How to Use Instagram Stories for Market Research: 5 Ideas for Marketers

3/4/2020

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How to Use Instagram Stories for Market Research: 5 Ideas for Marketers

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Looking for new ways to conduct market research? Wondering how to get feedback from your highly engaged Instagram followers?

In this article, you’ll learn how to use five Instagram Stories features to gather valuable feedback.

Why Gather Consumer Feedback via Instagram Stories?

Businesses know that making customers happy is a proven way to increase revenue. If you want to know your customers’ opinions about your business, product, or service, it’s important to gather customer feedback.

Consumers aren’t shy about sharing their positive or negative experiences with other potential customers on social media and 66% of consumers have left an online review. So why not use your Instagram stories to encourage people to share their opinions?

With the short lifespan of 24 hours, Instagram stories create a sense of urgency that motivates users to watch ephemeral content so it’s no wonder that Stories is growing 15x faster than the feed. Stories content keeps the audience hooked and engaged and offers features that allow you to communicate with them in interesting and engaging ways.

Here are five ways to use Instagram Stories for gathering customer feedback.

#1: Understand Your Customers’ 1-to-1 Preferences With the Poll Sticker

The Instagram Stories poll sticker is a quick and effective way to understand your customers’ preferences. It allows you to share single-question polls in your stories and your followers can vote for their choice and see real-time results.

When you add the poll sticker to your story, you see an Ask a Question field and Yes and No buttons. Type your question in the text field. If you want to customize the responses to your poll, tap in the Yes and No boxes and type in your own choices.

Many brands use the poll sticker in their stories. Let’s look at Sephora as an example. For a company that stresses the importance of having two-way conversations with their customers, using the poll sticker in their stories makes perfect sense. It allows them to interact with their followers and better understand their preferences.

At a recent event, Sephora asked celebrities about their makeup preferences and uploaded short videos of their responses. Sephora included the poll sticker to let their followers vote on their own choice.

Because the poll sticker lets you tailor the choices you present, you can let your creativity run wild to find out what your audience loves. Some options for assessing customer preferences include:

Product options (color, look, shape, etc.)
Features
Pricing

#2: Get a Better Understanding of Followers’ New Product Interest With the Emoji Slider

Do you want to add a layer of emotional context to find out what your followers feel about something? Try using the emoji slider sticker. It’s another Instagram Stories feature that helps you get richer feedback.

To make the most out of this feature, type in your question and then browse the library of emojis to find one that matches your question’s mood. When your followers view your story, they can drag the emoji left or right and then release it to register their response. After people participate, they can see the average response from other followers.

To illustrate, take a look at how H&M used the emoji slider to ask their followers how they feel about sequin dresses.

And here’s another example from Missguided. The company published the best-dressed celebrities on the red carpet from the 2020 BRIT awards and included the emoji slider to let followers show how much they love the outfit.

When you use the emoji slider sticker in your stories, you can see who’s responded and how each person voted. This gives you the perfect opportunity to make personal connections with your followers to build brand loyalty and trust.

Why bother with Instagram DMs? According to Instagram, 150 million people use Instagram Direct each month to communicate directly with a business and a third of those interactions start with an Instagram story. Users crave communication with brands on Instagram so go the extra mile and respond to those people via direct messages to establish a personal connection.

#3: Collect Consumer Pain Points With the Questions Sticker

According to Sprout Social research, 78% of people want brands to use social media to bring them together with the brand. If you’re looking for ways to start conversations with your Instagram followers, try using the questions sticker.

The questions sticker lets you ask an open-ended question in your stories. This gives your followers the opportunity to put their feedback into words without being limited to a set of options to choose from. This is a great way to collect customer pain points so you can offer a better solution.

In July 2019, Dunkin’ launched a new vegan menu option, Beyond Meat breakfast sandwiches, initially available only in Manhattan Dunkin’ locations. In honor of the launch, Dunkin’ used the questions sticker to collect feedback from their Instagram followers about the menu option.

By analyzing the replies from consumers, Dunkin’ realized that the vegan menu was in demand so the company later expanded its Beyond Meat breakfast to more than 9,000 locations.

In the story below, Milk Makeup used the questions sticker to tease a new product and invited their Instagram followers to guess what the product was. The company received hundreds of responses that reflected the strength of customer expectations. This feedback gave the company a better understanding of customers’ needs and expectations of their product and revealed more opportunities for new products.

To see the list of your followers’ responses when you use the questions sticker, look at your Instagram Stories insights, as shown below.

#4: Include a Swipe-Up Link to Survey Your Followers

Are you a verified Instagram account? Or do you have more than 10K followers? Make the most of the swipe-up link in your stories to get in-depth customer feedback. You can direct your followers to your customer satisfaction survey by linking to it in your story.

To get the attention of viewers and encourage them to complete the survey, organize a giveaway and add “fill out a feedback survey” as one of the participation requirements. Because Instagram stories are only available for a short period of time, your followers will be more likely to share their thoughts for a chance to win a prize.

The Oasis Festival used Instagram stories to inform their followers about the new festival and give away four tickets to Oasis 2020 in exchange for providing customer feedback.

For even more visibility, they promoted the customer satisfaction survey in an Instagram post, too.

You might also consider using referral rewards to motivate your loyal followers to spread the word about your survey among their communities. This can help you attract even more people who can share their opinions for a chance to get something valuable.

#5: Use the Quiz Sticker to Determine Whether Your Followers Understand Your Brand

First things first: Instagram isn’t a viable source of market research if you gather feedback from followers who aren’t your customers. To conduct qualitative research, you need to make sure that your Instagram following includes your target audience.

How do you do that? By using the quiz sticker to ask your followers relevant multiple-choice questions. Once they make their selection, they’ll see the right answer in real time. This feature not only increases user engagement but also helps you assess how well your followers know your brand.

Booking.com often uses a “Guess Where” segment in their Instagram stories to test passionate travelers and keep them engaged. Before sharing the quiz sticker, the company posts several clues to spark interest and help people make the right choice.

After voting on the quiz, Instagrammers can see whether they got it right. The company also dedicates one story to the right answer and includes a swipe-up link that allows viewers to read more about the featured country.

When you use the quiz sticker in your story, you can see how many votes each option received and how each person voted. To view your quiz results, just swipe up to open the viewer list. If the majority of your followers know your brand well, you’re more likely to receive qualitative data when you use your story to gather consumer feedback.

Conclusion

When Instagram Stories appeared in 2016, no one could have predicted that this short-form content format would surpass the original Snapchat version. In the first year alone, Instagram Stories helped increase the amount of time people spend on the platform from 15 to 32 minutes a day. Today, 500 million people use Instagram Stories daily.

With a lifespan of 24 hours, Instagram stories drive user engagement and help motivate your followers to establish a connection with your brand. If you want to understand your followers better and gather customer feedback, consider using Instagram Stories. It offers many business-specific features that can help you get in-depth consumer feedback with ease.

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What do you think? Do you plan to use customer feedback tactics featured here? If so, what Instagram Stories feature sounds most interesting to you? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.