal or ethical hot water if you fail to disclose your relationship to the mentioned brand.
Continually creating engaging and compelling stories on Instagram can be a difficult task. By default, Instagram only posts your story for 24 hours and then it is no longer visible to the public.
Previous Instagram stories are stored in Instagram's archive or can be stored locally on your phone. You can either repost the story on a different day or share the story as a normal Instagram post.
Posting a used Instagram story as a standard post comes with many benefits.
First, it will not disappear after 24 and remain on your profile as long as you want.
The second great benefit is where the post will appear on your follower’s news feed. A normal Instagram post appears in the news feed and has a better chance of being seen in your follower's news feed and not disappearing after 24 hours.
For more inspiration, check out this great piece on more ideas for your Instagram posts.
Instagram stories is an exceptionally great platform to connect with your audience.
Interactions can range from direct messages to simple binary polls. With these forms of dynamic input, you can collect user data to help you achieve your personal or business goals.
The key to having a successful Instagram account is consistently posting high-quality content to drive engagement. This means posting high quality content on a routine basis.
Using professionally designed Instagram story templates can make this a near-effortless task. Visme offers hundreds of free Instagram story templates and has all the tools you need to create, edit and share your stories.
Instagram stories are all about sharing what is going on in your life.
Stories have been an influential part of every culture in human history. Visual storytelling is the new way to communicate your thoughts, feelings, emotions and ideas to those around you. Now over to you. How will you tell your story? What will your next big Instagram story be?
Design visual brand experiences for your business whether you are a seasoned designer or a total novice.
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