Instagram Stories

Successful Marketing with Instagram Stories I N S I G H T S E R I E S

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 2 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 3 A Home for Visual Expression .............................................................................................................................................................. 3 Why People Use Instagram ................................................................................................................................................................... 4 The Instagram User Journey ................................................................................................................................................................ 4 The Shift to Stories ................................................................................................................................................................................ 5 How People Are Engaging with Stories ............................................................................................................................................... 5 Harnessing Instagram Stories Superpowers ........................................................................... 6 Automatic Placements ......................................................................................................................................................................... 6 Asset Customization ............................................................................................................................................................................. 7 Tips for Running Instagram Stories Ad Campaigns ............................................................................................................................ 8 Best Practices for Advertising with Instagram Stories ............................................................ 9 What to Showcase on Instagram Stories ............................................................................................................................................. 9 Your Brand on Instagram: The Nuts and Bolts ................................................................................................................................... 11 The Latest: Bringing Shopping to Instagram Stories ....................................................................................................................... 15 A Customer Success Story: Deezer ....................................................................................... 16 Instagram Best Practices in Action .................................................................................................................................................... 16 How Marin Social Delivered Enhanced Instagram Performance for Deezer .................................................................................. 17 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 18

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 3 Introduction Every few months, digital advertising undergoes tectonic shifts in the form of breaking news and more ad formats. With its promise of visual discovery, connecting with friends, and exploring new likes and interests, Instagram is one of the players in the space that continues to upend the status quo and provide additional creative opportunities to industry advertisers. In this guide, we cover trends with Instagram Stories from both consumer and business standpoints, including the innovations driving Stories as a favored platform. Additionally, we discuss cross-platform capabilities, media buying, and creative best practices to ensure you’re making the most out of your Instagram Stories ad spend. Recognizing that digital advertising is a world of multiple platforms and placements, we cover best practices for buying media not only for Instagram, but also across the family of Facebook apps and services to drive the best possible ROI. The content of this paper is based on a webinar we presented with Facebook. A Home for Visual Expression Although formats continue to expand within the Instagram family, there is one constant: Instagram is primarily a home to visual expression, whether it’s in someone’s feed or in new placements like Instagram Stories. Instagram is where people come to express themselves, as well as interact with their favorite brands and services. Back in 2010, Instagram was a picture-only placement with a square aspect ratio. The main usage was sharing pictures among friends and family. In 2013, the platform introduced video, which allowed people immersive experiences that captured more of their moments. In 2016 came Stories, a full-screen, immersive, visual experience, followed by more recent additions like Instagram TV and Instagram shopping. The platform continuously evolves based on the needs and research of consumers. Now, with over a billion monthly active accounts, Instagram is experiencing huge growth and consumer adoption across demographics. Advertisers have caught on and are vying for user attention.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 4 Why People Use Instagram According to global Instagram survey results, people use Instagram for a few primary reasons: • It allows them to connect with family and friends. • They can interact with their favorite cuisine, celebrities, and tastemakers. • They can interface with influencers and cultural instigators across different industries. Influencers are a big part of Instagram, but most importantly, Instagram is a place to interact with your favorite brands and services. People’s interaction with Instagram allows businesses to connect at every phase of the consumer journey, making it a rich platform for discovery, research, and locating exciting trends and interests. The Instagram User Journey These numbers show that Instagram is a robust place for user activity. Instagram’s future, however— particularly from an ads buying standpoint—lies in Instagram Stories. 83 % 80 % 60 % 80 % 50 % discover new products and services decide whether to buy a product or service of people on Instagram follow a business or service say it’s a place that enables interactions with brands are more interested in a brand on Instagram search for more information 79 % visit the brand's website or app 65 % visit a retail store they've discovered on the platform 37 % talk to their friends and family about the brand or experience 29 % make an online purchase 46 % follow the brand's account online 31 % What happens after someone sees a product or service on Instagram? Why People Use Instagram Source: Instagram (https://business.instagram.com/getting-started/#why-instagram) Source: Instagram (https://business.instagram.com/blog/25-million-businesses)

