How to Use Storytelling to Connect with Your Audience on Instagram

While the digital age has brought increased access to information, digesting it all takes time and energy. Because consumers trust online reviews more than ever, and are able to compare products or services between two brands at a single click, marketers need to convey why their brand is worthy of their attention. Storytelling in marketing is a means for brands to simplify the complex ideas that they want to convey.

Most importantly, it works. Consumers are more likely to convert when product pages integrate some sort of story (such as the winemaker’s information for a bottle of wine), and they're willing to pay more as well. Storytelling is also how marketers can tap into younger demographics’ desire for experience over products, by making buying from them and being part of their community an experience within itself.

Need to revitalize your Instagram strategy through the lens of storytelling? Here are three key elements to keep in mind.

1. Know your values

Great storytelling begins with a clear understanding of your brand’s history and values. The historical development of your brand, easily referenced and communicated, will give your audience insight into why you’re championing the values that you do. Harken back to your company’s mission and vision to find out what angle to approach the stories you tell with your marketing strategy.

In the case of Instagram, it’s important to be able to not just write all of these out, but to translate them into visual content.

One great example is singer Rihanna’s beauty company, Fenty Beauty. Born from the desire to see a wider variety of makeup shades available, the company’s marketing emphasizes diversity, in contrast to mainstream cosmetics brands - which worked perfectly for its launch product, a foundation in 40 different shades.

Here’s where a social media style guide comes in. All your content should be guided by your company’s values, and a social media specific style guide gives you an easily accessible reference point for them, translated into a how-to for running your account.

Your guide should contain how each profile you have must be optimized, tone of voice when writing copy and answering comments, the formatting to use for each post, what your branded hashtags are, and the visual guidelines for your account - colors, fonts, logo placement, and more.

2. Maintaining harmony between image and copy

Yes, people do still read the captions on Instagram. That’s why, especially for brands, you shouldn’t shy away from giving more context to your images - unless your strategy specifically calls for the opposite.

Use your social media style guide for help with this - that’s what it’s for.

The first step is to edit your photos so that they’re in line with your brand’s personality. You don’t have to strictly incorporate your colors into each and every photo, but take care not to cause a disconnect between what’s depicted in each image and how you edit them. A brand geared towards young children and parents, for example, may not want to edit their photos to be dark and brooding.
To edit your photos and jazz up the colors, you could try using the many filters that come with Instagram, or download your own photo-editing app. One app worth checking out is Instasize which has a creative toolkit with modern filters for you to choose from, as well as other cool border tools and font options that can help make your visuals stand out while staying true to your brand.