There are many ways to engage your audience on Instagram, but the most popular one lately is Stories. They should look visually pleasing to the subscriber and carry an interesting idea. In this article, you will learn: what ideas for Stories can be implemented in your online store, and how to decorate the stories beautifully. To begin with, let's understand what is a Stories?
It's a feature consisting of automated mini clips (on Instagram, they last up to 15 seconds) in which you can show a video or photo, with additional elements in the form of text, drawings, stickers, and questionnaires.
Content
How to create beautiful Stories?
Helpful ideas for Stories
1. Questions
2. Other Interactives
3. Product presentation
4. Customer testimonials
5. Contests
6. Storytelling
7. Bestsellers
8. Tips
9. Useful product information
10. The moments of your day
11. Working inside out
12. Bonus System
13. Price
14. Social activity
15. Shipping
The bottom line
How to create beautiful Stories?
Beautiful stories consist of three important elements:
- A high-quality photo or background;
- An interestingly designed, literate text;
- Correct, visually pleasing structure.
The photo for the Stories can be made by yourself or found on the Internet. For the first option, you need a good or medium-quality camera, light and beautiful objects in the frame. You can hire a photographer or learn how to take stock photos using video tutorials on YouTube.
If you don't have that option, there are many services for making Stories, with ready-made photos in the form of templates. Using templates is a useful tiphack because you get ready-made photos, backgrounds, and quality structure.
Apps with templates for stories:
- Story Maker.
- Nichi: Collage & Stories Maker
- Story Click
- Canva
Beautiful fonts are already in some of the above apps, or you can find them online at websites:
- Pilliapp
- Lingojam
- Beautifulfonts
- Igtype.onhipe.
Helpful ideas for Stories
Creative Instagram posts are not only pretty pictures but also interesting information, which will make the viewer stay on your account.
1. Questions
Interactives in stories are good at engaging your audience. One of the most popular ideas for Instagram stories is questions. Instagram has specifically designed several features for this type of activity (the “ask me a question” function and the quiz).
You can ask your audience a question. For example, if your account is a clothing store, it would be appropriate to ask:
- What fabrics do you enjoy wearing?
- What colors do you choose most often in your clothes?
- Does your clothing style have a name?
- What size clothes do you wear?
For a cosmetics store, an example might be:
- What is your skin type?
- What cosmetics do you use most frequently?
- What is your favorite product in our store?
- How often do you use skin care products?
Also, the audience likes it when you ask them questions. So you can sometimes do Stories interactive with questions not related to the subject of the account. As an example:
- What mood are you in right now?
- How was your day?
- What city are you from?
- Do you like to travel?
The second option is for your audience to ask you questions. You can answer questions about the store as well as personal questions to introduce subscribers to you. Naturalness is in vogue right now, people like open and straightforward people on the other side of the account.
2. Other Interactives
There are interesting interactives in Stories other than questions.
- Bingo
- Questionnaires
- Games of “what will you choose” or “true/false.”
- Checklists
Bingo is a game with a set of cells in which certain information is written, if it is true, cross out the cell. The goal is to fill all the cells. Popular Bingo themes are watched TV shows, food, clothes, childhood. Templates for Bingo and questionnaires can also be found online.
3. Product presentation
Good ideas for Instagram stories are product presentations and novelty announcements.
- Take stories with models who use your product
- Take pictures of the small details
- Make a post with the advantages of the new products
- Show the practical use of your product in real life
- Shoot a mini scripted video with your product (for example, if you have an Instagram account of a cake store, show a mini video about a birthday party, where guests try a cake).
4. Customer testimonials
Customer testimonials are a must for any online store and a great idea for a story on Instagram. Most users don't risk buying from a store without reviews and consider the lack of reviews a scam.
Take screenshots of written reviews, and save photo and video reviews. You can create Highlight Reviews so that they are always in front of your customers.
To reward your customers for good reviews or motivate them to leave them, you can come up with a bonus system. For example, 5% off your next purchase for a photo or video review in your account-tagged stories.
Add to yourself stories with a mark of your account, in which subscribers use your product or write a positive review.
5. Contests
Creative Instagram posts involve constant interaction with the audience. Contests with multiple winners are just such an option.
Giveaway is a raffle for your stories merchandise, which involves fulfilling the conditions for participation. The classic triad of conditions: tag your friends in the comments, share a post with a tag in the stories, subscribe to you and the sponsors. They also sometimes ask you to like recent posts in your feed.
Discount Drawing – the conditions are similar to the giveaway, but the prize is not a free item, but a discount on a purchase.
Such contests are great for boosting assets on an online store's page. Want to learn more about promoting your Instagram store? Read the useful article “How to open and promote an online store on Instagram”.
6. Storytelling
This idea for a story on Instagram is relatively new, but has quickly gained popularity. Storytelling is a story in one or more stories. Such sincerity will be well appreciated by customers.
