Things to consider when designing your Instagram Video Strategy

Instagram is a social media content publishing platform. But, it is not just that. It is a widely used portal for not just entertainment but for learning too. And, It is a potent marketing channel thanks to over 1.4 billion users it hosts!

Over 44% of users shop on the platform every week and many more discover new brands and businesses every day through Instagram!

Naturally, the platform is one of the main channels for a lot of brands to engage with users and is an integral part of any successful marketing campaigns for such businesses. And, it is practically impossible to design any strategy for Instagram marketing, with the platform’s growing video-centricity, without video content.

So, how do you start designing a great Instagram video strategy that works? Here are some basic touch points to consider:

How much does Instagram affect your bottom line?

As a first step, it is wise to first understand what a successful campaign on Instagram would mean to you. It is increased brand awareness? Higher sales conversions? Better engagement and establishing trust? When you zero down on this, it gets easier to see if Instagram is indeed the right platform to focus your efforts in. 

Once you understand what you want, you can then get on with chalking out the ‘How’ part of it to improve effectiveness. This will also help you set the budget right and not overspend in the wrong direction.

Define the nuances of your target audience

Next, you define who your audience is. Especially with a platform that is as populated as Instagram, efforts and money must be directed to people who are as close as they can be to your ideal customer persona lest it is wasted.

Start from the gender inclinations of the persona, the age, the geographic aspects, and such broader areas and define it as much as you can. Choose criteria that most affect the pain-points that your business is solving for. Apart from targeting and promoting your content with such audience, also keep these notes in mind while creating the content to better define the tone and nature of your content.

Focus on adaptability and agility of content creation

Instagram, among other things, is also famous for its ever-changing algorithms. And, the way for businesses to actually take advantage of this instead of losing out on audience reach is by designing adaptable, agile content creation processes. 

The main ways to do this would involve:

Consistent content posting

Quick turn-around of topical, trending content

Having a repurposing strategy in place for different types of content

Minimizing video creation costs while still keeping the bar for content quality high

One great way to achieve all 4 of these approaches quite easily is with Steve.AI as your AI video-making assistant to reduce costs, conserve manual effort (thus enabling consistency), create videos in minutes to ride on trends, and repurpose any text or image content into videos in a flash!

Explore collaborations with micro-influencers

Once you have your optimized video creation processes in place, the next step is to think of distributing the content right. 

Instagram is one of the foundations for influencer marketing. This provides a great way to reach really concentrated target audiences through a trusted voice. What’s more effective than that? Micro-influencers!

Micro-influencers are both cost-effective to collaborate with as well as give you access to a niche audience that is likely to really understand the value your business is creating. So, it is a great idea to have this as part of the bigger strategy.

These points are just the starting points. Once you have the basics in place, experiment, understand better and keep refining your strategy to build a solid marketing channel on Instagram. Also, don’t forget to be frugal and smart while you are at it, in terms of resources as well as costs, and leverage the power of AI at every possible step!

How to go from Text to Instagram Video in seconds with AI

We live in times where the word “viral” is as terrifying as it is a ticket to stardom! With deadly COVID making us dread even uttering the word, there’s the digital world where “viral” is the ultimate success metric that is desired and many a times even aspired for.

Now, there is of course no set rules or process to create a piece of content that can go viral. That is, in fact, part of the appeal that virality has. But, there are definitely a few factors that can help.

Let us talk about video content since it is one of the primary content formats that audiences consume, supported by stats that show that over 92.7 of people on the internet watch videos every week. There are multiple platforms to post videos, the first deciding factor for virality and reach depends on which channel you choose to host your video. One of the most popular platforms is Instagram. It has wide number of users, its algorithms support trending content and the audiences are on the platform looking for popular content to entertain them.

Now, if you are a brand or content creator looking to great video content on Instagram, what do you do to optimize your efforts and improve your chances to trend? Well, hire an AI video making assistant like Steve to do the hard work while you spend your energy on being as creative as you can!

You can go directly from text to Instagram video with Steve in minutes, at a fraction of conventional costs AND you have the option to choose from a variety of content formats such as live-action and animation.

And, all it takes is 5 simple steps. Let us go through the steps to create an Instagram video to understand the process better.

Step 1

Login to Steve.AI using your e-mail id. 

You will now see your dashboard where you can begin creating your video with AI.

Step 2

You can choose between live action visuals and animated visuals at this stage. For the vertical format that is preferred for Instagram reels, live visuals are more suitable whereas animated visuals look great on the horizontal format. 

Let us choose the Live section and click on the Start button in the Script to Live video section.

Step 3

Now, you are at the Script page where you can simply copy-paste your script and the AI divides it into scenes. You can also choose from our library of over 200+ popular script templates and tweak the content on the scenes. Let us choose from a script template for social media here.

Once script is sorted, select the options you need such as music, voice-over, visual source as per your plan subscription, etc. Most importantly, enter the most relevant keyword for your video content to help AI understand the overall context better. 

Click on Next. 

Step 4

You can now see a set of video templates to choose from, click on the one you like and voila! The AI creates your video from the script in less than a minute!

On your Workspace, you can review each scene and customize colours, scene length, add/delete scenes, and so much more with the options on the side of your scenes! You can also add your own music tracks for trending reel audio by clicking on the Audio section at the bottom. 

If you wish to change the visuals of your scene, you can simple click on Swap and search from millions of media assets to choose the exact visual you want. 

