11 Ways to use Instagram Story Highlights to Market Your Business
Learn how to use the Instagram story highlights strategically for your business. Imagine how many more people could you get your message in front of if you let your followers discover the best of your company at their own pace. That’s what Instagram story highlights can do for your business.
Designing an attention-grabbing Instagram story cover is valuable knowledge in today’s visual world. However, knowing how to use Instagram stories strategically to market your business will take your design to the next level. In this post, I’m going to give you 11 great ways to use Instagram story highlights for marketing your business.
Before we get on that list, I want to give you a couple of resources that will help you design your Instagram highlight stories and Icons.
Instagram Story Highlights Design Resources
First, I have a tutorial video that will walk you through how to create Instagram templates, including the Instagram story highlights templates. If you want a step by step on how to make Instagram story templates and how to make Instagram story Icons in Photoshop, make sure to watch the video on Youtube or here on the blog.
Resource number two, I also have a full social media template pack with templates for seven different platforms that includes all of the Instagram templates with the highlight cover templates, icon frames, and design elements as well.
You can grab the all-inclusive, “done for you” template in the PrettyWebz shop.
Your Websites Powerful Sidekick
Instagram can be a powerful sidekick to your main online home. Of course, I’m talking about your website. We’re going to talk about the best ways you can use Instagram story highlights to support everything your business puts out online and drive traffic to content you’ve produced outside of Instagram. Instagram gives you a fantastic (and free) opportunity to showcase your brand.
Now let’s get on to the list!
Highlight Polls
As a business owner, I know you want to get into the mind of your ideal customers. Instagram is an excellent opportunity to ask questions and keep a running poll to get more responses to your burning questions. More responses mean more accurate answers from a larger pool of your customers.
Ideas for saving polls in Instagram story highlights as a business are to get feedback on products, crowdsource ideas for new products or services, or to get some interaction going with your followers. Polls are a great way to get to know them better.
Testimonials & Social Proof
Keeping a collection of social proof in your Instagram story highlights is excellent when your brand is small, and people are trying to validate buying your product. If a potential customer is already researching your company, they’ll probably link to your social media accounts. When they hit your Instagram account, they’ll find a nice bit of content all packaged, prepared and ready for them to devour.
Do you have a product or course that you sell online?
If you have people that have been through your course or have used your product, use this to let potential customers know how great you are. Search for and save all the little snippets and the success stories in your Instagram story highlights. You don’t have to go crazy with this and get pro videos recorded or anything like that. I’m talking about blurbs, and snippet like you see on websites all the time.
You can also “screen grab” a social media post about your brand. Search for mentions of your brand and reshare it as a story. You can also add a little background information to give your story context. Express how ecstatic you are to be able to showcase your student’s amazing results.
Sharing other’s experiences with your product will help you praise your customers and also help you show the legitimacy of your promise and how it’s helped others. If for nothing else, the Instagram story highlights for social proof is a great way to promote your students and their achievements.
About Me Highlights
Use these types of Instagram story highlights if you are the face of your brand. Alternatively, if your brand has a “face,” even if it’s not you, this should be about that person.
Similar to the about me page on your website except for this one can get a little bit more personal and highlights ongoing stories rather than the static story on your website’s about page.
Think about sharing images of your work or process, hobbies, pets and family life, personal wins and losses in the course of business, to name a few.
Sharing for a personal brand doesn’t have to be all professional. On the flip side, you don’t have to add personal info here either. You can keep it strictly about what you’ll be working on, projects, upcoming events, and thoughts about your industry.
About the company or brand highlights
Your Brand Instagram story highlights are where you can share all the things that you and your team are doing in the community. Events that you are sponsoring or participating in, charitable projects, things that highlight your values as an organization, employee highlights and more.
In this section, you’ll focus more on the brand as a whole rather than just the founder or the face of the business. When a potential client starts to notice you, give them a binge-worthy collection of all your great achievements.
