How to build brand value using stickers on Instagram stories

Instagram stickers are popular among users, but how can businesses use them to their advantage?
29 August 2019

Tap on your profile icon under “stories and live” to start. Source: Shutterstock

Instagram is a powerful channel that can help any business reach a wider audience. Every month, the platform has over one billion active users worldwide.

Many brands that choose to market themselves on this platform have seen amazing results, especially when they use Instagram stories to do so. Tiffany & Co, WeWork and GoPro are among the bigger ones that use Instagram stories to interact, build relationships and even promote their products to their followers in an extremely engaging way

Instagram stories stickers: fun, interactive and engaging

There are many ways you can use Instagram stories to boost your brand showing product reviews, generating user content, daily flash sales; the list goes on.

But there’s one function that small businesses are forgetting; stickers. These fun and interactive stickers can capture a lot of audience and user engagement if you know how to use it well. 

In this article, we’ll show you how you can build your brand value just like the big guys by using just three stickers: Quiz, Question and Countdown.

# 1 | Quiz sticker – for testing your followers’ knowledge

The quiz sticker helps get instant engagement from your followers. Just take a photo using the stories camera, tap on the sticker icon and select “QUIZ” from the list of interactive stickers available. Specify your question and add two choices of answer.

There are a few fun ways to play around with this sticker. Restaurants can take a photo of their new dish, put a sticker next to it and ask users if they can guess what the hero of the dish is. If they guess right, they’ll get a chance to try it out for a discounted price (via a self-created promo code that you can share to the winners through instant messaging). 

Other businesses like fashion or service providers can have fun with it as well – like asking followers to “guess what colour the shoe is”, or “what would you do if you were in this situation?”. The key is to keep the questions short because long questions will bore social media users. 

# 2 | Question sticker – to run a free social survey

If you’re promoting physical products, public opinion matters as it can help you find ways to improve your products. But why engage a survey company when you can get honest and direct opinions from your users instantly, for free?

How? Just utilize Instagram’s “Question” sticker. This sticker lets users answer your question by writing their answer as opposed to the specified A/B answers from quizzes. Just take a photo of your new product, select the sticker and ask them what needs improvement. It’s one way you can get good opinions without spending a dime to hire surveyors.

You could also ask users what sort of product or service they wish to see next. If you’re a restaurant, you can ask them what would they like to see on the menu; or if you’re selling a product, you could ask them what would they like to see next in your listing.

# 3 | Countdown sticker – to host flash sales and build anticipation

Product sellers could find the countdown timer sticker extremely useful when there are some items to be cleared from inventory. How? By using it to host flash sales.

The idea is simple– just take a photo of the items you want to sell, add the countdown timer sticker and create an engaging copy like “This needs to go!” and an engaging caption, along with the price of the item and a link that takes users to the purchase page. 

You can do this with multiple items or schedule your items for sale. However, do take note that if you wish to link your posts directly to your own site, the function is only available if your profile is a verified business profile with more than 10,000 followers. If you don’t have these much followers, add the link as a text to your post.

You can also build anticipation for a product you’re launching by using this countdown timer. Simply take a short video via the “hands-free” function, select the 16-bit filter (tap on the round smiley icon to access filters) and add the countdown sticker to it. 

After the countdown, introduce the new product as a video on Instagram stories or on your page directly.

Building brand value on social media isn’t difficult if you know what captures your target audience’s attention. On Instagram, you can be casual, crafty and fun, which is what the new generation of shoppers are looking for from the brands they engage.