Ideas for Storytelling:
- Your online store success story
- How you came to create a store in this subject or how you chose your profession
- A story about the results of the week, month, year. (For example, “during the year 2021 more than a hundred author's bags of our brand were sewn and sold…”)
- An interesting case related to work
- A response to a situation that happened in the world and gained publicity
- The format expectation-reality
- How was your day at work?
- How you handled a problem (customer, workflow organization, warehousing, shipping, etc.)
7. Bestsellers
Take photos for stories that show your best-selling product. Describe its merits and the reason for its success. You can create the top products of your store. Use the aforementioned stories interactives here, such as the questionnaire “Best cake design in your opinion?”, “The tastiest filling in our store?”, etc.
8. Tips
Stories ideas in the form of tips are useful content for your Instagram page. Give tips related to the topic of your online store. Let's look at an example of a clothing store. You can tell:
- At what temperature to wash clothes from your store;
- How to properly iron the thing;
- How to combine clothes
9. Useful product information
Tell and show the audience useful information about your product:
- What materials (or ingredients) your product is made from
- If you are buying from abroad, tell about the country of manufacture and the import process
- Tell us more about the style of your store. For example, if you sell street-style clothing, explain the history of the style, its development and branches
- Any information related to your store that interests your subscriber will fit under this heading. Let your imagination run wild!
10. The moments of your day
Creative Instagram posts are full of naturalness and reality. Don't be afraid to tell your audience about you and how you run your Instagram store. You can talk about these moments of your day:
- “Going to the post office to mail your packages.”
- “Packing merchandise.”
- “Choosing fabrics for the new collection.”
- “Filling my diary with new ideas for the store.”
- “Snacking between jobs.”
11. Working inside out
Show the work process in your online store. For example, sewing clothes or unpacking new arrivals. Tell more about the team behind the store. Shoot live content at events related to your business. Create interviews with store staff.
12. Bonus System
The option of a bonus system using an interactive in-store description is a photo or video review in exchange for a discount has been suggested before. In addition to this, there are a couple of other interesting options.
- Each subsequent purchase gives +5% interest to the discount
- Free shipping on purchases above 1000 UAH
- Certificate of 100 UAH for purchase in your store for the greatest activity on the page of the online store
- Describe the bonus system in detail, and then create a highlight with this information
13. Price
At some point, on Instagram, the “price to direct” scheme gained popularity among online stores. Its meaning is that it creates activity, and numerous comments shows Instagram algorithms that your page is exciting to users. Is it really effective? Practice suggests that no.
People don't like the extra step in the form of “leave a comment to get a price” or “write to direct”. Many people are put off by this, and they simply decide to look for another store where everything is already listed in the public domain.
It's also not convenient for you. Hundreds of messages in direct are hard to handle, it takes extra time that you could have spent on other more useful things for your promotion. And some queries can get lost. Conclusion: put the price right below the post. Or use this as an idea for an Instagram story.
Add product prices by category to the story. You can use photos and videos to better demonstrate the product and make a potential customer want to buy. Create several highlighters with prices.
14. Social activity
Show your social stance. Every well-known brand has a message, or an area of social activity, in which it expresses support.
For example, brands like Apple and Stella Artois created videos in support of environmental issues. In this way, attention was drawn to an issue of global importance and the brand was positively engrained in the minds of viewers.
You don't have to take such a big scale as a social ad, there are other ways. Use this as an idea for an Instagram post:
- Share a post in your stories that highlights a particular issue;
- Make stories in the form of storytelling on a thrilling topic;
- Give a percentage of sales to charities and highlight progress in the stories;
- Create interactives in the stories on socially important topics.
- Pick a social stance that is disturbing to you or one that is close to the theme of your online store.
For example:
- For a clothing store, you can cover social issues: using of child labor, sexism, and pollution of the planet.
- For a food store - body positivity.
- For a cosmetics store - testing cosmetics on animals.
- For a home goods store - sorting garbage and protecting the environment.
15. Shipping
Shipping is the last but no less significant idea for an Instagram story. Tell in your Stories all about the delivery in your store: what delivery services do you collaborate with, what cities and countries do you deliver to, and what delivery terms the customer needs to follow.
The bottom line
There are a lot of ideas for Instagram stories, the main thing is to use them wisely and produce beautiful, high-quality content that will be of interest to your audience. Write down ideas, group them, and create a schedule for adding stories. The flow of stories should be regular. Try to add at least 4 stories a day. It's helpful to be in front of your subscribers at all times.
At first, you'll have to fiddle with creating photos for stories, writing and styling text, and finding a handy app with templates. But over time, you'll get the process of creating stories, and you'll only spend 5-10 minutes on fantastic content. Use the ideas in this article to promote yourself effectively.