Products & Services
In the products and services Instagram story highlights, you can share all of your products and their benefits. Share photos, product demonstration videos created by your company and the product or video of the end user using the product.
This section should be used to show off your products not answer questions about products. Use the product and services Instagram story highlights as showcases of your products and services.
I want to point out that you can have more than one product or service Instagram story highlights category. If you use a hashtag for your products, make sure to add it to all of your product/services Instagram story highlights.
Instagram Shopping Stickers
Another excellent feature for products is you can use shopping stickers to tag products from your shop. You don’t even need 10,000 followers to do this! Shopping stickers are an Amazing opportunity for a new account to get links back to an online store.
Product Q and A
If you get a lot of questions on Instagram about your products and services, consider putting together a Q&A story highlight to keep them all organized/. The q&A story highlights could potentially save you from having to answer the same question over and over.
Freebies/resources Instagram story highlights
This one is great for showcasing your email newsletter opt ins share e-books checklists, worksheets and all of the other fabulous resources you have available for free on your website. For those of you with over ten thousand followers, you can share links! Don’t forget to add that call to action at the end with the link to your freebie landing page.
If you don’t have ten thousand followers, you can still get in your most important landing page links. Tag yourself in the post and make sure you’re using a service like
More Posts on this Topic
YouTube video and Facebook live highlights.
If you’re a YouTuber and want to share clips of your latest video, this is a great place to keep those so that all your Instagram followers can check out what you’ve been posting on YouTube at a glance. Send people over to your Facebook lives even after they’ve already aired.
Current Promotions
This highlight is excellent for online stores or affiliate marketers. You can keep all of your current discount codes and special offers in this highlight section. You can also use this to highlight for current giveaways sweepstakes and contests and other promotional activity inside your business. Share all the info on where your followers can go to sign up or enter a contest, even if you’re hosting that promotion on another platform.
Current promotions Instagram story highlights are also a great place to put cross-promotions with other Instagram accounts.
I’ve also heard of people selling a highlight as ad space if you have enough followers and engagement this may be something worth investigating.
News and Updates
Do you have some exciting news to share? Save all the updates on your latest project promotion or event in the news and updates highlights.
Blog /Vlog posts
You might consider the blog and vlog post type Instagram story highlights as part of the News and Updates categories. However, you may want to add your blog and video posts as separate Instagram story highlights to keep your Instagram followers up to date on your primary content.
Share a little information about your blog posts, tutorials and other traffic-driving content to get people back to your website for more.
Strategic Branding and Marketing
Remember these are all great ideas in specific cases. The choices you make about the content you highlight depends on your business and the brand strategy you’ve set up. These categories are meant to inspire your marketing plan. Ultimately, how you set up your account is based on your overall content marketing goals and strategy. Once you have your content marketing goals set, a strategy in place and a firm grasp on the branding for your business you can design your Instagram highlight covers and learn how to put them on your profile and edit them too.
Plan out your Instagram strategy so that it compliments your brand and personality. Don’t try to do everything, do what feels right for you. If you need help with figuring out what to post on Instagram grab the 31 Days of Instagram planner and this Instagram Puzzle design tutorial as well. The puzzle tutorial also has a lot of information on does and don’ts of using a puzzle feed and general tips for using Instagram. Plus, grab two free seasonal Instagram puzzle templates in the shop.
What Next?
If you like the informational videos that we share here on Prettywebz, then make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive a notification every single time we send out a new video or a blog post. Ninety percent of the time those videos and blog posts also come with a little bonus that we send out directly to our subscribers. I don’t want you to miss out on that.
All of these informational videos can help you use your design assets in a more strategic way on your website, social media and in your promotions. Now you’ll create stunning designs and know how to use them to market your business effectively. Make sure to sign up below in the footer to become part of the Prettywebz family. Also, subscribe to PrettyWebz on Youtube so we can stay connected there as well.
Did you like this post? Share it with a friend or save it for later by pinning this image!
