The Power of Instagram Stories

In the world of social media the popularity of platforms rises and falls. Last year the social media darling was Snapchat. In 2018 Instagram, and especially Instagram Stories, has become a marketing force.

Why is Instagram a Marketing Powerhouse?

Instagram has become indispensable to many marketers for the usual reasons--it's large and it's effective in reaching and motivating attractive target audiences. Some 2018 statistics to back that up:

• It has 1 billion active monthly users as of mid-2018. Yes, that's billion with a b!
• Its growth is expected to continue, as compared to Facebook, Twitter and even Snapchat, all of whose growth in number of accounts has plateaued.
• Instagram users spend an average of 53 minutes each day on the Android version of the app.  
• Of primary importance to marketers, it is the platform of choice of 18 - 34 year-old consumers worldwide, a notoriously hard to reach demographic.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/248769/age-distribution-of-worldwide-instagram-users/

• 1/3 of US mobile users are on Instagram.
• 25% of US mobile male users are on the platform. 
• 40% of US mobile female users are on it. Note that worldwide slightly more men than women are on the platform,
• Their usage is formidable:
• 22% of users log in to Instagram at least once each day.
• 38% check their account multiple times each day.
• 63% of US teenagers use Instagram daily.
• 34% of US Millennials use the platform daily.
• 72% of users have purchased a product they saw on Instagram.

Instagram is a Proven Business Platform 

 

As users have flocked to Instagram, brands have followed them there. The platform works equally well for global brands and small local businesses. And it does work. According to Hootsuite's aggregation of stats:

• 16.71% of businesses use Instagram; there are 17.25 million business profiles on the platform.
• It has 18.2 million monthly advertisers.
• 19.8% of users follow at least one business.
• 60% of users discover products there.
• 75% of users take some kind of action like visiting a product's website.
• In a single month 1/3 of Instagram users purchased a product using a mobile device making them 70% more likely to purchase from a mobile device than non-users.
• Instagram has a 2.2% interaction rate, higher than competing platforms.
• In a single month in 2017 50% of Instagram business accounts produced at least one Story.

What Are Instagram Stories?

If Instagram is a marketing powerhouse Instagram Stories is the feature that is propelling its current growth. Instagram Stories is a feature that allows users to post photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. Snapchat was the first to introduce Stories in 2013 and now Facebook offers the feature also. Instagram quickly outstripped the popularity of both Facebook and Snapchat stories among the key young adult demographics.

Once the Stories feature has been activated on the app, all the content posted during a 24-hour period is shown in chronological order. Content from the user's camera roll can be included. The story appears on a bar at the top of the creator's page. Stories can be shared with other users but there are no likes or comments. Stories also offers a number of engagement features--stickers, locations, hashtags and polls appear to be the most popular. In order to access these features the user must convert to a business profile. If you are converting a personal profile to a business profile, you may need to change some of your settings to activate all the new features. Once you have Stories operational, you can create your first Story.

Because of the ephemeral nature of Stories, sharing options are limited.  Instagram posts can be shared to a user's Story by using the paper plane icon. Stories can be reposted by accounts but only if they are tagged in another account's Stories. Reposting is useful for brands that use influencer marketing because they can include the influencer's post in their own highlights.

HubSpot lists other useful business features:

• Business that have over 10,000 followers can add links to their Stories, thereby driving viewers to their websites.
• The Highlights feature allows businesses to add a set of clips to their profile. Highlights do not disappear after 24 hours; they remain visible underneath the profile picture until the brand deletes them.

•  Instagram Stickers can be customized to increase engagement and add a call to action. See examples here.

 

 

 

How Brands Use Instagram Stories

Brands use Instagram Stories to promote their products and services in many ways, as shown in this chart from marketing services firm Launch. Their report says that Instagram is the best platform for creating viewer engagement and that brands value engagement even more than they do product awareness. Makes sense--engagement has a good chance of leading to viewer action.

Brandwatch posted an infographic with compelling reasons to use Stories and links to 30 interesting case histories. Unfortunately it's just too long to post, but here's the link. Some of their statistics are already outdated. I've been careful to use the most recent ones I could find for this post. Here are some capsules of brands who are using Stories well.

Selena Gomez. Not a brand, you say? To my mind anyone who has 144 million followers on Instagram is a brand, whether she intended it or not. And I assume this former girlfriend of Justin Bieber did intend it. I've read the Vanity Fair article on how she became the top Instagram celebrity and I still don't understand it. But that's ok because I'm not part of her target audience. She does Stories, of course; this is simply her profile picture.

