How to Use Instagram Stories to Market Your Business

Do you use Instagram to its full potential? Many businesses don’t! This very popular platform has so many features that can help you grow and market your business and it would be a shame if you wouldn’t use it to your advantage. Story feature is one of the main tools that can help you reach a wider audience and bring more people to your profile. Stories are fairly easy to be seen since the users are not forced to watch them, but they see what they follow. It’s not an annoying way of marketing, but it has a natural flow since you can skip or exit it anytime. So if you still don’t know what to do to market your business on Instagram stories, here are some proven tips that should become part of your new social media strategy.

Ideal Client/Customer Hashtags 

Hashtags can help your post be seen by more people, whether that’s in stories or posts. Research the hashtags that your ideal clients use and include them in your stories. If you don’t like hashtags being seen, you can hide them behind text or zoom them out, so they will disappear but still do the job. By exposing your content to more eyeballs, you are marketing yourself and targeting the right audience that might buy your products or services. If you use the hashtag sticker, your story will be added to the hashtag story that compiles stories from everyone who used the same hashtag.

Adding Location Stickers

Do you want to be discovered in your local area or in a specific country? Always use location stickers to market yourself in the area you are targeting. This will help your story to be added to the original location story that can get you bigger exposure. It’s also great for connecting with a community that is in the same country.

Posting Stories On a Consistent Basis

Being consistent is the key to your social media presence. If you’re not consistent, all your marketing strategy will be most likely ineffective. By posting regularly, you can establish a community of followers that like what you do and want to support you. 

Depending on your business, I would recommend you to combine live stories where you show your face and who is behind the brand with a regular pre-made pictures or interactive stickers stories. This way you are building trust and people can get to know you and your brand.

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Adding Stories to Your Highlights 

We all know by now that stories are up for only 24 hours and then they disappear. However, you will still have them in your archive and you can use them for your advantage. How? Create several story highlights, each of them with a related topic to your business and allow your ideal audience to view it another time. You can showcase your products/services, testimonials, or other topic related stories and therefore market your business! Story highlights are also one of the first things that people who are looking at your profile see, so spend some time on it, to make it look visually appealing and effective.

Adding Website Links to Stories 

This feature is relatively new because it used to be only for verified accounts, but now anyone with 10k followers and more can use it too. Swipe up is a great way for adding a call to action on your stories and for people to know what you want them to do straight away. Sending people to external links like your website or to the other platforms can help people take action and they know exactly where they are being redirected with that link.

I hope these tips were helpful and you will try to implement them on your Instagram profile to market your business more effectively. Which of these are you using to improve your Instagram marketing? Let me know in the comments below.