As most businesses are aware, there are a lot of opportunities when it comes to Instagram. I like to think Instagram adds a face to your brand. It helps you create a more personal connection with your customers and in turn, has the power to generate and convert high-quality traffic to your website. As of now; Instagram has 1 billion+ users and this number will only continue to rise. To take your Instagram marketing to the next step Instagram Story ADs are the way to go…
In March 2019 Instagram decided to release story ADs. When it comes to ADs there’s a lot of available inventory on Instagram, it saturated with organic content but not many people are properly utilising them in the Story format.
What’s wrong with Instagram Promotional Posts?
The short answer to this question is nothing. Nothing is wrong with promotional posts on Instagram. Feed ADs are great when used in the correct setting and for the right campaigns!
The problem that arises is that we as humans are so conditioned for the creative types that consist of feed ADs. It’s what we’ve had forever when we see an AD we know it’s an AD. Popular on Facebook, Instagram AND Twitter, people are so used to seeing feed advertisement format.
Sure, Instagram story promotions only last a certain amount of time but is this necessarily a bad thing? Statistics show (based on an ad performing well) the average watch time of an Instagram feed advertisement is around 8 seconds whereas the length of a story AD pans will generally stretch the full 15 seconds.
Why are Instagram story ADs so immersive?
When it comes to Instagram story promotions, they come with limited real estate which is initially seen as a bad thing. Sure, this can be a bad thing if done wrong, but who goes about creating content on Instagram in the wrong way?
Limited real estate means no long tail captions or “read more ” tags. If a story ad is done right it gives the user exactly the right amount of information to digest, without them having to read a crazy amount of text! What does this mean for the story itself? This means you have to tailor content to be more image or video-based.
Humans can digest image and video-based content 60,000 times quicker than any form of text-based content.
This also means that as a business you have to be more creative with your ads. Create an ad that takes full use of the immersive experience and the user won’t want to flick past it. In fact, if you look at the story ad statistics as a whole most users will sit back and watch the whole ad.
Instagram story advertisements captivate ALL the watch time
The average watch time for Instagram Video Ads in the feed is about 8 seconds (and this is based on an AD that is performing well). The length of Instagram Sponsored Ads for the Story pan out to 15 seconds, what’s interesting is that people will pretty much watch the whole AD. There is a mixture of reasons to why this occurs…
- Let’s not forget, Instagram Story Ads are still fairly fresh to the market, it’s less than a year since they’ve been in place. You’re likely to see this figure drop as the market becomes more saturated, people may become less engaged.
- Another factor is that Story ADs look more like an organic Story Post than a feed AD or Instagram Carousel AD looks to its specific counterpart. Much like an organic story; the ADs have a progress bar at the top to show the user how much time is left. When it comes to Instagram Feed advertisements, doesn’t matter how you set them up, you can always tell that they are an AD.
- Another advantage of these types of advertisements is that it will automatically play unmuted videos so the user can hear the AD straight away. This is not something the feed promotions support and can really grab someone’s attention. It is to be noted that the video will only play unmuted providing the user has the rest of the videos in their feed unmuted.
