By Ciara Brady on 27 Sep 2019
Wolfgang Bites: Watch - Tips & Tricks to Make Sales Through Instagram Stories
Wolfgang Bites: Read- Tips & Tricks to Make Sales Through Instagram Stories
In this weeks #WolfgangBites our Head of Social Roisin talks about how to drive sales through Instagram Stories.
Alan: Hey Roisin! So you've uncovered some really interesting social media trends of late.
Roisin: Instagram has been growing massively and Instagram as a platform has been growing five times faster than all the other social media platforms. Stories in particular are growing really fast. Instagram Stories are growing 15 times faster than the Instagram feed.
Alan: Wow. Massive growth. I love that. Now, when I think of Stories, I think of very top of funnel awareness emotions. Whereas I'm a cold hard search marketer. I like conversions. Is there a commercial opportunity for advertisers in Instagram Stories?
Roisin: Yes, there is. Instagram Stories have released lots of new product focused shopping features. For example, they have introduced shopping tags so you can incorporate your product feed into your stories. They also introduced the swipe up to shop function, a good while back. So there is an opportunity to sell product on Instagram Stories. But... these are only available organically at the moment.
Alan: Okay. So there's a commercial opportunity through organic stories. Do advertisers then have to sit on their hands and wait for some innovation to come for them, or is there some workarounds that advertisers can use now to sell product via Stories?
Roisin: There are workarounds. We saw huge amounts of reach and click through rates increasing through Stories. We really wanted to figure out a way to increase our conversion rate through Instagram Stories. So our workaround was to remarket to people based on a category level into their Instagram Stories. What this means is, let's say you're shopping for a pair of jeans on a retailer's website, then you go onto your Instagram Stories the next day. We're going to show you an Instagram Story of a model wearing similar jeans to the ones you were looking at, just jeans in general. With a really nice background and a nice model shot, one that fits in with the Instagram Stories vibe. So this workaround meant that we can actually show product to people in their Instagram Stories.
Alan: Okay and it's relevant to what I had been looking at, if not exactly what I was looking at.
Roisin: It's got the same category that you're looking at. Yes.
Alan: Hit me with the commercials. Was there good return on ad spend for these campaigns?
Roisin: Yes. This is a very simple remarketing tactic, but we hadn't been doing it on Instagram before. It hasn't been done on Instagram Stories before. Previously you were running Instagram Story ads. They were getting good reach and good click rates, as I mentioned before, but very little conversions. When we incorporated this remarketing tactic into Stories, we saw a return on our ad spend of 20 to one. So really, really high.
Alan: Very significant. That's brilliant. Is this just a window of opportunity? Instagram's probably going to come and bring some advertising features to fill this gap in the future, is it?
Roisin: I should hope so. I'd imagine that Instagram Stories will be releasing dynamic product ads fairly soon. These are remarketing ads that are going to show you the exact products that you've been looking at on a website. It's not here yet, but I'd imagine it would be a massive missed opportunity if they didn't. But in the meantime, you can use our tactic and you can drive some conversions that way.
*Update*
So, Roisin was right! The Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) are available now in the Instagram Stories placement. Here at Wolfgang we’ve started seeing some promising results by testing them. However, our famous Instagram hack of remarketing based on category level is still our favourite tactic, as we are able to add full screen, “Instagramable” creative which is also very relevant to the end user.
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