The most critical weeks of 2017 are coming up: It’s called The Big Holiday Season! Are you prepared to give your best in customer acquisition and beat that Q4 business goal?

No, this conversation isn’t about trying to help you spend the leftover marketing budget dollars. This post is about exploring other opportunities you might be missing out on such as Instagram.

Frequently overlooked by “more serious” companies and brands, Instagram continues to grow its user base, which, according to Statista, reached 800 million users in September 2017. With over 500 million users active daily, Instagram presents a number of different opportunities to connect and engage with your target audience.

At CrossCap we work with the largest global companies and brands such Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, J.C. Penney, Vista Print, Vera Bradley, Total Wine, The Children’s Place, Dollar Financial Group, and many others. Here are the ways some of our customers are leveraging Instagram and its new feature Instagram Stories to ensure user engagement and to potentially grow revenue:

• Run a variety of engagement campaigns on Instagram from giveaways to “Who wore it better” and share photos of the winners on the company’s account.

• Share useful and catchy content such as “Holiday gift ideas”, “Holiday recipes”, “Where to shop during the Holidays”, “Best holiday discounts” etc., incorporate all popular seasonal hashtags so the posts get easily picked up by Instagram search.

• Did the company throw an event? Sponsored or attended an expo? Did a popup show? Use all the media files to create a small Instagram album and encourage users to click through and comment.

• User Generated Content (UGC) and micro influencer marketing: identify users who have a following of 1500 – 10k followers. Reach out to see if they are open to collaborating. Perhaps, you can offer them your product or service in exchange for an honest review – a valuable user testimonial.

• Explore Instagram Stories! Instagram Stories and Facebook Live are both on the rise because of their ability to create a sense of urgency and being “in the moment.” Offer a discount or a limited time promotion via Instagram Stories (especially, on Black Friday.) Build that urgency by highlighting that this promotion will only last 24 hours, the lifetime of a Story.

• Use polls, the new feature that Instagram Stories rolled out just a few weeks ago. Ask questions and encourage users to vote.

What else can you use Instagram Stories for?

• new product announcements;

• special deals and limited-time promotions;

• promote a live event via Instagram Stories;

• let the users see “behind the scenes”: holiday in-store preparations, runaway, VIP event etc.;

• did someone share a photo and used your business location to check in? Let them be known by adding them to your Stories. A little bit of vanity goes a long way.

Take a look at how brands and companies from a variety of industries use Instagram Stories in their engagement marketing campaigns:

The real examples of companies in different industries use Instagram Stories in their pre-holiday marketing efforts. Download the .pdf version of this file.

To learn more about how to better integrate your social media campaigns into your omni-channel marketing plan, please take look at how Marketing Calendar Software can help.