By Ryan Pell
Does your brand need more exposure on social media? Think that pictures do okay with promoting your products and services, but don’t quite translate their value?
Then it’s time for you to hack Instagram stories. They’ve become hugely popular among individual users and businesses and provide a great addition to the content in the curated Instagram feed.
In fact, Social Media Today described a study by Klear of 149 brands that found that 45 percent of them used Instagram stories once per week. Among them, some of the world’s most popular brands, including IBM, Lufthansa, Mercedes-Benz, and McDonald’s.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to up your Instagram stories game by using location stickers. They could help you to get more targeted exposure by showing them in the search results of people in that area.
So, if you’re ready to learn how to get more local exposure by adding location stickers, read on (tips for businesses without a physical location are also included!)
Why Are Location Stickers Important for Marketing?
If you’re reading this article, chances are you’ve been using Instagram stories and adding location stickers to your personal stories for a while, so we’re going to focus on the business side of the topic.
Instagram stories are a relatively new feature (in fact, it was introduced in 2016), but they’ve become incredibly popular among users. Location stickers (both literal location stickers and city-specific stickers) have quickly become widely used as well.
This was a great news for businesses as well because those cute stickers do more than just show your followers that you’re visiting a new place or a new city. They’re clickable and appear on the Explore page of other Instagram users as a part of the larger location story.
Many people use this page to search for local businesses, a lot like they use other networks such as Yelp. Although no studies have been conducted to provide an actual number of searches on Instagram, it’s safe to suggest that there are countless examples of stories leading to brand discovery and, ultimately, purchase.
This is especially common for coffee shops, pizzerias, and other brick-and-mortar businesses. For example, people using Instagram to find local businesses type the following in the search:
“product/service + city name”
By switching to Places tab in the search, they’ll see a list of places that meet the search requirements.
If an Instagram user selects one of these places, he or she will be taken to all available Instagram content for that specific location.
Or, as long as your phone location settings are on a specific city or town, Instagram will suggest Location stories on the Explore tab for you to check out. And, of course, some businesses will be promoting their products/services there, too!
Since you’ve got quite a competition, looking for ways to enhance your Stories effort and get more exposure makes a perfect sense. The following section shows how you can do it.
Using Instagram Location Stories to Achieve Maximum Exposure
Instagram stories are a big part of the reason why brands prefer Instagram over other social media platforms. These short videos attract more attention to your content because it gets picked up by the system and featured for a specific location. As the result, you can get a major boost in terms of exposure.
Here are some of the best ways to achieve maximum exposure using Instagram Stories
-
Create a Story that Resonates with Your Target Audience
Before you start posting stories, consider using storytelling. It is one of the best ways to boost your social media marketing efforts that has been around for a long time. Seth Godin, one of the world’s best bloggers once said this about visual storytelling:
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell”
“So, this technique involves building a narrative around your product/service/brand through video rather than telling people how great it is,” explains Patrick Dean, a digital marketer at Axonim.
But how to create a fascinating narrative that reflects your brand/product that your target audience will be interested in?
Try behind-the-scenes content. For many companies, it is the default, low-effort, and often low-cost method of producing good content. Here are some of the most common ways of showing this type of content:
- Sports teams sharing training sessions
- Cafes and restaurants showing the skills of their employees (how they prepare dishes etc.)
- Fashion brands giving makeup advice
- Any brands showing a typical day of their employees
- Previews of exclusive content about something that is yet to be announced, released etc.
For example, here are a couple of screenshots from a Story from the official Instagram account of Audi of America where the company showcases test drives of new cars. This is gold for the fans of German engineering!
2. Show Special Events
Many businesses organize events that for customers such as master classes, contests, and charities. If your business does that, too, use this opportunity to demonstrate how great your organization is and how fun it is to visit your special events.
You can create behind-the-scenes content here as well. Your followers will be glad to see some interesting insights and details.
-
Combine Location Stories with Poll Stickers
Instagram has made its post a little bit more interactive when the poll stickers feature was introduced last year. The users fell in love with this new feature pretty much immediately. Adding them to your stories is super easy: just drag and drop it onto the image in a story, and a small window with customization options will appear to help you type in the question and the answers.
By using this cool feature, you can interact with your audience in a new and exciting way. For example, you can ask them some questions about your products/services or pretty much anything related to your business.
IKEA’s official Instagram page, for example, has recently featured a poll called IKEAtrivia that asked viewers product-related questions like the one shown on the screenshot below.
-
Tag Your Own Location
Always use a combination of a fun location sticker and a geotag of your location. They’ll ensure that your stories will be shown to Instagram users looking up your location.
What If Your Business Doesn’t Have a Physical Location?
In this case, there are still some ways in which you can take advantage of Instagram Stories and location stickers, including:
- Post stories about local events, celebrations etc.
- Post stories about major sights of the city/town that you want to be found for.
- Add location stickers in most of the posts related to your business. This way, you’ll make it easier for your customers to memorize your location.
The Bottom Line
Instagram Location Stories could be a new way of translating the value for your customers. As you can see, using them is super easy but can give you some amazing benefits such as an increased exposure. This advantage makes them very important for marketing, so making it a part of your social media marketing strategy is certainly a must.
Hope these tips will be useful for you to start improving your Instagram performance. Happy posting!
About the Author
Ryan is a passionate writer who likes sharing his thoughts and experience with the readers. Currently, he works as a digital marketing specialist; you can check his website here. He likes everything related to traveling and new countries.