Step 5

Once you have made the required changes, if any, hit Publish and Steve will take you to the download page. Here, you can preview the full video one more time and click on Download.

Sit back and watch Steve completely take care of rendering and finishing the video. You will get your final high-quality video in a few minutes that you can share on Instagram! It is the perfect mix of human creativity and AI coming together to create content, isn’t it?

Things to consider when designing your Instagram Video Strategy

Instagram is a social media content publishing platform. But, it is not just that. It is a widely used portal for not just entertainment but for learning too. And, It is a potent marketing channel thanks to over 1.4 billion users it hosts!

Over 44% of users shop on the platform every week and many more discover new brands and businesses every day through Instagram!

Naturally, the platform is one of the main channels for a lot of brands to engage with users and is an integral part of any successful marketing campaigns for such businesses. And, it is practically impossible to design any strategy for Instagram marketing, with the platform’s growing video-centricity, without video content.

So, how do you start designing a great Instagram video strategy that works? Here are some basic touchpoints to consider:

How much does Instagram affect your bottom line?

As a first step, it is wise to first understand what a successful campaign on Instagram would mean to you. It is increased brand awareness? Higher sales conversions? Better engagement and establishing trust? When you zero down on this, it gets easier to see if Instagram is indeed the right platform to focus your efforts in. 

Once you understand what you want, you can then get on with chalking out the ‘How’ part of it to improve effectiveness. This will also help you set the budget right and not overspend in the wrong direction.

Define the nuances of your target audience

Next, you define who your audience is. Especially with a platform that is as populated as Instagram, efforts and money must be directed to people who are as close as they can be to your ideal customer persona lest it is wasted.

Start from the gender inclinations of the persona, the age, the geographic aspects, and such broader areas and define it as much as you can. Choose criteria that most affect the pain-points that your business is solving for. Apart from targeting and promoting your content with such audience, also keep these notes in mind while creating the content to better define the tone and nature of your content.

Focus on adaptability and agility of content creation

Instagram, among other things, is also famous for its ever-changing algorithms. And, the way for businesses to actually take advantage of this instead of losing out on audience reach is by designing adaptable, agile content creation processes. 

The main ways to do this would involve:

Consistent content posting

Quick turn-around of topical, trending content

Having a repurposing strategy in place for different types of content

Minimizing video creation costs while still keeping the bar for content quality high

One great way to achieve all 4 of these approaches quite easily is with Steve.AI as your AI video-making assistant to reduce costs, conserve manual effort (thus enabling consistency), create videos in minutes to ride on trends, and repurpose any text or image content into videos in a flash!

Explore collaborations with micro-influencers

Once you have your optimized video creation processes in place, the next step is to think of distributing the content right. 

Instagram is one of the foundations for influencer marketing. This provides a great way to reach really concentrated target audiences through a trusted voice. What’s more effective than that? Micro-influencers!

Micro-influencers are both cost-effective to collaborate with as well as give you access to a niche audience that is likely to really understand the value your business is creating. So, it is a great idea to have this as part of the bigger strategy.

These points are just the starting points. Once you have the basics in place, experiment, understand better and keep refining your strategy to build a solid marketing channel on Instagram. Also, don’t forget to be frugal and smart while you are at it, in terms of resources as well as costs, and leverage the power of AI at every possible step!

How to make animated birthday videos for Instagram in under 5 mins!

Birthdays are really special and birthday wishes for loved ones are always a big part of our lives. Birthdays of loved ones are days when we get to celebrate people who mean the most to us and really tell them how much we love them. But……how do you say “Happy Birthday” without boring them and actually give them an experience that eventually becomes a great memory? How about a birthday video? Nah, too regular right?

Well, not if it’s an amazing ANIMATED birthday video!

That’s right! You can make a really sweet, quirky, heart-warming animated birthday video for Instagram without any prior training or shelling out all your money. 

All you have to do is think of a great couple of lines that would be the script of the video and let AI do its magic, creating animated characters and effects for you. You can then go on to customize the video by editing the expressions, adding more effects, swapping the music, etc as needed and voila! The video is ready to make the day of the birthday boy/girl!

And, the best part is that the entire process is just a couple of clicks and takes just about 5 mins! Here’s a step-by-step guide that will take you through the video creation for an animated birthday wishes video.

Log into Steve.AI and choose Animation on the dashboard. Click on Create and choose the Animation option. Select Horizontal.

Next, choose from the auto-generated script for birthday video and customize it by editing. You can also write your own script afresh if you have a couple of lines jotted down.

Now, select from the platter of choices as per the kind of video you want. This includes the music, voice-over additions, and most importantly entering the keyword for your video which will give AI the context to create your content.

Click Next. Select Video Design type from options according to the visual format you prefer.

Annnnnnnd your animated birthday video is now ready! Well, a pretty solid first draft is!

You can now customize the video to make it your own and add your touches. You can swap out the characters from a wide range of options, change the expressions of the characters from hundreds of choices, add some fun elements from all the creative assets available and make the video all the more beautiful for your loved ones.

Click on Publish and let Steve AI take care of the rendering and give you a downloadable video in minutes!

This is exciting, isn’t it? So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and create your birthday animation videos like a pro with Steve AI by your side and make amazing memories with your loved ones! Also, the video becomes an excellent keepsake that will always remain special!

Here’s how ours turned out – https://www.instagram.com/reel/ChJ2Xu-ACv7/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link