Social media users are becoming increasingly fascinated with Instagram Stories as a more authentic and lesser filtered alternative to regular Instagram posts. Since 2019, a whopping 500 million people have been using it daily which is a 250% increase since 2017. It is therefore a well-founded idea to look at how to design sponsored Instagram stories that convert. Post introduction of story ads in Instagram the platform has seen a wide use of this feature since 2017. This suggests that there's more competition for businesses that wish to advertise on the platform.
As an advertiser, you would want to form sure that your Instagram Stories ads have the specified impact rather than just using a stock image that resembles the products in your advertising campaign, consider all of the Instagram Stories best practices that will assist you to create impactful ads that convert.
Let us understand the nuances of creating an engaging advertisement in an Instagram story, to begin with. Let us take a glance at the essential steps to make ads for Instagram stories:
1. Choose your objective
What end do you want to achieve with your ad campaign? You will choose between several objectives for Stories ads including reach, brand awareness, traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, and conversions.
2. Develop your ad creatively
The next step is to make ad content that will fulfill your objective. this might either be images or videos alongside other creative elements like a billboard headline and replica. To assist you with this, read on to find out some tips for creating Stories that get attention.
3. Use the recommended dimensions
You can not use an equivalent ad dimension across all platforms. Instagram has recommended ad sizes that will ensure optimum visibility for your feed ads and your Stories ads.
4. Set your audience
Next, you would like to narrow down on the audience you would like to focus on for your Instagram Story ads. You will have the choice to focus on people supported location, gender, language, interests, behavior, and age. You will also narrow down your target customers or audiences for your brand i.e. whether to include all or exclude all such people who follow you already, whether you should target their friends and followers, and so on. However, you have to be very specific about your content since story ads last only for a few seconds.
5. Select your ad placement
The next step is to settle on your ad placement. While some other platforms like Facebook provide an option to put out ads automatically, it is always better to leave a human touch to how the advertisement is placed. So it's going to not be a controlled display based on equivalent ads and offerings to them.
6. Develop a compelling call to action
The final objective of any advertisement is to generate some action on the viewer’s part. The advertisements should be able to motivate customers to initiate the action desired by your ad. Use targeted action words like shop, subscribe, buy, learn, enroll, discover get, etc. You may also want to leverage past CTA words and actions that have worked for you.
Best practices for Instagram Story ads
Once you have mastered the fundamentals, you will ask the subsequent Instagram Stories best practices to make engaging ads that convert better:
1. Make the primary few seconds count
Instagram ads last only for a few seconds. Moreover, they are not presented on a large screen of a television. The first few seconds are therefore crucial to leave an impact on the viewer’s mind and capture attention. A RivalHQ study has revealed that brands lose 20% of viewers by the second slide of their ads. This suggests that it is important to captivate your audience instantly.
Subscribers are less likely to move away from visually appealing ads. Experiment with colors, fonts, and imagery that might appeal to your audience.
2. Create clear and concise messaging
While posting ads you must always remember that pictures will take up the majority of the space keeping very little space for texts to appeal. So if you are getting to use text in your ads, confirm you come up with a quick message that is punchy and gets straight to the purpose. You will even use carousel ads and video ads if you would like to inform an extended story.
3. Maintain brand visibility
The whole point of making Instagram story ads is to introduce more people to your brand and its products. So it won’t add up if people see your ad but do not know which brand it is from. Ensure your brand logo is prominently visible. This suggests ensuring that no other design elements are obstructing or distracting from the brand logo at the highest left corner of the screen.
In addition to the nuances mentioned above, there are a few more options to put the spotlight on your name and ensure better brand visibility:
Overlay your name or logo without obstructing other elements.
Focus on your product, especially if it's your name and/or logo thereon.
Opt for minimal colors, fonts, and style elements so that your name stands out.
Position your text strategically.
As we have mentioned earlier, there is very limited space to feature text elements in your Instagram Stories ads. While keeping your messages expedites half of this problem, your text positioning is equally important. You can not just throw your text around anywhere on the screen and hope for the simplest effect. You must ensure it is prominently visible without obstructing other elements and thus also by not being obstructed. It is best to feature your text over white space so people don’t miss it. While this is not always possible, confirm you select highly legible fonts albeit you are placing your text over other visual elements.
Why You Should Start Running Instagram Stories Ads
Don’t be afraid to experiment. Sometimes they could not perform that great by just doing the generic ads that everybody else seems to try to do. Get your creative juices flowing. Try out various things, give the video a go, make it funny and interesting yet aligned and relevant to the purpose. Just like with running other adverts, you ought to a/b test your ads. Instagram users are intelligent.
They will know if the story they are watching is a blatant ad. If it’s very promotional and appears excessively like a billboard, then it will be skipped the bulk of the time-have no misgiving about it.
That is exactly why a number of the foremost successful ads are people who feature an individual lecture the particular camera during a selfie-style cam. It makes the advert less formal and less sales-like, leading to capturing the user’s attention and making it desirable making them take note of someone on a more personal level. This has been an enormous success for influencers and makes that aren’t afraid to experiment.
Nearly every business that uses Instagram to promote their business has resorted to Influencer campaigns. It is always an excellent idea to use an influencer in the story ad. If you are aware of an influencer that fans love who can relate to the product you are selling then it might be a good idea to include the creator in your story ad campaign as the connection to the target audience will be more direct, energetic, and honest. You can also decide to feature previous ad campaigns with influencers that your customers will like.
One example of this is the #belikemike campaign used by Gatorade to bring out some vintage photos with Micheal Jordan and use them in their story ads. However, to do this you will have to find the most opportune moment to leverage the edge provided by such previous ad campaigns to cash in on your customers’ favorite face and the nostalgia associated with old favored ads with familiar faces.
Using Instagram stories to publish your ads is a brilliant idea. Although short-lived in actual duration these ads are the best option to initiate action. Instagram ads are effective in unique ways due to their short-lived nature. They hit the average user with more creative kinesis than other media. If you can combine Instagram story ads with a sustained program of growth strategy on Instagram you can dominate the platform as well as marketing in the digital world to a great extent. The flexibility of the process lets you include any kind of promotional activity. Whether you are a big business or a local photographer, story ads can initiate inertia towards your business in an unparalleled way.
However, all this has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Instagram story ads will help you bring in more traffic and in turn customers only if you can figure a winning marketing strategy. Putting random ads will only discourage users and will ruin the brand value of your business. The contents have to be interesting and creative. Remember while putting up story ads you need to do everything just right and only then you can get users to do what you want them to do. Never miss out on a good call-to-action (CTA) strategy to these ads.
Make the story ads something that your audience can relate to on a personal or emotional level. The moment your customers want to engage with you via these ads you will know that you have figured out how to design sponsored Instagram stories that convert.