Business owners can expand their audiences and customer bases with the marketing tools offered by social media. Instagram Stories are a form of highly engaging content that generates enthusiasm among users and has the added convenience of disappearing without a trace after 24 hours. They’re particularly suited to businesses that want to get their message out to an audience without worrying about user comments or social media drama. Whether you have a private sports management business or you handle the social media marketing operations of a large company, Instagram Stories can help you boost your professional profile to a highly targeted audience.
Related resource: 50 Most Affordable Selective Colleges for Sports Management
Creating an Instagram Story
It’s important to carefully plan your story ahead of time so that you can make the most efficient possible use of your resources and optimize your audience engagement. The content you publish in a story can be no more than 24 hours old, so the first step in creating a story is to make a list of instructions to follow when you’re ready to go. During the planning phase, consider every aspect of the story from start to finish so that you can simply follow the list of instructions and then publish the story. The opening four seconds of your story are absolutely crucial because the majority of your audience will lose interest soon after. While horizontal photos and videos are better suited to traditional media, Instagram audiences prefer viewing content in the vertical position on their phones.
Optimizing Instagram Story Features
Instagram provides a number of useful features to help business owners connect with their audiences and promote their brands. From hashtags to geotags, all of the usual social media functions are available to use in your story. Geotagging enables you to specifically target users near a brick-and-mortar location so that you can maximize the effectiveness of your story. Other useful features include linking to special offers for your customers and scheduling your story to be published during a period of high audience engagement. According to Social Media Today, most users interact with Instagram on Mondays and Thursdays from 7 pm to 9 pm, and the period of least activity is in the afternoon from around 3 pm to 4 pm. If you use a third-party app to schedule your Instagram Stories, you can choose to split them into multiple parts that are published at predetermined times.
Marketing with Instagram Stories
Most of the normal rules of marketing apply to selling products, promoting a brand or generating leads with Instagram Stories. When constructing your story, include a call to action somewhere within the content. Instagram gives you the option of embedding links in your story for your audience to follow by swiping up on the screen. One smart way to encourage people to swipe up is to make special offers for products or services related to your business. A coupon or special price can be enticing enough to increase the amount of engagement your story gets. You can also encourage people to get involved in your campaign by providing useful how-to content from experts in your field.
Businesses in every niche can take advantage of the marketing possibilities of Instagram Stories, and sports management professionals, in particular, have many useful options to choose from. With careful marketing strategies and proper planning, your Instagram campaign can generate enthusiasm and engagement among the people in your audience.
