January 15, 2021 / Guest Author

9 Tips for Creating Instagram Videos that Drive Maximum Engagement

Are you looking for new ways to reach your audience on Instagram?

Instagram has been a great place to promote your business over the past few years, as there are over a billion users on the network, and it’s very popular. It’s the 5th most visited website in the world, according to SimilarWeb.

Source: Similarweb

But this growth has been accompanied by drawbacks. One of them is that many of your competitors have joined the network, and they too are vying for your audience’s attention. On top of this, Instagram is reducing the reach of posts. This is making it even harder to grab the attention of your followers.

If you use the same old tactics to reach your audience, your engagement rates and sales will suffer.

How can you counter this?

The solution is to create more video content. Only 18% of posts on Instagram are videos.

Source: quintly

But they generate more interactions than both images and carousel posts.

Source: quintly

If you create more video content, you will not only generate more engagement than your competitors, but you’ll also standout.

Therefore, to help you quickly create high-quality video content, I have shared my top tips below…

Create short videos

One thing you’ll really like about Instagram is that you don’t need to create long videos. Yes, Instagram videos naturally cannot exceed 60 seconds. But as this report shows, the ideal length is just 26 seconds.

Source: Hubspot

It shouldn’t take you very long to create a short video.

A company that gets this right is Califia farms. You will find that they create short recipe tutorial videos like this one.

People like watching helpful videos such as this on Instagram. As this study shows, how-to videos are the most preferred video content on the network.

Source: Wibbitz

Find out what your followers’ most pressing problems are and share answers to them using video.

Ensure that the video content you create is of the best quality, as the better they are, the more people will watch. So, invest in a good camera and online video maker like InVideo to create the best videos.

Source: InVideo

InVideo comes with a lot of templates and an editor. You can simply pick a template, add your footage, and optimize it for viewing.

Create more stories and reels

In-feed videos are a popular content format. People still interact with them, but as our aim is to stand out, you should create other types of content like stories and reels that fewer people create.

I recommend you to come up with a video posting plan. In it, you must decide on how many videos you will publish in a day and then distribute them among in-feed posts, stories and reels.

Create more stories and reels as fewer people create these types of content. This will help you get more views. You especially want to give reels a try as Instagram promotes reel posts in the feed and on the explore page. They even created a separate feed just for reels. They’re using it to compete with TikTok. So, posting reels will help you get more views and engagement, at least for now.

An example of a company that is posting more reels and stories is Sephora.

Source: Sephora

They publish both informational videos to drive engagement and promotional content to help drive sales.

Get yourself a useful Instagram scheduling tool to plan a posting strategy and consistently schedule posts. It should let you post both in-feed videos and stories from your desktop. As creating content on a desktop, then downloading it to your mobile and posting is time-consuming.

Promote posts that do well

As I mentioned, Instagram has been decreasing the reach of posts. Video posts will reach more people than image posts, but they won’t do as well as they did two to three years ago. It’s because Instagram’s newsfeed is evolving into a pay to play feed akin to Facebook’s.

One way to reach the same number of people you did years ago is to pay for it. Don’t promote every post, but just boost the ones that already did well. If more of your followers are watching the video, liking, and commenting, you will probably see better results when you promote it.

Do this to both educational and promotional videos. You might wonder what’s the point of promoting educational content that doesn’t sell anything. But this type of content can nurture your audience and build relationships. When you later publish posts advertising your products, you will generate more sales.

Instagram likes it when you create ads without links that don’t take people away from the network. They will reward you with more views.

Create custom audiences with views:

To ensure you get the most out of those views of your organic content, make custom audiences consisting of video viewers. You can do this for both organic and paid views. You can later retarget these viewers with ads that promote products. Your ROAS will be high from these ads as you’ll only retarget people who watched your content.

Make sure you retarget these people with video ads. They already watched your video, so they probably like video content and will respond to one better. Video ads also convert well. The above report from Wibbitz found that 31% of people have purchased after watching a video ad.

Source: Wibbitz

Use thumbnails

Instagram videos don’t automatically play for everyone. People have the option to turn off autoplay while on mobile. These people will see a thumbnail.

To get more of them to watch your videos, you should create beautiful thumbnails that attract attention and tease part of the content inside. This will get more people to press play.

You can easily create these thumbnails with InVideo. Their templates include thumbnails. You can modify them with your own text and brand colors and make your thumbnail in minutes.

For some ideas on creating Thumbnails that attract plays, you should check out the Buzzfeed Tasty account.

Source: Buzzfeed Tasty

They create simple thumbnails that tease the contents of the video, which get you to click play.

Try live videos:

Another tactic you can try is live videos. People spend 3X more time watching live videos. They prefer watching live videos as they are a one-time event. They want to watch them before everybody else.

You can use them just like webinars to nurture your audience and to promote products. You can also create custom audiences from live video views and retarget them with ads.

Tag products in videos

Instagram lets you tag products in videos. If you promote any products in your video, tag them to make them easy to find. You won’t need to use the roundabout way of asking people to leave the post and click the link in bio. As this is more direct, it will result in more clicks and sales.

An example is this post from Oro Los Angeles.

Source: orolosangeles

When you click on the ‘View Products’ button, all the products tagged in the video will appear in a popup. People can click on them and directly visit the product landing pages.

Tagging products in videos will also save you time as you won’t need to repeatedly modify your URL every time you publish. You can simply create a special bio link with a tool like Rebrandly’s link.gallery.

Monitor data

One of the focal points of an Instagram video marketing strategy is the data. When you publish images on Instagram, you can just see the number of impressions, likes, and comments the photo got. But with video, you can gather various other data points such as views, how much of the video they watched, where they exited, the effect a thumbnail had, etc.

All this data can help you create much better videos and images in the future. So, closely monitor as many vital metrics as possible and use them to conduct marketing experiments.

Conclusion:

Creating Instagram videos will undoubtedly take more time than creating images. But as you can see above, they can help you drive more engagement, sales and gather more data that will prove useful in your marketing strategy.

So, begin creating more Instagram video content today. You can compare the results you generate from video against images to see which works best.

You can also take the time you put into creating videos while calculating the ROI to check if the extra time and money you are putting in are worth it.

Author Bio

Mitt Ray is the founder of Social Marketing Writing and Creatiwitt.

Further Reading:

This Article is About:

Instagram Videos
Video Making
Digital Marketing
Social Media