The easy trending IG Story advertising technique you need to try

Repetition is a popular and effective technique for learning and memorization - two important things for businesses to strive to achieve with their brand.

With short attention spans and a seemingly endless ocean of IG stories to tap through, it’s no wonder that brands such as Mini Cooper Convertible use a combination of visual repetition and unique layouts to stand out from the crowd.

Let’s walk through how to easily recreate this effect for your next IG story.

Limit your messaging

Repetition is simply repeating a single element many times. It is a powerful visual technique for education, design, photography, and communication. However, it is more effective when demonstrating restraint on how much information to repeat.

Simple messaging is not only easier to digest, but it’s also easier to create. As an example, let’s say you want to announce on Instagram that you just released a new podcast where you share all of your favorite recipes for fresh cherries.

Well, good news! By using repetition, you can just focus on the central theme or selling point which are… beautiful red cherries! You don’t need to spend extra time finding the right combination of visuals to depict that it’s a podcast, nor visuals to capture the cooking and baking part too. Watch the example below for inspiration.

Create visual repetition with media layouts and collages

Creating visual repetition for IG stories is easy to do when you have professionally designed collages and layouts at your fingertips.

As shown in the video example above, there are several varieties of media layout blocks that can be added to any video you make with Animoto. You can use media layout blocks to display up to 9 of the same or different visuals at once. To discover all of these layout options, click on the Add a Block button from the bottom left corner of your video project.

To customize it, simply drag and drop your own photos into the block, or add photos from our Getty Images library. Then, drag and drop to recenter your visuals as needed.

Pro tip: It should come as no surprise that viewers can absorb multiple repeated visuals much faster than trying to decipher multiple different visuals in a collage. So don’t be afraid to use the same photos multiple times within a collage. Doing so will not only reinforce the central messaging but also create a visual, attention grabbing effect.

Leverage interesting design treatments

Repetition also makes it easier to create emphasis. By repeating the same visual multiple times, even just a small visual accent is all it takes to create stimulating interest -- for example, by adding design animations to your project.

To try this in Animoto, click on the Design button from the top menu bar of any project. From there, you can select a preset Theme to choose from, or click the Video Settings tab to preview specific transitions and visual treatments that you can apply to your project such as Film Strip, as shown in the example above.

Check out our New Post Teaser template shown below. It is an easy template that features one block with a layout that can accommodate two assets at once, and adds a brush stroke animation when revealing text to add visual interest.

Ready to start creating your next IG Story with this technique? We’d love to see how your videos turned out! Tag Animoto and share it with our Facebook community.