Luke: How Do You Approach Instagram Stories for Effective Marketing?

Danielle:

The thing with Instagram stories, everyone knows them and uses them, but I kind of feel that they're an underutilized and underrated piece of Instagram. Instagram is a social connection platform, the main reason that you're on there, or that people are on there, is actually just to connect with other humans. If we really want to learn something, we'll go to YouTube or to Google. And while we do use Instagram as a source of information, it's more about to learn about other inspiring humans and pick up tips from them. And stories is really where you have your most dedicated, almost inner circle of followers. They're the ones that actively like your feed, and the people that watch your stories are the people who will actually be served up content from you in the algorithm. So yes, some of them might be your friends and family, but if someone is following your stories on a regular basis, it's kind of showing that they have a deeper interest than just maybe catching one or two tips from your reels along the way.

Luke: Can You Share Specific Strategies for Selling Through Stories?

Danielle:

I would never go hard sell because no one wants cold DMs and no one wants that kind of strategy anymore. We're much more savvy. I was reading something, an article the other day, I think it's Sprout Social, one of the marketing platforms, and they're saying I think it's about 83% of marketers use stories as a main way to drive conversion. And the reason that stories are so great is, like you said, they are the behind the scenes, they are the unpolished versions. There is a big trend right now where people are more interested in the unpolished version, that's why TikTok is so popular as well. People are very excited to see a little bit of the messier side. And if you can show that even in your day-to-day experiences, when it comes time to sell, you can take them through a sequence that allows you to like drop a link and help you click into an offer, it can drop you to a landing page or things like that. But it helps them feel like it's their choice clicking on the link rather than just being forced down their throat.

Luke: What Final Advice Would You Give for Using Stories Effectively?

Danielle:

I mean, yeah, stories should play a part of your strategy. By strategy, doesn't mean that everything has to be created in advance, but just knowing that you do need to put effort into it like you would your post or your captions. I would say the thing that really helped me is just to give myself a challenge to film or photograph four pieces of content for stories daily. Not that I'll use them all, but wherever I'm at, I just look around, I'm like, can I take a picture or a little video of this? And I might not even use it on the day, but maybe two days later, I will post it about like the beach that we were at surfing and relate it back to something that we're talking about then. Definitely use stickers and engagement polls and things like that. Just think of it as a two-way conversation. You're starting a conversation with your clients. So like, how can you get them to respond to you? And they can drop into your DMs, or they can send you an emoji if they want a little extra piece or a PDF or a freebie from you.