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 5 The Shift to Stories Remember when desktop led to handheld, and advertisers had to adapt to this change and understand new industry nuances? Or the change from television to mobile video? Now, with the transformation from a feed-based environment to vertical, immersive stories, advertisers must know and master best practices around creative, media buying, and what makes this ad format unique. People love Instagram Stories. The format is full-screen and playful, but it’s also ephemeral, disappearing within 24 hours. And, the experience is short-lived, so users tend to feel more comfortable sharing their authentic, everyday selves with friends and family. Because of this, there is heightened pressure for brands to present their authentic identities and for their content to be highly curated, presenting moments in “snackable”, interactive bites. How People Are Engaging with Stories How are people actually engaging with the Stories placement? According to data in the graphic below, videos and sound grab people’s attention, allowing and encouraging advertisers to tell traditional narratives in a sound-on environment: Significantly, one in three Stories receives a direct message from a user. So, if a brand posts an organic Story and people want to learn more, many of them contact the brand directly with questions such as, “How can I buy?” and “How can I learn more?” This is just one reason why Stories matter so much to businesses. And, as more people continue to move onto the platform, it becomes increasingly important for brands to go where consumers are, and understand and embrace best practices for maximizing engagement. of Stories posts are sound-on +60 % of Instagram Stories viewed are video 50 % of Stories receive direct messages to the brand 30 % How People Are Engaging with Stories Source: Instagram (https://business.instagram.com/a/stories)

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 6 Harnessing Instagram Stories Superpowers With half of all businesses having an Instagram presence, it’s important to note that these businesses account for a third of the most viewed Stories. That’s nothing to sneeze at! From discovery to participatory ad units like polls and questions, Stories allow consumers to connect with brands in a way that’s immersive and highly engaging. Instagram Stories Example Get Interactive: Polls and Questions Instagram’s main superpower is interactivity, and creating polls and questions is a great way to draw people to your Stories. Brands and advertisers can create ad objective around polls that allow you to embed a polling question directly within ads. You can then gain insights from the response rate and how people are engaging with the question. As people wait for a polling question to launch, you can reach them with ads embedded in the experience, encouraging them to watch your ad longer than they might otherwise. If you’re using video, consider keeping the polling unit directly within the creative for the full time to increase views and completion rates. Automatic Placements Once you’re drawing in new audiences, how do you gain the most efficient outcomes based on your media spend? This is where Automatic Placements come in. These give you the ability to use Instagram to buy across all placements within the Facebook family of apps and services. They deliver the most efficient ROI by allowing the platform’s algorithm to place your ads where your audience exists, with the optimal probability of driving the best results—whether your goal is a mobile app install, website click, or brand engagement.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 7 Facebook’s algorithm knows—based on your targeting parameters and objectives—which placements it should deliver to. It finds pockets of efficiency based on its back-end predictive algorithms to give you the highest possible ROI. Every placement is an opportunity to connect with your audience. In the early days of Facebook, ad placements were only in the News Feed. Since then, Facebook has constantly innovated to give advertisers more opportunities, adding ad placements to Instagram Feed, Stories, Messenger, and Audience Network. Since Facebook constantly rolls out new ad inventory in new placements, they strive to simplify the buying experience and deliver the best ROI. Automatic Placements rises to this challenge, providing ad objective and targeting options in Ads Manager for maximum effectiveness. Facebook’s delivery system does the rest. To ensure maximum reach and the most efficient ROI, be sure to stay opted in to Automatic Placements for your Instagram Stories ads, across all placements. Asset Customization As Facebook continues to roll out new placements across its properties, leveraging Automatic Placements will make it easier for advertisers to optimize to the best placements. However, it’s important to test and learn to identify the best placement strategy. In Ads Manager, placements are initially automatically selected. You can then go through these and customize creatives or specific placements depending on your goals. Why customize creative across placements? Since each placement has its own unique consumer behavior and interaction behavior, you may want custom creative for Instagram Stories, but also run Automatic Placements for the best ROI. To meet this need, Facebook introduced asset customization. Once you’ve selected all of Facebook’s placements in Ads Manager, you can also enter bespoke, unique creative for Stories that includes items like stickers, emojis, or overlays that are native to the platform. You can also add custom creative for Instagram, Facebook News Feed, Stories, etc., and compare performance. Asset customization is a powerful tool that allows you to easily select different placements, assign a unique creative for each one, and then test and learn. It drives better performance and delivery based on creative best practices for a given placement. increase in lift 2.1 x lower cost per conversion 71 % more reach 70 % The Impact of Automatic Placements Source: Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/196554084569964?id=369787570424415)