Nike. Always a powerhouse in digital, there are literally dozens of  Nike Instagram accounts. Some are corporate accounts, some are retailer accounts and some may even be individual fans. This is from #Nike, which features user-generated content. I captured this shot from the Black Friday story because it has an interactive feature, a question sticker, I think. It turns out to be a post from Turkey's largest retailer of sportswear. What fun!
[accessed November 23, 2018]







Monterrey Bay Aquarium. National Geographic is far and away the leader in this space with 94.3 million Instagram followers as I write this. It has been an internet and social media giant from the beginning with its captivating photos. The Monterrey Bay Aquarium, with 'only' 253 thousand followers, shows much smaller non-profit using Stories well. Any account that can host a #SeaSlugDay has my vote. It also has my vote for having an Instagram account just for teens to post their own content for other teens. That's a great fit with their mission "to inspire conservation of the ocean" and their program "to inspire the next wave of ocean leaders" by focusing on education and development programs for children, teens and teachers.
[accessed November 23, 2018]

 Mailchimp.  When you search the best B2B Instagram marketers email marketing firm Mailchimp invariably shows up. These three screens from their Small Business Saturday Story gives a good idea of why. Interactive features promote engagement and the answer, of course, is a promo for Mailchimp's services. They have 87.7 thousand followers, which is not too shabby for a marketing services firm unknown outside the email industry. They have one service that is especially relevant--the ability to create an Instagram (also Facebook) ad directly from their platform. The process is explained thoroughly without the viewer having to create a Mailchimp account. The third resource page Create Instagram Ads in Mailchimp has a 2-minute video that would work well in the classroom. Wow!
[accessed November 24, 2018]

This is more than enough to give you the idea! A word of warning, however. It's difficult to do justice to ephemeral content in a static context. Instagram Stories beg to be shown in class. You can find good sources in the Brandwatch infographic post or a more recent article in Forbes. You can also ask your students to suggest a story. Having had some embarrassing experiences with that--both intentional and unintentional, I think--I always suggest that you have a backup ready. Or do both. Your students will give you some entertaining examples; you can add the digital strategy aspects. However you choose to present Instagram Stories, I think both you and your students will enjoy it!

Related Updates
How not to do Instagram video--Dolce&Gabbana

Google's Fake Dr. Fork Ads Provide Unusual Classroom Opportunity

It's always fun to discuss ads in class, but too often it winds up being a "he said/she said" type of discussion. Everyone has his or her own preferences, but in the absence of knowing what actually worked the discussion can reach no conclusion and be frustrating.

It's also not a good representation of good marketing on the web. Everything can be tested, often without a lot of extra effort or any additional expenditure. Amazon, Facebook and Google all offer A/B split testing and both Facebook and Google have multivariate testing as part of their advertising platforms. There are also a number of companies that offer tools for testing digital ads. Every digital marketing activity offers an opportunity for testing. Too few marketers take full advantage of that.



Google's Unskippable Labs created and tested 33 ads for a fake brand of pizza and cheesecake. They were interested in testing the impact of sensory cues and testing conventional ad wisdom like "you cannot have someone chewing and looking directly at the camera." Here's a link to the 15 that are still on YouTube. Its interesting to look at the variations shown on the YouTube page. Some of the 33 ad variations were small--sound vs. no sound, for example, but the total effort produced interesting and useful findings.

• Immersive, multi-sensory experiences have more impact than single sensory ones
• Separate visual input from text
• Give explicit instruction to imagine
• Food ads with edge-to-edge (close-up) shots perform better
• Portray food experience in different ways
• Younger people reacted better to personal point-of-view ads than did older people.

Dr. Ryan Elder of Brigham Young University collaborated with Google on this project. His research interests center on sensory experiences and visual cues.  Dr. Elder says, "This collaboration with Google created a unique environment where creative development in advertising could be informed by academic theory, tested in the real world, and immediately disseminated to companies to use."

However you use them, this is the type of large-scale ad experiment that should provide students a lot of food for thought   

Marketing and Advertising Opportunities on Messaging Platforms

Twenty-five years ago this month the first text message was sent from a computer to a smart phone. No one could have imagined the meteoric growth in messaging that followed. According to Statistic Brain, over 781 billion text messages were sent in June, 2017, an average of 551 per month per subscriber.

Growth in MAUs and Revenue. Sources: Statista and eMarketer.

The two largest messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger (both owned by Facebook) have over 1 billion MAUs.  By 2018 mobile apps are expected to have 75% of the messaging market and 98% of market revenue. That is because free mobile apps are cheaper to use than the messaging services supplied by mobile network operators.

The downloadable free apps are frequently referred to as OTT services. That translates to “over the top” applications—ones that stream content directly to the consumer over the internet, bypassing traditional internet providers like broadcast and cable services. That means OTT apps include streaming video like Netflix and Hulu as well as the messaging apps discussed in this post.

Mobile network operators have relied on subscription revenues, although that has been declining in recent years as apps have grown in popularity. Stand-alone apps, as opposed to those owned by major platforms like Facebook and Google, obviously have incentive to monetize their free services, but the eMarketer chart shows a vast difference in the degree to which they have succeeded. The success of the Line app illustrates what is possible from the app’s perspective.

The Case of the Line App: Marketing for Monetization

In March 2010 a team was already at work on a mobile app when a earthquake of magnitude 9.1 and resulting tsunami struck the northern part of Japan. (This was the tsunami that lead to the nuclear melt-down at the Fukushima power plant.) It caused widespread devastation, leaving residents completely cut off from communications.

