Follow these tips to help you use Instagram videos for your business, including taking advantage of influencer profiles to enhance your brand image.
Instagram videos can single-handedly improve your social media marketing and entrench your brand in the minds of fans and customers alike. In fact, over 53 percent of marketers said that using Instagram videos is essential in their marketing strategies.
Instagram videos have been around for quite a few years, but Instagram Stories, IGTV, and the overall growth of the platform recently have catapulted their importance to the forefront. Videos are an excellent way to advertise your brand and build trust with your customers.
Every year, more and more people are watching videos on their mobile phones. So, it’s always a good idea to buy Instagram likes in order to create a buzz around your content. Stay ahead of your competitors and start creating content for your Instagram videos.
Here, we’ll tell you how to do just that.
How to Use Instagram Videos for Your Business:
1. Make use of the Instagram Stories Video
Every day, more than 250 million active users check out Instagram Stories. The limited 24-hour lifespan of each story causes a slight sense of panic. Fear of missing out, or FOMO, is a real motivator for people scrolling through their favorite Instagram account stories.
You can take advantage of this. How?
Offer Exclusive Deals
Instagram Stories provides an excellent opportunity to tap into the customers’ love for deals because of its time-sensitive nature. One right way to do this is to have a limited-time offer in your Instagram story.
Choose a post to feature the offer and keep your viewers guessing. Set it up so that the redemption time is only within the story’s lifespan of 24 hours.
People will keep coming back in the future to check your stories, hoping they can catch a deal, thus increasing your business’s exposure.
Show the People on Your Team
After you have built enough people into an audience, you can start introducing your team. Here we’ve included an example of Nike Basketball introducing LeBron James.
Obviously, not everyone has The King of basketball on their payroll.
Nevertheless, including team members in the space where your product or service is offered is an excellent way to endear customers to your brand.
Do this often to build a sense of community for both your customers and your business.
Show a Sneak Peek of Your Product
Upload a video of your product and describe how it looks, what its features are, and what makes it unique.
It’s all about taking the genuine interactions from Instagram Stories and turning them into a representation of your product.
Invite an Influencer
Influencers are famous individuals whose accounts can significantly affect people’s purchase decisions in a specific niche.
A chart detailing the most-likely-to-be-adopted influencer marketing trends from MarketingCharts.com
A chart detailing the most-likely-to-be-adopted influencer marketing trends from MarketingCharts.com
By partnering with an influencer, you can reach more customers as they introduce your product to their audience. The more followers an influencer has, the more people you can reach.
2. Integrate Instagram Timeline Videos
With a maximum time of 60 seconds, Instagram’s timeline videos play automatically when seen. Businesses use this simple social media feature in various ways.
Highlight Products
Create a product video that focuses on the main features of your product. Grab people’s attention and keep them interested enough to buy what you’re selling.
Create a DIY
Despite its limited time frame, a one-minute video can work wonders. You can feature a DIY video on how to use your product to pique the interest of your potential customers.
Produce Short Commercials
Be it an emotional, funny, or inspirational commercial, Instagram is a perfect place to put out short ads. They’re an excellent way to present your product creatively and link it to a specific lifestyle.
Now that you know how to use Instagram videos for your business, we’ll move on to creating one. The following are five tips for creating compelling Instagram videos.
5 Tips for Creating Effective Instagram Videos
Show your artistic side, and don’t be afraid to get creative. Make a video that doesn’t necessarily adhere to the rules. Break some if you want.
Here are some techniques to help you finish the right kind of video.
1. Use Subtitles and Text Overlay
Keep in mind that some viewers can’t turn up the volume on their Instagram video. If a video can’t be understood when the sound is on mute, you’re missing out on potential customers.
Use text overlay on your videos to help people understand the message of your video. An added subtitle allows users to follow with the narration playing over the video.
Be careful. Don’t rely too much on these strategies to get your message across. Use footage, images, and editing to communicate a coherent narrative. Tesla’s example above is perfect. The video itself shows everything you need to know, but the added text does just enough to both:
- let you know what’s happening
- adding to the video (text helps deliver that they are comparing roof tiles to Tesla roof tiles without explicitly saying that
2. Choose a Unique Visual Style That Resonates
Find out if a specific visual style is related to your target audience. Once you finish your research, take note, and create something that’s unique but is also familiar to your target audience.
Stand out from your competitors and do the opposite of what is widely used. Create a version that uses static and clean shots and checks if it resonates with your audience.
To see which technique works best, test your different ideas, and find out which sticks. Try something different and out of the ordinary.
The engagement analytics will tell you what style you should be using.
3. Use Horizontal Videos for News Feed and Vertical Videos for Stories
There was a time that filming a video vertically was considered a bad choice. Nowadays, that changed with the recent popularity of mobile devices.
The different social networks made it possible for the user to capture, share, and edit any media on smartphones quickly.
Now, the vertical video is a new standard as it fits Instagram Stories. The vertical videos do create an immersive viewing experience, but there’s something more basic at play.
That is: HORIZONTAL VIDEOS ON STORIES MEAN YOUR VIEWERS HAVE TO TURN THE PHONE SIDEWAYS.
Of course, this causes the well-known phenomenon of portrait-to-landscape screen orientation battles between the viewer and their phone.
Unlike Instagram Stories, the timeline will correctly orient horizontal videos. At the same time, vertical videos will be more narrow if posted to the timeline. This can make them feel small and awkward.
4. Grab the User’s Attention with Caption
Caption your videos using a descriptive style and provide a brief sneak peek of the video. Don’t spill too much information and just make it enough to spark someone’s curiosity.
5. Use Relevant Hashtags
Be specific when it comes to hashtags to make it easier for your target audience to find your posts. Don’t overdo the hashtags and keep it to a maximum of 11 hashtags.
Your audience may get annoyed if there is too much.
It’s That Easy
The techniques above help you take advantage of Instagram videos for your social media marketing strategy. As always, observe each new addition to your campaign. Continue the tactics that work, and eliminate the ones that do not.