Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sui.

Eric: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sui.

Neil: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric: And today we're going to talk about how to create engaging Instagram story ads. I don't know if there's like somewhere where there's like a repository of Instagram story ads. That's a good idea for somebody to build a tool or site around that, but what actually sticks out to me, there's one Instagram story ad that I actually remember-

Neil: Why don't you first explain what story ads are? Because I bet you, some people don't even know.

Eric: Sure. Instagram stories as you know, Instagram has copied Snapchat recently and these are when you're watching stories and you're scrolling between stories, you actually see a [mid-roll 00:01:00] ad that pops up in between stories that you're looking at. Similar to Snapchat ads. You have a kind of engaging video that people can watch. Now here's the key thing: if you want to get people to actually watch your story ad, the only time where I've completely watched a story ad as a marketer, is when I watched Brendan [Buchard 00:01:18] ad. He's actually a marketer but he made his story ad actually look like an Instagram story. Usually, when people are posing Instagram stories, it's like they're doing something, right? Or maybe it's a selfie video of them talking or they're showing like food or landscape or something, right?
In Brendan's case, it seems like he's doing a selfie video. He's teaching something, right? But it doesn't seem like it's an ad. So if you make your story not seem like an ad, where it's almost like a native ad, then people are more inclined to stay and actually stuff through the whole thing. Versus if I see something from Toyota and I see like this is really well done, this is a good production, I'm just going to try to skip through it.

Neil: Yeah, and if you're not advertising on relevant areas on Instagram like you have your targeting correctly, because I'm seeing story ads in irrelevant profiles like when I'm checking out my buddy's stuff and you know, like a [inaudible 00:02:11] or whatever will come up and it's not really the cars. It's not effective. If you're going to do story ads and let's say you're Toyota, you better be on car profiles and when you're on these car profiles, you can't just show a normal Toyota car. You have to show like a souped up one, you have to show what's your next latest and greatest, fastest Toyota that's coming out there. By making it relevant to the type of profiles you're on, your conversions are going to go up and that's the biggest mistake I'm seeing with Instagram. Because most ads that are on there aren't relevant to the people that are just browsing. I don't know why, maybe the targeting from Facebook isn't as great yet. But still, there's no excuse for showing people the wrong type of ads.

Eric: One thing I will add as a bonus is I do recommend, if you can get your Instagram above 10,000 followers right now, which is what I'm trying to do. You do add the ability to swipe up for stories that you're putting up and that's good, especially for us because we're creating so much content around marketing. That swipe up feature is pretty powerful because you can link directly to whatever you're trying to push people to ...

Neil: The other thing to keep in mind too, is any type of advertising you do on Instagram, it's not effective unless you run it for a very long period of time. Instagram won't get you as direct of a ROI as Facebook or Google ad would. It's more for branding. So make sure people are seeing your stuff multiple times. I like making sure people see my stuff at least seven times. [inaudible 00:03:36] rule of seven in marketing. And I'll run my ads for at least a few months.

Eric: That's it for today, but before we go, we have another special giveaway for you, this is a one-year annual subscription to Olark, which is intended to add a chat to your site, which is intended to drive more conversions and conversations. To get in on this, all you need to do is rate, review and subscribe to this podcast and text marketingschool, that's one word to 33444 and we'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. Don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.