Three months later the Tokyo team was able to launch the LINE app, which allowed residents to communicate over the internet. Jae Hyung Kim, head of strategy and operations for Line Euro-Americas said in 2016 that, “Our core values are to help foster powerful connections for people during specific moments.” It offers services similar to other leading apps including unlimited free messaging, voice and video calls, live streaming chat and a video service similar to YouTube. It also offers mobile services and a payment system. The company has transformed itself from a messaging app to a social media platform, third in user activity in Japan following only YouTube and Twitter. The majority of LINE subscribers are in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia. What truly separates LINE from the pack is its ability to monetize its services as shown in the eMarketer chart.

LINE Friends 5th Anniversary

A LINE Stickers Set

LINE sells games, themes and calling credits in its Line Store. However, stickers, introduced in October 2011, are the heart of the monetization effort. LINE friends are the icons, with personalities and lives of their own. The 5th anniversary image, for example, shows that Brown and Sally are a couple. In 2014 the firm launched the LINE Creators Market which allows all users to register and sell their own stickers. LINE says there are about 720,000 creators registered in 2017, more than 400,000 sticker themes and sets, and sales of over JPY47.9 since the market was launched. LINE receives 65% of the revenue from most of those sales. The number of sticker postings on Pinterest are simply impossible to count, each one of them serving as promotion for the app. Stickers have sound as well as animation. Related sales come from of stickers characters merchandise and licensing fees. Together, the stickers-related sales accounted for about 1/3 of LINE’s revenue in 2015. Fast Company has an article about LINE stickers with more than you ever wanted to know.

Growth in LINE Advertising. Source:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/lines-q2-fewer-active-users-but-profits-leap-off-rising-ad-revenues/

Impressive though the growth of stickers has been, advertising is now LINE’s fastest growing revenue category. LINE is just beginning to offer targeting options for its ads. Performance (PPC) ads are growing explosively. Ads comprised 30% of LINE revenue when it went public in 2016. Forty-one percent of revenue came from content which includes taxi services and an online payments system. It also offers paid accounts which allow businesses to send content and promotional stickers to LINE subscribers.

LINE’s goals extend beyond just communication. It aims to be a global marketing platform. Its evolution illustrates the breadth of activities necessary to monetize the communications platform. Its future activities in search of profitability and expansion will be interesting.

Advertising: Here Come the Chatbots—Again!

The example of LINE shows that advertising is a fast-growing category in messaging apps using standard approaches like mobile banner ads and PPC. It is not surprising that Facebook has entered the fray. In September 2016 Facebook added Messages to its objectives in Ads Manager, extending the option to Instagram in June 2017. Selecting the “click to Messenger” ad objective causes Facebook to serve ads to users most likely to communicate with businesses through a chatbot. There are many of them; one study found that 63% of users were willing to communicate with a business through a chatbot and 29% said it was their preferred way to communicate with a retailer when making a purchase decision.

Kalani Milliker for CoverGirl

https://www.topbots.com/project/covergirl-kalani-hilliker-kik-bot-review/

Of course, in order for a brand to communicate with a Facebook user that way it must have a chatbot. There are already 30,000 chatbots on Facebook, many with their own personalities. CoverGirl has an app based on 16-year old television dance personality, Kalani Hilliker. The app is infused with her personality and offers make-tips, coupons and more with engaging enthusiasm. This is a high-tech way to include influencer marketing in a digital program. Note, however, that a chatbot is another app that must be marketed to users; that’s part of the beauty of the Facebook ads.

 http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/mr-m/311340/

Less attractive but equally engaging is Mr Mucus. This app was developed for the Amazon Echo and Google Home. When users search WebMD for information about colds and flu Mr. Mucus encourages them to ask questions about treatment of colds and flu. He doesn’t dispense the answers, but he might at some future time.



Marketing and Advertising Both Have a Role on Messenger Apps

The number of people using messaging apps globally has grown to 1.4 billion and eMarketer forecasts that by 2019 fully ¼ of the world’s population, 1.75b people, will be using them. 8.6 trillion text messages are sent each day around the world.  Marketers have taken notice, but marketing and messaging on messenger apps has just begun to take hold.

While in-app sales of stickers, emojis, games and payment services are staples of marketing on messenger apps, the role of advertising is growing. Advertising is also using the staple techniques of mobile banners and PPC. However, the sheer volume of communication that could flow to brands through messaging channels will require extensive use of chatbots. Ensuring positive user experience will require strong marketing efforts to “teach” the AI-driven bots the information users are asking for and creativity will be required to develop apps with engaging personalities. The data gathered by messaging apps may offer new targeting options to advertisers.

This fast-growing area of digital offers more impetus for the consideration of mobile-first strategies.

See the infographic 

Related Updates

Young people turning to messaging apps for news 
OTT video goes mainstream 
OTT fuels video growth