When it comes to fashion, what people see matters more than what they hear. Your audience prefers an in-the-moment view of those superhyped bracelets and luminescent apparel, not some idealistic blocks of diluted and refined copies.
And nothing helps you put out those moments more than Instagram stories.
According to Facebook’s annual report, over 500 million people view Instagram stories daily—a figure expected to have grown even more since its release. Every one in three buyers on Instagram also said they became interested in a product after watching a story on it.
So, seeing more brands leveraging this traffic-drawing tool for growth is not surprising. In this article, we’ll show you how you can do the same and use Instagram stories to boost your ROI.
What Are Instagram Stories?
An Instagram Story is a unique feature that allows you to share your day-to-day memories via pictures and videos with your followers and other Instagram users. They usually appear horizontally at the top of your Instagram dashboard but can also appear as colorful rings surrounding your profile picture.
Instagram says, “As you share multiple photos and videos, they appear together in a slideshow format: your story.”
These stories are unique because they disappear automatically within 24 hours unless you save them in your highlights. This helps create a short but lasting impression on viewers, especially if your content carries some originality—candid moments and unfiltered scenes.
In addition to visuals like images and videos, you can use stickers, GIFs, polls, editor pens, and many other elements to enhance your stories’ overall creativity.
Reasons You Should Be Using Instagram Stories
Over 36% of global brands use Instagram stories to promote their businesses, whereas US marketers dedicate 31% of their Instagram advertising spending to stories. Gap, one of the world’s most iconic apparel and accessories brands, reported a 73% increase in clickthrough rate after including Instagram stories in their campaign.
Those stats are enough evidence to use Instagram stories for your fashion brand. But just in case, here are more reasons you should use this supercharged marketing tool.
Enhanced Engagement
One key difference between feed posts and stories is that stories take you on a nostalgic journey. For example, they might feature candid clips of you strolling through the suburbs with your Gucci bag or snapshots of you doing a DIY bedroom makeover while wearing lightweight apparel.
Source: Gucci Stories
The Instagram story feature turns these media into a slideshow and helps you engage your audience through storytelling. This, in turn, encourages active engagement via likes and shares, all of which boost your stories even more.
“For a fashion brand, flexing your products in short clips of images, videos, or texts indirectly piques people’s interest. So, you should expect even more targeted engagements like direct inbox messages”, Jeffrey Zhou, CEO and Founder of Fig Loans, adds.
Increased Visibility
Instagram stories record about 500 million views per day. On a more minor note, Insta users with over 10 to 50k followers have a reach rate of about 13.3%. That’s 1,330 views for a 10k account and 6,650 views for a 50k account daily.
An average fashion brand could have hundreds of thousands of followers. That’s around tens of thousands of views on each story per day. For Louis Vuitton, with over 55 million followers, you should expect several hundreds of thousands of views.
Source: Louis Vuitton
Of course, this calculation isn’t absolute, but it’s evident that Instagram stories help push your products to a larger audience population.
Drive Traffic and Conversions
More visibility means more opportunities to drive traffic to your social media e-store. Instagram also allows users to insert links into their stories by using the link sticker feature—a creative, clickable option that appears on each story. With that, you can refer viewers directly to your website.
This makes it easy to turn your social media followers into website visitors, consequent leads, and buyers, eventually.
Sometimes, depending on how you craft your content, a single Instagram story might be all it takes to influence a prospect’s decision to buy your product, especially in the fashion industry, where narratives take precedence in marketing.
Content Versatility And Valuable Analytics
Pictures of your recent Yoga pant collections, DIY clips on how to tie a head scarf, stickered textual posts, polls, and so on. Instagram’s story feature helps you become creative with as many pieces of content as possible. It all depends on how well you use each format.
The availability of in-built analytic tools also makes it easy to track your post performance, determine what type of story format is bringing in more views, see which ones receive more likes and shares, and derive valuable insights for improving your content strategy.
4 Instagram Stories To Inspire Your Fashion Brand
Short, creative, and fun. Those are the three main components of a compelling Instagram Story. Let’s see how these brands are nailing the trend and how you can pull it off, too.
Fashion Nova: 21 Million Followers
Fashion Nova is a trendsetting fast fashion retail powerhouse, serving bold, body-positive styles that turn heads and break the internet. Known for its savvy use of social media, the brand delivers affordable, curve-hugging looks inspired by the latest trends and pop culture moments, making every customer feel like a celebrity.
