Why Stories?

Using Stories in marketing campaigns is nothing new. In fact, this technique has been right under our noses for quite some time now. Just think about Instagram ads: They're Stories with visuals, and that's exactly what makes them so engaging!

Stories' versatile nature makes them suitable for any kind of content. From images, to videos to copy, you have full control over the design and you can tailor your Story to fit your brand and identity perfectly. Besides, visuals are much more memorable than any other kinds of mediums. The Story's are instantly imprinted into your reader's mind, it creates a basis you can gradually build on. You control the flow, remember? So everytime you submit bits and pieces of information, you add a new piece to the puzzle and earn your audience's trust further.

Creating Stories is really a fast and painless process that can help you speed your activity: you can create a high-performing Story in minutes with a builder like Tappable when a traditional SEO landing page can take a lot of time and effort to create. So we figured, why not take this format further and leverage the power of storytelling to create great Landing Pages too?

Well, that's is exactly what we did!

How did we do it?

Step 1: Create a Story

The strategy was quite simple: Create a Story about the PS5 and the Xbox with branded Storytelling filled with various graphics. As visual assets don't impact Stories loading time - thank you AMP technology - we added all kinds of images and videos, which are quite handy when you know videos increase conversions by 86%!

The story was aimed at creating up-selling and cross-selling. We conceived a narrative where a power gamer could play for hours on end, using all the products in the Story; from memory cards to a special offer for energy drinks.

Step 2: The Digital Marketing Strategy We Used

Although the campaign was a simple test, we still wanted it to be functional. So we signed up for the Amazon affiliate program and created links from the Story to their corresponding page on Amazon.

All we needed to do then was to reach the right audience and that's fairly simple: we created a campaign through Facebook ads targeting gamers and ran the ads for three days and carefully measured the numbers at every stage.

Results

Our marketing funnel basically looked like this and has revealed to us the following: 

1. Impressions: the ad was show 29.000 times on Facebook and Instagram
2. Ad conversion: 4% or 1183 people clicked on the add and landed in the Story . Pretty standard for a Facebook ad.
3. Total Story views: 1579. We were puzzled. How come our Tappable backend shows 395 more story views than what facebook says. The answer is very simple. 25% of the total story views (395) came from people sharing the story with their network. That's 25% of free advertising!
4. Story conversion: 31% or 485 people clicked through to land on the Amazon e-commerce page. It. Blew. Our. Minds. The CTR were through the roof and proved to be way better than what we were expecting!
5. Sales: none. But that was never the intention. We are by no means an online retailer and the experiment was designed to measure CTR. But hey! Our cookies are there for 30 days, so we might still get affiliate sales, you never know!

The results speak for themselves: using Web Stories as Landing Pages are an undeniable success!

Hidden in plain sight, Stories have been the best-kept secret of many brands and there are multiple ways you can start leveraging the power of Stories too.

Key Learnings

Do you want to give Web Stories a try and see the results for yourself? Here're a 3 tips we encourage you to use to ensure optimal results.

Be short but sharp: While it is important to explain your brand's philosophy, it's more important to keep your audience engaged. Try to avoid long drawn out content that no one will take time to go through.

Address your audience's pain points: Your product has a clear job to be done that answers a distinctive pain point? Make it clear in your messaging and your imagery.

Inspire your readers: We've repeated this over and over again, but we really can't emphasize this enough: Stories are highly visual and immersive, it's a real asset that you should take advantage of to immerse your audience and inspire them enough for them to take action.

It doesn’t take much to come up with a good story for a Landing Page, especially when using a builder like Tappable. Give this experiment a try and see your conversion rates spike and reach an all-time high. Are you ready to start breaking records?