Episode 83: A Simple Guide to Instagram Stories (with ideas!)

Welcome back to what's probably going to be one of my last episodes of summer shorts, but I am loving these little shorty episodes in between longer ones. So I think I'll just continue it and just call it all shorts. That doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Today's episode is all about Instagram stories and it's something that I find a lot of you are sleeping on and I'm here to tell you that you shouldn't be because not only are they one of the fastest pieces of content to create, but they're also one of the easiest.

easiest ways to convert your warm audience to being hot leads into actually being patients in your door or clients in your virtual coaching business. So without further ado, let's talk Instagram stories.

Hey, welcome to Holistic Marketing Simplified. This podcast boils down to the fact that we wholeheartedly believe that more humans need to know about holistic health solutions. And you didn't go to school to learn how to be a full time content creator and show up on Instagram and do all of this marketing stuff all day, every day.

So let's come hang it out while we chat all things easy in your marketing. And my goal is that you shift your mindset around your marketing from a quote should to a I get to more dream patients and clients. Yes, please. Hello, my name is Dr. Abby Parish and I'm a chiropractor located in Old Town Daphne, Alabama.

And I listen to the Holistic Marketing Simplified Podcast. So I'm not going to get into all the technicalities of Instagram stories when it comes to, I love all of you lovely type A people in my audience. And I feel like sometimes maybe I attract you because I am so different. Maybe I repel some of you because you're like, just tell me exactly what to do.

But if you are in a posting slump, a lot of times people will ask, I literally had someone ask this at a conference. They were like, what do you mean by posting every day? Like on my stories or on my grid? I'm like, that's just like semantics, right? So if you're in a posting rut and you're having a hard time actually posting on your grid.

And by posting on your grid, I mean whether it's a real or just like a regular static post, whether it's a photo or Canva graphic or whatever. Then to get your mojo back, I would actually just had this question, how do I get my mojo back? I would start just with posting stories because the cool thing about stories.

Is, it's the anything goes, it's only up for 24 hours and it really doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be curated, it doesn't have to be on brand, it can be whatever the heck you want it to be. From a more like, if you are somebody who's posting consistently, I typically think of my stories as, because a lot of people ask, but what, should this be a reel or should this be a story?

And a lot of times I record my reels inside Instagram stories, because just to be quite frank, I like my subtle filter that's in my Instagram story. So If you're someone who's hesitant to show up with like face to camera reels because you're like, I don't like the way I look. I mean, there's no shame in just opening up Instagram stories.

I put on my subtle filter. I film my face to camera reels in the stories interface and then on the top of that, Of the screen, there's going to be a little down arrow and press that down arrow and it's going to save that video to your camera roll so then you can repurpose it as a reel. The cool thing about that too is if, I didn't even mean for this episode to be about this, but here we are.

The cool thing about that is if you are trying to record a longer face to camera talking head reel, and you feel like you're getting long winded, this almost forces you to break things up into clips so that it's easier to kind of edit together and piece together to make it a little more visually interesting as well.

Anyway, assuming I didn't like say something go blah blah blah, which I do sometimes. Which I do sometimes when I'm recording in Stories. Often I will post that video that I'm recording for a reel to use maybe like the next day or like maybe in that afternoon, I'll just post it as a story, use the closed captions and then it's like double whammy, right?

Because the beauty of it being in a reel is if I'm like referring to a certain one of my free downloads or to Holistic Marketing Hub, then I can just like hyperlink it right in Stories. And then of course when I'm using it as the reels version. You know, you can't just hyperlink directly on it, but if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you're just going to have to get around it.

in stories and play with the buttons. Just push some buttons, okay? Like, if you open up Instagram stories and start talking, nothing's going to happen. No one's going to see it. Uh, once you start recording, you have to literally press, like, to post. And even if you do post it and you hate it, you can just delete it.

Big deal! Coming back to the topic at hand of, like, what I actually wanted to make today's episode about is Instagram stories. I typically, when I'm, you know, posting consistently on my grid, I typically think of my stories as the, like I said, the anything goes. Yes, I will do some educational. I'll promote my offers directly and free downloads directly, but also I just post random things like, Hey, this is my new favorite afternoon snack.