FN leverages a body-inclusivity campaign strategy in its strategy on Instagram stories by sharing collaborative clips of well-known personalities like Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, and Kylie Jenner.
A more recent Story shared about four weeks ago demonstrated a 12-clip story featuring an ebony in a sports suit ahead of the Olympics in Paris. This was a two-way approach to promote its latest sleek wear and incorporation into the globally-recognized event.
Takeaway
Fashion Nova’s Instagram stories all focus on inclusivity, encouraging women of all colors, shapes, and sizes to embrace their uniqueness with its products. You can also implement the same tactic, especially if your offerings are similar.
Burberry: 20 Million Followers
Burberry is a timeless symbol of British luxury, known for its iconic trench coats and signature check pattern. Seamlessly blending tradition with innovation, the brand offers a sophisticated range of clothing, accessories, and fragrances that appeal to the modern, global fashion enthusiast.
Unlike Fashion Nova that primarily promotes body inclusivity, Burberry takes a big brother approach by providing flagship combinations, showing you when and how to wear it right. That’s not surprising given its fleet of celebrity customers who dorn trench coats in similar fashion.
Burberry also has a highlight section where its followers can directly access Instagram stories on “when and how to wear it right” for each season—Spring, Autumn, Summer, and Winter.
Most importantly, customers like to pretest an order to see if it looks good on them or not before paying. Taking a fashionista stride like Burberry helps to solve that problem since you’re literally showing them how they’ll look already.
Takeaway
If clothing makes up a bulk of your brand, creating instagram stories on how to combine different styles for an epic look will help improve your engagement and enhance customer conversion.
Chanel: 59.9 Million Followers
Chanel is another epitome of timeless luxury, blending classic elegance with modern flair. Famous for its iconic tweed jackets, little black dresses, and the legendary Chanel No. 5 perfume, the brand remains a symbol of sophistication.
However, unlike the previous three, Chanel doesn’t have a dedicated highlight section. However, the brand occasionally posts stylistic DIYs on Instagram Stories featuring its top products in different fashion categories.
Chanel is also known for collaborating with iconic celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Keira Knightley, and Kristen Stewart, blending classic allure and contemporary elegance for short story clips and reels. This has become a significant source of lead attraction and community focus.
Takeaway
Much like Chanel, you can leverage celebrity power and invite popular fashionistas in your industry to create on-the-fly moments for your Instagram stories.
Gucci: 52.3 Million Followers
Gucci is the epitome of Italian luxury, blending timeless craftsmanship with bold, avant-garde designs that redefine fashion. With its iconic motifs and global influence, Gucci continues to set the standard for high-end style, offering everything from runway-ready clothing to statement accessories.
Fashion Nova boasts inclusivity, Burberry throws its weight on DIYs, whereas Chanel focuses on the celebrity power. But when it comes to Gucci, focus is on the stage where lights shine bright. Talk about GRAMMY Gala, Cannes Film Festival, Paris Fashion week, and so on.
By collating these comet events where people wear the brand, not a cloth, Gucci is able to captivate its Instagram Story audience and simultaneously build authority in the industry.
Takeaway
Leverage events to build a live-in-action hub of memories. Ask customers to send their JPEGs and videos when they dorn their luxury to parties—more or less a User-Generated Content (UGC) approach.
Tips To Create Converting Instagram Stories
Instagram stories can help your fashion brand generate more leads, nurture potential prospects, drive engagement, and increase traffic to your website. But all these results are only achievable if you do it right.
Let’s go through a few tips to ensure your stories actually convert.
Use Clear And Concise Messaging
Instagram stories focus on showing rather than telling. This includes sharing DIY clips featuring your fashion products, compiling UGC content from customers into slides, and uploading on-the-fly use of your wear. The effectiveness of these tactics, however, depends on how clear your messaging is.
Take Fashion Nova’s post on female sportswear, featured above, as an example. The story focused on promoting FN’s swimwear collection, showcasing how their pieces can be effortlessly styled and highlighting their modern, chic, and confident look.
This leverages the hype around the Olympics and reinforces Fashion Nova’s brand identity of being accessible, trendy, and empowering for its audience, particularly targeting those who value bold, fashionable swimwear that stands out.
