Should You Test Instagram Stories Ads? (And Tips For Doing It)
The Stories placement is a placement type that's a bit different than the others. If you really want to run a good Stories campaign, you should plan your creative specifically around the unique way that people interact with them. Watch to hear my tips on the best way to add Stories ads into your strategy!
Transcript:
If a lot of your audience is on Instagram, or you've noticed that the Instagram newsfeed placement has been effective for you in advertising, it's probably worthwhile for you to test out the Instagram stories placement. So I'm not talking about just using automatic placements and letting your ad that's meant for newsfeed show up in stories, I’m talking about custom creating an ad for the stories placement.
This placement is more unique than the newsfeed and right-hand column. So it's really beneficial if you're making ads for stories that you custom create your content to match the style of stories ads. So that means creating video content that is vertical. So the 16 by 9 aspect ratio that fills the whole screen. You also should plan content that doesn't need any additional copy. So you're not putting any copy in the ad. So what you can do is, you can take your video and you can open it up to Instagram as if you're going to share a story. And if you need to, you can add text on the video that way. I recommend doing it this way, because it looks a lot more organic because you're creating it as if you're going to share it to stories with text in the same style as organic stories. And so just blends in a lot better with the rest of the stories that as users are swiping. You can also even add gifs to make it look even more just fun and organic and interesting. You also want to include a call to action to swipe up on your Instagram story. Just because it's a little bit different than the regular Facebook ad in which they can put the link. So you just want to make it really clear what they need to do to take the next action.
Lastly, if you want to, you can even add a poll to your Instagram story to encourage engagement with your ad. Facebook has done research and they’ve found that when people include polls on Instagram stories, it actually increases brand recall because engaging with the ad and engaging with your brand helps them to remember you and your messaging. I tested this out with a client, a cider company, and we just have people poll on which flavour they would pick. We got people to engage with the ad. We increased brand awareness of the cidery. And we also got some interesting insights about which flavour people like. Instagram stories ads can be really effective for your business. So I highly recommend testing it out.
