Case Study: Winning With Video Marketing on Instagram
An illustrative 2019 case study in video marketing, when a Stories-and-IGTV content mix, not a single hero video, was what moved a small brand's sales.
The starting point
A direct-to-consumer skincare brand, described here by category rather than name, had spent 2018 producing a handful of expensive, polished product videos each quarter for its main Instagram feed and website. Sales moved a little around each launch, then flattened until the next one.
What changed
Early in 2019 the team shifted most of its video budget away from a few big productions and into a constant stream of Stories content: quick tutorials, customer testimonials filmed on a phone and behind-the-scenes clips of the product being made. They used Stories’ swipe-up links, available to accounts over the follower threshold Instagram required at the time, to send viewers straight to product pages instead of relying on a single link in the bio. Longer explainer content moved to IGTV, where it stayed available for people to find later instead of disappearing after a day.
The result
Daily Stories views ran far higher in aggregate than the quarterly hero videos had ever reached, and because each Stories post linked directly to a product, the brand could trace a much clearer path from a specific video to a specific sale than it ever could with the old approach. IGTV views stayed modest, but the videos posted there kept getting found by new customers for months, unlike the quarterly campaign videos that stopped generating any results within a couple of weeks of launch.
What made the difference
The shift wasn’t about spending more, it was about spending differently. Cheap, frequent, personal-feeling content on Stories consistently outperformed expensive, polished content posted rarely, because it matched how people were using Instagram in 2019: quickly, often and expecting something that felt current rather than produced. Pairing that constant stream with a smaller number of durable long-form pieces on IGTV gave the brand both immediate sales and a growing library that kept working after the fact.
The lesson for other businesses
By 2019, winning with video marketing rarely meant making one great video. It meant building a system: something quick and native for Stories nearly every day, something more durable for IGTV or YouTube on a slower cadence and a direct path from the video to a purchase built into the format itself rather than bolted on afterward.
More from the archive: browse the Content Marketing category or see everything published in 2019.