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 8 With placement optimization, there’s no trade-off between automatic placement and placements with specific, bespoke content and assets. Now, you can go directly into Ads Manager and customize across every placement, and design creative that’s native across all of Facebook’s placements. Then, you can view reports to see how each placement performed. Be sure to look at aggregate campaign performance, which enables you to identify the most efficiency improvement opportunities. Tips for Running Instagram Stories Ad Campaigns Keep these additional tips in mind with asset customization and creating Instagram Stories ads: • Choose creative that matches the recommended aspect ratio. • Create bespoke assets within an Automatic Placements campaign, and customize your creative assets to best match the viewing behavior of each placement. • Use the same images as you do on Facebook, and ensure you have sufficient campaign budget. • Target a large audience. • Split test to optimize your placements, and to understand what’s working and not working. Upload new creative depending on the results. If you’re concerned about brand safety with certain placements like Audience Network, use category blocking. Facebook also provides a pre-campaign publisher list where you can review a complete roster of publishers and a domain app block list to stop your ads from appearing on specific websites, apps, or pages.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 9 Best Practices for Advertising with Instagram Stories Stories are working for brands. Again, consider the numbers. At Marin, we recommend using Stories to give people the opportunity to engage directly with your brand, build brand loyalty, generate new customers, and give your brand a voice. In this section, we go over more strategic ways to convert users into loyal fans—and eventually paying customers—and how to optimize for the best performance. What to Showcase on Instagram Stories Here are a few things you can start showcasing on Instagram Stories now to raise your brand’s profile, grow engagement, and convert more customers. Products and Services First off, always show your most important products and services. What are you selling and what differentiates you in the marketplace? What is your brand’s value-add? Deals and Promotions Everyone loves a good deal. Once users start to notice that Stories are an outlet for you to market exclusive offers, they’ll continue to stay engaged and look to your Instagram Stories or your account for additional promotions. monthly active users of users follow a business on the platform accounts use Instagram Stories every day of most-viewed Stories are from businesses 500 million 80% 1 billion 33% Source: Instagram (https://business.instagram.com/a/stories)