So, when crafting your stories, ensure they speak volumes and portray your brand’s values. Don’t just take a 3D picture of that head bonnet without actually putting it on.
Incorporate Strong Call-To-Actions
Call-to-actions (CTAs) are like email subject lines—both are designed to grab attention and motivate the audience to take a specific action. If a CTA is too bland and disconnected, no one will click.
To avoid that, ensure your CTA text is simple, concise, and resonates with your audience.
See how Gucci did the same below.
The whole story featured diverse sets of the Horsebit girl wear by Hana, and Gucci ended the last clip with a CTA calling viewers to check out more on their website. The word “Explore” shows there’s more to see and intrigues the audience to take action—click the button.
Alex Rhodes, Founder at AutoNoMail.com, says, “You should also place your call-to-action buttons where they can gain the most visibility. Advisably, that’s at the end of your stories if you’re working with less than a dozen media. But if you’re uploading more than a dozen in a day, you need to put the CTA at about every ten stops.”
Utilize High-Quality Visuals
67% of customers say the quality of a product image is an essential factor when deciding to make a purchase. This percentage is likely to bump up a bit when it comes to anything fashion.
Your visuals—from videos and pictures to stickers—all play an essential role in creating lasting impressions. It’s just the same way you wouldn’t expect a max 240p video quality from Burberry, a leading high-end luxury brand.
So, remember to upload your stories in the best quality as much as possible—HD. If necessary, you might need to upgrade your video recording sets and cameras to a higher quality or hire a visual production agency if you’re on a tight budget.
Add Interactive Elements Like Polls And Quizzes
“Instagram stories are not all about video clips and pictures alone. You can spice things up by adding polls after a series of moments. This encourages audience engagement and helps to build a functional brand-community relationship where your followers know their voices are heard”, Brandy Hastings, SEO Strategist at SmartSites, suggests.
You can also use other interactive elements like a countdown sticker to build interest before a product launch or the swipe-up link feature to redirect traffic to your website when you post an excerpt on Insta stories.
- Style Preferences: “Which look do you prefer?” with options like “Casual Chic” vs. “Glam Night Out.”
- Product Feedback: “Would you buy a preowned Rolex?” with options like “Absolutely!” or “Not sure.”
- Upcoming Collections: “Which trend should we feature next?” with options like “Neon Brights” vs. “Pastel Tones.”
- Seasonal Trends: “What’s your go-to summer style?” with options like “Breezy Dresses” vs. “Cool Shorts.”
Once in a while, launch creative quizzes to get your audience talking. It could be something like these:
- Fashion Quiz: “Which fashion icon are you most like?” with a series of questions leading to results like “Audrey Hepburn” or “Rihanna.”
- Style Matching: “Find your perfect match!” Users answer questions to discover which of the brand’s outfits best suits them.
- Behind the Scenes: “Guess the fabric!” with images of different textiles, and users have to choose the correct one.
Leverage User-Generated Content
We’ve discussed how Gucci invests so much effort in UGC—and it’s paying off. Instagram posts with UGC content have 70% more engagement and are 8.7 times more powerful than influencer content.
Thomas Medlin, Co-founder at JumpMD, says, “Ask your past and current customers to capture and share moments of them using your products. To encourage participation, consider offering incentives such as discounts on their next purchase, one-time coupons, cash rewards, or even a featured spot on your popular page.”
Analyze Performance Metrics And Adjust Accordingly
Analyzing your performance metrics helps to see what’s working and what’s not. With the built-in analytic tool, you can see where your viewers are coming from—followers or new visitors—and what actions they take when engaging your stories.
Collect insights from these analytic reports and adjust your marketing strategy via Instagram stories accordingly. This includes looking out for peak engagement times, which can tell you what time of day to upload your stories.
Performance metrics can also inform your content strategy. Figure out which content format drives more engagement and why.
Wrapping Up Instagram Stories For Your Fashion Brand
If you use it well, Instagram’s story feature is a powerful tool that can help scale your fashion brand’s visibility and revenue growth. For a start, draw inspiration from other top fashion brands in the industry and within your niche.
Pass your message clearly and concisely while incorporating CTAs that move the needle. Enhance your creativity with high-quality visuals and integrate various interactive elements wherever possible.
Lastly, leverage UGCs and analyze performance metrics. Use overall insight to improve your Instagram story marketing and content strategy.
