SKEMA Digital Marketing in Tourism and Events: Instagram Debuts Full-Screen Ads In Stories: an opportunity for the tourism industry?

Instagram is a hot and trendy social media. Created in 2010 it is mainly useful to share pictures and video with your network, but shortly it is also become an efficient tool in the Tourism and Travel industries.

The pros of this free application are that is it downloadable from all the mobile devices and can be translated into several languages. This means that this application can be broadcasted from all around the globe.

Nowadays, the Tourism and Travel industries companies are more and more supporters of the use of Digital Marketing tools which include POEM (Paid Owned Earned) media, such as Instagram. They are powerful means to reach millions people for low cost, and high potential revenues.

Instagram launched its own analytics tool “Insight”, which enable the companies using it to get an overview of what’s really happening on the web. They can get all the impression from their audience and check the number of views on their official website. They can of course still post content (posts, pictures and video) in order to enhance their product.

As this application is pretty young and for free to download, it allows to reach people easily and very fast. Through the participation of all the users, it is a good way to share and broadcast all the information, through all the other social media by the same way.

The participative tourism is a good way for Travel Destination be advertised through the use of hashtag and @ by Instagram followers.

People can see the attraction of the destination if there are lots of contents, if lots of people have been there and raise their awareness by the pictures of what the tourists experienced.

When Instagram launched the stories, it has “become a mainstream expression tool," said James Quarles, the Instagram's VP of business. Indeed, businesses are seeing the stories as a new opportunity to deepen the relationship between a business and a person. For tourism businesses, it is a good way for communicating on their destination and strengthening their brand image.

With the launch of the full-screen ads in people stories, businesses can reach 150 million daily users. The ads in stories can include photos, videos and they are labeled as sponsored. Advertisers and businesses would be able to create videos or slideshows of pictures of maximum 15 seconds that will be seen when Instagram users will watch stories.

According to an Instagram study, one-third of the most-viewed stories are made by businesses and around three-quarters of Instagram users follow a business on the app. By consequence, the ads in stories give a use opportunity for businesses to influence their targets. For the tourism industry, it becomes a new opportunity to communicate on their destination, gives Instagram users the desire to visit those places and make them dream at any time.

The global head of social marketing and content at Airbnb said that “by creating and publishing experience-driven stories, we can truly captivate and reach travelers wishing to book aspirational trips on Airbnb" and mention the fact that Instagram Stories engages their community to be part of an adventure.

Instagram is now experimenting ads with around 30 clients, including General Motors, Nike, Asos, Yoox, Netflix and Airbnb.

Here is an example of Airbnb ads in a story