Over 2.5 billion, or close to a third of the world’s population, spend time watching stories on apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Snapchat every day. Now that is testimony to the fact that there’s massive potential for businesses to utilize the function, tell compelling brand stories, and capture customers they may have not been able to engage previously.
For starters, stories also exist outside of social media. Companies such as Coinbase utilize both static and interactive story formats in their ‘Coinbase Learn’ section in their app, presenting educational information in a format that gives easy-to-understand, bite-sized essential information in a compelling format with graphics, visuals, and pacing controlled by the end user.
With this in mind, it is only imperative that businesses leverage in-app stories as part of any marketing campaign, whether internal or external. Understanding what makes a story compelling, however, is much more complicated than just posting a few photos or videos in succession. To help you on your way, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide around understanding how to leverage in-app stories.
In-App versus Social Media
Most people are familiar with social media stories, which typically include images or short videos tied together to create a narrative. Widgets such as polls, question boxes, meters/gauges, location tags, and ‘swipe-up’ links are also regularly utilized to foster user interaction and enhance engagement. These stories can be used for sales, marketing, customer engagement or branding exercises.
Within private apps, stories can come in many different shapes and forms and are used for a variety of purposes. While some are used purely for advertising, others are used as part of educational courses and to streamline important information related to onboarding processes. With engagement on its side, stories are also used to collect data and measure sentiment around a range of company-related services or aspects.
Despite the difference between private and social media app stories, they all share the same elements that work. Images, videos, text, graphics, and the ability to navigate stories at the users’ desired pace.
Benefits of Stories
The overarching benefit of stories is that it boosts engagement more than traditional posts, images, or articles, with 50 percent of story viewers clicking through to promoted materials. This engagement means that users are actively participating in the story process, digesting pertinent information, and following call-to-action triggers. This attention-grabbing nature is by far the biggest benefit of utilizing story formats in-app, considering the real estate that it owns to engage.
In-app stories are especially useful for user onboarding, with the format enabling businesses to offer step-by-step explanations, the ability to feature any product or message, as well as the power to build custom user flows in a visually appealing yet snackable format.
For marketers and designers, stories present the opportunity to flex their creative muscles due to their combination of interactive elements, rich visual elements and versatility. They’re also quick to create, as in-app story formats generally follow a simple set of design principles, so populating the content is as simple as creating the text in the right order. This allows more time for teams to test, edit, and update their stories without having to worry about development or onboarding time.
Leveraging In-App Stories
With all these benefits in consideration, the next step is to want more information about adding story elements to your own app. Although it is expensive and labor-intensive to code a custom solution, there are workarounds and widgets that can enable these capabilities without the stress. Vajro, an mobile app building platform, seamlessly interacts with storybuilding app StorifyMe, enabling anyone to add story widgets to their app with just a few clicks. Once the widget is added, users simply need to connect their StorifyMe account with their Vajro account to start creating, showing, and leveraging in-app stories without the rigmarole of creating a custom solution.
As for story creation, there are no limits – not even inspiration. Thousands of templates enable users to create beautiful and engaging stories that can be rolled out the very same day and shared across every channel. With the speed, ease-of-use, and ability to effectively engage a wide base of customers in mind, leveraging in-app stories is a no-brainer for anyone looking to strengthen their marketing and engagement strategies.
