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Instagram Story School: What it is and How Marketers Can Benefit

Instagram is schooling all of us on how to use their platform…literally.

Crew, meet Instagram Story School. Don’t worry, this isn’t some boring classroom snooze-fest. It’s a free educational space to help businesses make better use of stories ads.

With 45% of the most viewed Instagram Stories being from businesses, you gotta make sure you’re fully taking advantage of all the ‘gram has to offer.

But we get it, ain’t nobody got time to sit down and watch a tutorial about using Stories ads. You really gotta know what kind of content begs for attention. The goal is to get people to stop watching Stories of their friends’ dogs long enough to pay attention to your ad.

Instagram is all about visuals, and inspiring your viewer to take an action of some kind. Best practices for creating visually stimulating content include:

1. How-to videos. If your business can solve a common problem, what does that look like in 15 seconds?
2. Behind the scenes. Everyone wants to know what’s really going on. Beautiful photos are great, but what does the before look like? If you are promoting a product, the behind the scenes of setting up the product shoot is something your fans probably wanna see.
3. Promotional. Again, not everyone has time to have a camera rolling at all times. There’s a way to recycle older images to promote what you’re selling. Add the option of swiping up to learn more and link your website so those interested can be directed to a different platform.

But wait, there’s more! Instagram stories ads are all about getting creative. Fun fact: 60% of Instagram stories video posts are played with the sound on.

Sooo…add sound whenever you can to your Stories ads. Feel free to play around with gifs, stickers, and other features. There’s nothing like a good Boomerang to keep people on the ‘gram engaged.

So, now you can talk the talk of Instagram stories ads. If you wanna learn how to walk the walk of getting your Stories ads live (it’s not complicated, trust us) read on. For now, class dismissed.

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The Art Of Crafting More Powerful Content: 5 Top Tactics from the Experts

Is your content as powerful as a hippo crushing a watermelon with its chompers? We’re sure it is. But we all know there’s room for improvement.

So we’re on a mission to help ya improve. Well, TopRank is anyway. We’re just delivering the message. We’re leaning on TopRank to pass on the art of crafting powerful content.

👉Pair your awesome content with even better visuals. We’ve gone over this before. And we’re gonna cover it again cause 65% of visual content stays in our memories. You want visuals that are appropriate, effective, and engaging.

TopRank says to use authoritative research on user experience to guide the visual you choose.

👉Make it suuuuper easy to share. You can have the most beautiful piece of content but it means nothing if it’s difficult or impossible for people to share it. One super easy way to do this is taking advantage of Click to Tweet.

But we know some of you are saying, “Nah I’m not using Click to Tweet, Twitter is dead.” For those people, TopRank shared 7 more creative ways to get readers to share from Heidi Cohen.

👉Make it a game. Everyone likes a good game and including it in your content can do wonders. Especially if you’re B2B – 91% of B2B buyers prefer interactive and visual content. Think quizzes, polls, and surveys. Don’t be afraid to get a little weird with it. After all, games are supposed to be fun.

👉Back to basics with SEO like metadata basic. Why? Well, it worked pre-Google days and still has a major role today. Y’all know who Rand Fishkin is right? He offers a closer look to what SEO means today.

👉Have the best answer. An overflowing amount of content is launched into the digital world by the second. Now more than ever it’s important to become the one with the best answers.

TopRank says, “Creative content draws audiences in, entertains, and when done well, enlightens.”

There’s a ton of resources to tap into in this blog. You know what to do!

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The 25th Hour

“I just don’t have time to work out every freakin’ day.”

If you’re anything like us, you’ve said that about a gazillion times in the past few years. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to work, eat, sleep, work, watch TV, waste time on social media, and workout.

Except there’s one day this year where there are enough hours. That day is November 4th, aka Daylight Savings, aka the 25-Hour Day. That extra hour guarantees that you’ll have time to workout.

To celebrate the 25-Hour Day, Orangetheory Fitness put together an ad campaign designed to get you into their fitness studios on November 4th. This is a great example of a brand tying themselves to something that you typically wouldn’t think of.

Unrelated: does anyone else get Orangetheory’s logo mixed up with Hubspot’s?

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