It’s Story Time

Instagram and Facebook Stories, they’re quick, they’re concise and they’re the perfect place to get your fix of adorable animals. With a combined active audience just shy of 3.5 billion, it’s a powerful marketing tool. But how do you ensure your content, and brand, stands out amongst the sea of selfies and pet pictures? After attending Facebook Groups’ Creative Considerations event we have condensed their insights to provide you with key recommendations, ensuring your next Instagram & Facebook Stories set the digital world on fire.

With over 1 billion stories produced every day on Facebook & Instagram by half a billion people (Facebook Group, 2020), it would take 475 years to view the content created in a single day! So making sure you understand how your stories perform, and how you can optimise your content, is imperative in the modern world of advertising.

In an oversaturated market, the power of creative is of paramount importance. With performance marketing being a critical part of the marketing mix, the stories you tell and how you tell them, have a direct impact on sales volumes and conversion rates. Sounds obvious right?! However, you often see the same recycled assets used across the board, embracing flat broadcast messages and staple imagery. This gives no space for the audience to develop and invest in the story being told. But never fear, Arke is here.

Keeping up with best practice

We’ve broken down these insights into three categories to make your life easy. Look & feel, analyses the creative strategy and elements utilised in your story. Brand & product focuses on how to effectively communicate both (surprise, surprise) your brand and product. Formula & execution discusses how visual style and storytelling can be utilised to enhance your creative.

Look & Feel

• Keep attention with speed, fast cuts and changes will attract the audience’s attention. Leverage speed as a creative element.
• Enhance your story with sound, in split testing 80% of campaigns with sound (music, SFX or narration) outperformed those without.
• 87% of static creative performed better without stickers, however, this was reversed for video content with 83% of creative performing better with stickers.
• Rules surrounding text are still inconclusive, however best practice is to not overwhelm or distract the viewer. Use text to give the viewer additional information or further the narrative of the creative.

Brand & Product

• Best practice is to begin your creative with the brand or product. A vivid background utilising contrast allows your brand to be immediately recognised.
• Place your branding or product front and centre at the beginning of your content to clearly communicate the focal point of your piece.
• 75% of people focused creative drove better brand awareness, however when focusing on lower-funnel conversions, product-centric creative outperformed 73% of the time.
• Animated CTA’s performed extremely well. Emphasising a CTA with animation or focal points increased chance of campaign conversion by 89%.

Format & Execution

• Keeping in theme with the learnings about speed, more scenes in creative encourages higher engagement. A study found that the optimum story should contain roughly 5.3 scenes, each lasting approximately 2.8 seconds.
• Mixed content is the way to go, with a study showing campaigns with mixed formats (video and static) had an 86% chance of outperforming single format content.

Ultimately, what does this all mean?

Stories are a proven, successful and engaging form of creative. The bitesize approach gives you the opportunity to be playful, engage and grab your audience’s attention in an authentic manner. The real-time aspect makes room for bold creative, after all, it’s only live for 24 hours, so they offer their perfect place for you to test your creative waters.

The full-screen aspect of the story allows you to dominate the viewport of the device for a solid period of time – be respectful of that time, you don’t want to disappoint. With Facebook Group reporting that 56% of brand sales lifts being directly attributed to the quality of creative from their stories, the importance of creative execution has never been more prevalent.

Ready to venture into the world of story-based advertising? Or simply want to take the next step in your creative marketing? Get in touch to speak to an Arkenaut & let’s do something awesome together!