Case Study: Winning With Stories Marketing
An illustrative 2018 case study of a small retailer using Instagram Stories, once polls, question stickers and swipe-up links had matured past pure novelty.
Where Stories stood by 2018
Instagram had launched Stories in August 2016 as a direct, openly acknowledged copy of Snapchat’s disappearing-photo format, and by 2018 it had thoroughly eclipsed the platform it borrowed from. Instagram announced in June 2018 that Stories had reached 400 million daily active users, more than Snapchat’s entire user base. Snapchat, meanwhile, had a rough start to the year: a controversial redesign in early 2018 drew such a public backlash, including a widely reported tweet from Kylie Jenner saying she barely opened the app anymore, that the company’s stock reportedly dropped in the days that followed. By 2018, in other words, Stories weren’t a novelty anymore, they were the format brands were expected to have a real plan for, and Instagram had become the place to run it.
An illustrative scenario: a small retailer figures out Stories
To see what a working Stories strategy looked like by 2018, it helps to walk through a plausible, composite example rather than any single real company. Picture a small independent home goods shop with a modest but engaged Instagram following, a few thousand followers built up over two years of regular feed posts.
Early on, the shop treated Stories the way it treated its main feed: occasional promotional photos, posted inconsistently, with no real difference in tone from a regular post. Views were low and mostly flat.
The shift came when the shop stopped treating Stories as a smaller version of the feed and started using what made the format different. They used the question sticker, introduced in 2018, to ask followers what products they wanted restocked, and answered a handful publicly in follow-up Stories. They used polls to let followers vote between two new product photos before deciding which to stock more of. And because the account had passed 10,000 followers, they had access to the swipe-up link feature, which they used sparingly, reserved for actual product pages rather than every single Story, so followers didn’t tune it out.
What changed in the numbers
Within a few months of this shift, the shop’s Stories views climbed well past its feed post reach, a pattern that was becoming common industry-wide by 2018 as more users defaulted to checking Stories first. More importantly, the swipe-up link started driving a meaningful share of the shop’s website traffic, traceable directly to specific product Stories rather than general brand awareness. Direct messages also increased, since polls and questions gave followers an easy, low-friction way to respond that a static feed post never prompted.
Why this worked in 2018 specifically
This wasn’t a story about a clever trick nobody else had thought of. It worked because Stories, two years into their existence, had matured past pure novelty into a format with real interactive tools, polls, questions and swipe-up links and an audience that had developed genuine habits around checking them daily. The businesses that struggled with Stories in 2018 were often the ones still treating it as a place to repost their feed content rather than as its own, more casual and more interactive channel.
The takeaway
The lesson from this kind of case, illustrative as it is, matched what was showing up across many real businesses’ results in 2018: Stories rewarded brands willing to be more informal and more interactive than their main feed, and punished brands that just repeated the same polished content in a new format. Two years after launch, the format had earned a real, distinct place in a business’s marketing plan, not because it was new anymore, but because it had proven it could drive measurable traffic and engagement on its own terms.
More to explore: other social media guides, the rest of 2018 on this site or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