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 10 Event Videos One great way of building your Instagram community is sharing videos of your events to make people feel like they’re part of the experience, even if they’re unable to attend. Event videos bring more transparency to your business, which will help you build deeper connections and trustworthiness with your community. Industry News Staying up to date with current trends or movements shows that your brand is a thought leader in the space. Finding a brand with the same moral compass continues to be a really important consideration for users when purchasing. Influencer Connections Influencer marketing is becoming increasingly important for advertisers. People adore their favorite influencers, their choice of brands, what they like to do, and which activities they engage in. Be sure to incorporate influencer marketing into your strategy and to include unique hashtags or promo codes for the specific campaigns. Collaborations and Takeovers with Other Brands This is exactly what it sounds like. A takeover typically involves a brand temporarily taking over your Instagram account and giving followers a look inside your company or products from a new perspective. Think of it as “a day in the life” where you offer your followers a sneak-peek into your host life for one day. This can be accomplished with an influencer or a brand. Be sure to announce the upcoming takeover in your feed for adequate exposure. The same goes for collaboration, which is especially important for B2B marketer company culture. Give people a taste of what it’s like to work with you. How do your employees represent your brand? What is company culture like on a day-to-day basis? Remember, you have the creative liberty to be whoever you want to be, especially since everything disappears after a day. Use the time to be spontaneous and transparent.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 11 Your Brand on Instagram: The Nuts and Bolts Now we’ll touch on some Instagram Stories tips and tricks to help you stand out from the crowd. We talked about what to display in your content, but what about the how, and those extra dimensions to make your content more interesting? Video Videos are a popular Stories format. They allow you to not only tell a longer narrative, but they also provide greater opportunities to engage with your audience. In the H&M example below, the brand focuses on aesthetics and environment—the breezy day outside, a comfortable shirt, etc. By offering enticing content, the viewer identifies with the subject matter, as well as the overall style, look, and feel. H&M Video Example Boomerangs In online video parlance, a “boomerang” is a short one- to three-second burst of pictures that look like they’re going forward and backwards. They take something simple and turn it into something special through movement. If you opt to use these, be sure to spread them out—although they’re fun, too many of them can be overwhelming.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 12 Hyperlapse Hyperlapse enables you to create cool and complex time- lapse videos on your phone. There are a couple of great ways brands can use this feature: • Show users the full process of creating a product. Demonstrate the development and the behind-the- scenes footage of making a specific product through different phases, and then showcase the final presentation. • Create buzz for new products. In this Foot Locker example, followers get an early view of a new product before its release. User-generated Content People are sharing content more than ever before, and they look to their network for recognition and validation. They’re also using visuals as a means of communicating now. It’s important to leverage this up-and-coming trend, as there is a unique value in showcasing Stories from your followers. Not only does it build your community—it also creates trust and invites your followers to feel like they’re an important part of the conversation, and happy and honored to be part of your brand messaging. With user-generated content, your fans post pictures or videos with your products, and then you repost them to your brand’s Story. This Blue Bottle Coffee example shows a high level of creativity with how they’re using user- generated content. Here, instead of sharing the original Instagram posts, they’ve uploaded the original photo from the post to Stories and tagged the photographer. And, because they want to ensure brand consistency and the same look and feel as their paid ads, they’ve curated this content to make it resemble a lookbook or photo shoot.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 13 More on Polls As mentioned earlier, polls are a strong interactivity tool for Instagram. You can also use them strategically as surveys for your followers, to conduct market research, and to build out your content strategy. Work Instagram polls into your strategic ad campaign planning. For example, showcase your product catalog, and then show users different options from the catalog and ask them to vote for their favorites. Depending on their answers, you can incorporate this into your paid media strategy and then display similar products that your customers want to see the most. In this example, HelloFresh surveyed their followers to find out which recipes or food creations resonated the best. They can use insights gleaned from the answers to inform their paid media strategy. Hashtags Now a tried and true staple of social media, everyone’s familiar with hashtags. Still, advertisers sometimes forget to include them in their campaigns. Remember to use hashtags with all of your content. They’re great for random discovery and allow you to connect with people who may have been previously unfamiliar with your brand. Stickers Stickers give your content a fun look and add another layer of interactivity. They range from GIFs to geo- parameters to questions. In the following example, Nexwear does a great job of reminding people that they can use Instagram to ask product questions. Stickers are also a good reminder that with Stories, not everything has to be about a sale or a conversion. Use stickers to engage with your audience and build your connections and community. Today’s purchase journey has dramatically expanded the number of considerations consumers make before a final sale. Make it easy for your customers to ask questions across multiple channels, including Stories.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 14 Highlights Unlike regular Instagram Stories that vanish after 24 hours, Instagram Story Highlights live permanently on your profiles. Because of this, they’re great for helping your visitors discover what your company is all about. They’re also the perfect place to direct your followers to your most valuable and interesting content. Instagram Story Highlights is an excellent forum for posting content from brand collaborations and takeovers. With the Travel Tuesday example, Airbnb posts a story with the same formula every Tuesday. Airbnb shares a few clues about their location via pictures as well as interesting facts and statistics. Then, they use a poll with the two destinations to choose from and ask viewers to guess the location. Later in the day, Airbnb reveals the correct answer. They then continue to share amazing photos of the given travel destination. This is wonderful for brand awareness because they’re reminding travelers about possible destinations with Airbnb, creating memorable engagement with followers every week at a normal cadence. Links If you have a verified account or are running a business profile and have more than 10,000 followers, you can add a swipe-up link to your story. Previously, Instagram was seen as more of a top-of-funnel awareness tool. Instagram Story Links gives you the opportunity to use the platform as a direct selling tool. When users link within their story, it creates a much smoother customer experience and brings them directly to the referenced site, rather than having them navigate to the bio before visiting the URL. Let’s look at Asos and their content highlighting Ray-Ban sunglasses. Here, people have the option of swiping up to shop. The Story Link makes it really easy for people to navigate to the product page and purchase directly from the site without having to click an additional link.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 15 The Latest: Bringing Shopping to Instagram Stories Instagram recently released a new shopping feature for Instagram Stories that enables verified businesses to add shopping stickers within Stories. Instagram shopping is effective, unobtrusive, and ubiquitous—every month, 130 million people tap on an Instagram shopping post to learn more about products. For businesses, Instagram shopping posts are a great way to showcase your products and drive more sales directly from Stories. When someone taps a product tag on your post or a product sticker in your story, the platform takes them to a product description page where they’ll see: • An image of the product from your post • A product description • The cost • A link that takes them directly to your website, where they can make the purchase As you’ll notice above, product tagging in Instagram Stories comes by way of “shoppable stickers”. So, simply add a product sticker and tag physical products from your inventory or eCommerce platform. Now that we’ve gone over the why, what, and how, let’s look at a success story with Deezer, a Marin customer who had a big win with Instagram Stories and Marin Social.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 16 A Customer Success Story: Deezer Deezer is an international music streaming service headquartered in France. With over 50 million tracks readily available on their site, they were running ads on Instagram Feed and seeing steady engagement. Still, they wanted to connect with a younger Instagram audience. Instagram Best Practices in Action Deezer focused on driving app installs at a more cost effective CPA. To this end, they decided to test ads on Instagram Stories and implement a more creative and personalized engagement approach. The team incorporated many of the best practices we’ve covered in this white paper: • A promotion to try Deezer Premium for one month, free of charge. This deal attracted viewers, gave them exposure to the app, and converted them into loyal customers. • Content variety and A/B testing featuring dozens of different artists. This gave the team great insight into which creatives were resonating with their audience. Understanding the connection between content and app installs resulted in much smarter budget allocation for creative. • Instagram Stories stickers . Deezer successfully made their content splashy and interactive with texts, GIFs, and emoji overlays. With a solid creative strategy and robust testing methodology, all that remained was driving even greater performance with an automated solution. Next, we dive deeper into how Marin Social helped. increase in the number of app installs and a 43% percent total app installs 14,000 decrease in CPA 50% Over the course of two months, the team saw great results:

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 17 How Marin Social Delivered Enhanced Instagram Performance for Deezer Marin Social powers social media marketing with campaign management, reporting, and optimization tools that put you in control. The intuitive design helps you make sense of the social media landscape as you scale your programs, make better decisions, and acquire high-value customers. Open and independent, Marin Social lets you easily use cross-channel audience data to drive higher ROI. With many workflow efficiency tools including Bulk Upload, Mass Editor, and rules-based optimization at their disposal, the Deezer team focused less on day-to-day operations and configuration of social ads, and more on things that impacted business growth, such as creative strategy and A/B testing. Marin Social also has a flexible, customizable reporting dashboard that makes it easy for our customers to identify actionable insights. These dashboards simplified Deezer’s account management and enabled streamlined testing of multiple creatives, artists, placements, and optimization goals. They provided the team with a clear view of the best performing Instagram Stories and optimization techniques. Finally, Marin’s open platform allows seamless integration with third party-data and tracking providers. Our advertisers and agencies can pull in revenue and audience contextual data from any source, leading to faster ramp-up time and optimized bidding across channels. Marin’s cross-channel offering, MarinOne, is our most powerful resource. Advertisers running social and search programs—and retailers on eCommerce sites, Google Shopping, and Amazon—now have a way to manage all of their paid advertising efforts from one platform. With MarinOne, you can see how your different channels are performing against one another, all from a single view. MarinOne features include: • Automated, cross-channel budget allocation • Search intent to drive incremental revenue • MarinOne bidding, an algorithm that includes dynamic clustering and custom variables For advertisers like Deezer, MarinOne serves as a performance layer on top of publisher tools like Facebook. By bringing search, social, and eCommerce advertising into a single platform, MarinOne helps maximize the results of your digital campaigns, break down publisher silos, and improve your business results.

marinsoftware.com Developing a Successful Marketing Strategy with Instagram Stories 18 Conclusion With its diverse user base, simple interface, and robust ad options, Instagram continues to be a major resource in the social advertiser’s toolkit. By incorporating Instagram Stories into your day-to-day marketing strategy, you can reap the benefits and grow your business. From Automatic Placements for the best ad delivery, to interactive creative templates for increased ROI and efficiencies, Instagram Stories does the heavy lifting of expanding your audience, adding a personalized approach to engagement. Growth. Unleashed. www.marinsoftware.com/learnmore © 2020 Marin Software. All Rights Reserved.