How To Brand On Instagram – Instagram is quickly becoming the most important social media app for business owners to master. Especially for brands with a visual component, this social platform has the potential to skyrocket your customer engagement and introduce your biz to the masses.
With 46% of all engagement on Instagram coming through stories and 400 million users viewing stories daily, an Instagram story strategy is key to growing your business, building an audience, and increasing your revenue.
How To Brand On Instagram
If you haven’t realized the potential business boost Instagram can give your brand, I’m here to walk you through the steps to take your Instagram game from dull to awesome.
Branding Through Instagram Part 1: Defining Your Brand
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This crazy powerful feature of Instagram can be found front and center at the top of the user’s screen. Instagram Stories are the first thing your audience sees when they open the app, and business owners use it brilliantly to stay visible to their audience.
Here today and gone tomorrow. Instagram stories are essentially a disappearing montage of photos and videos that are only seen for 24 hours. This makes them perfect for sharing quick, timely bits of information and insights.
Because they move quickly and are consumed quickly, the number one goal of a story is to capture a viewer’s attention in an instant. If you fail to engage them, the viewer may simply click to the next story in the series, and you’ve lost the opportunity to connect with them at that moment.
How To Level Up Your Visual Branding On Instagram
By maximizing the use of key features and staying on brand, your stories can capture hearts and command attention day after day, building a brand that your audience connects with and adores.
First things first, before jumping into Instagram Stories and all its advanced features, take some time to create your Instagram story strategy. Be sure to use this feature to promote your brand and build your business effectively. If you’re still making a plan, jump over and read the 5 WAYS AN INSTAGRAM STORY STRATEGY CAN GROW YOUR FOLLOWERS.
To create a story, click the ‘add to story’ icon from either your main stream or your profile page. This action will open the story creation screen where you can add features like filters, boomerang and other functions to show your personality and brand vibe. Key elements include:
Add text to your Instagram stories to make it clear what your image is about. The style of the text can be changed depending on branding or readability.
How To Build A Brand On Instagram [10 Proven Rules To Follow]
Whether you want to create negative space on an image or color the background of your story post to be a certain color, simply select the effect you want, blocked or partially transparent and your color to get the look you want.
If you’re not careful, Instagram Stories can get messy. But you can avoid the chaos and mess and create incredible and one-of-a-kind
Click here to try Canva’s Instagram Story Templates – always free where you can design custom Instagram stories in 5 minutes.
As funny as these features may be, without relevant content to back them up, these elements will only clutter your audience’s stories with few results.
How To Brand Your Instagram Grid — June Mango Design
Stories are best used for quick tips, behind-the-scenes views, and sneak peaks. You can use them as teasers to promote your Instagram posts or create a string of stories to share big brand news. Just remember, the point is to engage your audience, so make them fun and interactive! Here are some ideas
Words of wisdom. Don’t go overboard with stories – a good rule of thumb is to post 4-5 at a time. Try not to fill your reel with a zillion stories or your efforts will backfire and cause people to quickly click through and miss important updates. My motto is, the dashes should never become dots when it comes to posting on Instagram stories.
Also keep in mind that stories cannot be arranged in any particular order. They will appear in the order you posted, so post with a plan!
An Instagram highlight is a saved group of Instagram stories. These stories are bundled and placed in a highlight reel on your profile page. Unlike stories, highlights are permanent and won’t disappear unless you delete them.
Instagram Stories: Your Brand’s Complete Guide
Don’t be tempted to squeeze ALL of your story content into your highlights. Instead, you’ll want to be selective and strategic when choosing what makes the cut.
Having a highlight reel that shows how people can work with you saves them having to leave your Instagram account to find out how to work with you. Think of this highlight reel as the ‘services’ page on your website, and encapsulate the transformation you provide to your customers. The easier it is for people to see what services you offer, the better, as it helps shorten the buying process.
Make this highlight like the ‘about me’ section on your website, share your story of why you started your business, your passions and your expertise.
One of the must-haves when it comes to highlight reels. It’s important that when someone lands on your Instagram account, they can see the type of results you’re getting for clients, and what your clients are saying about working with you. It instantly shows profile visitors that they can expect to work with you. Be sure to update this section regularly as results help you close sales.
Instagram Brand Book By Gingersauce
Creating a highlight reel for your freebies is a quick way to showcase the different freebies you offer to your audience, you can easily showcase the benefits of downloading your freebie and what’s included. This is an easy way to grow your list as you gain new followers. Remember to add a link to your bio if you don’t have the swipe up feature.
If you host or go to any events, create a highlight reel to document your event. People love to see behind the scenes of what you do in your business and the events you host or attend.
Mini-trainings are a quick way to showcase your expertise and appear as an authority in your niche. Create quick, informative and actionable training for your audience, giving them some quick wins to implement to get results in their business. It quickly builds the know, like and trust factor.
For example, if your brand is about growing your business on Pinterest, you can offer a quick tutorial on how to track the metrics in Pinterest, e.g. how to see which pins had the most repeats, and click throughs to a website.
Superb Brand Instagram Stories Examples To Inspire You
When deciding what to have on your highlight reel, the most important thing is to keep your highlights full of value and to keep your overall brand mission in mind.
Highlights need to be shared with your stories first – you can’t skip this step. If y
ou have Instagram Stories that have already expired, you can:
If you want to add a current story to a Highlight, simply click on the story, tap the highlight button (the one with the heart) located in the lower right portion of the screen, and either add it to an existing highlight or create a new one and call it — easy peasy!
A quick note – for a story to be eligible to be added to your Highlights, it must have survived the entire 24-hour story cycle. This means you can’t add a story, delete it, and then add it to your highlights.
Day Instagram Branding Challenge
Customizing your highlights by creating branded covers is the latest way to add brand consistency to your Instagram profile.
As Instagram Stories continue to gain popularity, the opportunity for customer engagement in that arena can mean gold for your business. This marketing tool is one that all business owners should consider using to grow their brand. With unlimited features and functions to explore on the app, the opportunity to create and customize a branded customer experience is at your fingertips.
Now you have all the tools to showcase your skills, your personality and the services or product you offer – it’s time to start using stories to help you make more money and sell more in your business.
Instagram stories are the EASIEST way to slide into your ideal clients’ DMs without being creepy, pushy, or just sending out cold messages.
How To Build A Brand On Instagram That Stands Out And Thrives
First, make sure you’re following your ideal clients on Instagram, and if you’re not, start today!
Then set aside 10 minutes a day to look at their stories. See what they are doing in their business, what products they are launching and if they are struggling with anything.
If appropriate, reply to one of their stories with a comment. Make sure you don’t just use the ‘quick emojis’, leave a thoughtful comment or question on their stories.
Can you see how interacting with stories removes the need to send messages like “Hey Hun…” or “Hey Girl, I just saw your profile…”. You know which ones I mean because you keep getting them in your inbox and you always feel like someone is after the sale first.
Top 10 Benefits Of Instagram For Business
Offer advice, help and build a relationship with your ideal client. When you believe it’s right
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