Or MJ just got a haircut or we're, you know, doing XYZ. I am not someone who, like to be a social media person, I have to, I feel like I'm actually a pretty in the moment person. I'm not someone who always has my phone out. So it's not like when my family and I go to like the local amusement park that I'm filming stories at the amusement park and posting them immediately.

Usually when it comes to stories, I'm just like snapping little clips. Throughout my day and like sometimes I post them right in the moment, but sometimes it's like the next day I'm posting something. I snapped from like the day before. I'm like, oh, I finally grew a tomato I especially do this when we are at a certain location So using my daughter's haircut example one thing.

I don't really show her face anymore So I just showed like the back of her head and her haircut and I tagged the salon where we got our haircut I didn't tag where we were when we were there. Like, I wait until either the next day or a few hours later or whatever. So, yeah. Also, a lot of people don't realize that So many sales come through my Instagram stories.

It's bananas. Like that's, I feel like it's, Instagram stories are this direct portal to your DMs. So whenever I'm actively engaging and going out and building community, I, my favorite way to open up a conversation with someone is to reply to one of their stories. So yes, this is a little different for y'all considering Instagram.

If your business to consumer, you're not watching random people's stories and being like, Hey, girl, you look pregnant. Let me help you at my clinic. I'm just saying like they're just so they're just like a direct portal to people's inbox. So maybe even if it's like a current patient that you're following or client that you're following who hasn't rebooked in a while and you're just like they posted a cool story of their family's vacation and you're just interacting with that, it brings you back to the top of their mind and opens up that conversation.

Again, If stories are taking you a long time to post, then something is off. They should not take you Any time to post, unless, the only time, like, for example, I follow Beach Reads and Bubbly, I love her book recommendations, and she'll make these like elaborate stories of like celebrity casting. You know who would you cast for this book and of course she's got to go find like screenshots of every single actor and then pull them onto her story slide or whatever.

Like I don't really foresee that you're going to be making a whole lot of complicated stories like that. In general especially if you're new to stories or you've never been consistent with stories you want them to be. Like, super fast, super quick, like I said, if it's taking you more than like five minutes, then I would say DM me and we can troubleshoot.

And I really mean that. I like to hear y'all's questions. If you ever feel like you're bothering me or not, because it really helps me shape my content to know kind of like where I'm losing people and where I'm not. One mistake I see with stories is just people saying, well, I just share my posts or my stories.

It's like, well, I mean. That's fine. Meh. Yeah, we share, you can share your posts to your stories, but I would recommend sharing like older posts to stories and being like, man, y'all really loved this one. Or including some type of poll with the story or just giving people a compelling reason to actually Cause there's a lot of people who get on Instagram, I should have said this in the very beginning, who just go to watch people's stories.

And it's so funny, my algorithm, there's certain people's stories that I only see their stories and there's certain people who I only see their posts, even if they are posting stories, like for whatever reason, the algorithm's like, Hey, you'll like their stories better. Or Hey, you'll like their reels better.

Or Hey, you'd like their posts better. So that's another reason to post on stories is because sometimes it's, they're shown to like a different set of your audience. While we're on the topic of audience, your stories are only posted to your current followers. That doesn't mean that if you have a public profile, of course, someone can, you know, navigate to your profile, see that you have stories active, and then they can watch them.

I'm just saying, when someone opens up the Instagram app, they The only little bubbles across the top that they're going to see of stories are people you're actually following, whereas when you go to scroll your feed, you see a lot of suggested content and suggested reels and suggested posts from people you don't follow.

That's another key distinction with stories. For like a more big, bigger stories, deep dive, you can go back to my episode with Emily Schwalbach and we can link that in the store, uh, show notes, but you can just easily find it to by going to mollykhill. com and navigating to the podcast tab and just search for Emily, or you can search for stories and you'll find that other episode.

Because I have, there's so much more I could say about Instagram stories. I have a full, I teach like a full, you know, video tutorial showing you what buttons to click and all of that. I also teach, I don't have time in this episode to talk about story highlights, but if you're a Holistic Marketing Hub student, I have a full tutorial on stories as well as a full tutorial on what should be your story highlights and all of that jazz.

Typically your story highlights should be like a start here. Which means like, you know, what to expect, how to, how to make an appointment with you, what people can expect on their first appointment, like, you know, start here. Um, then it's like your team and then reviews. And then I love having a local love story highlight.

Even if you're an online business, I love having like a local, like, you know, here's all the places I love around town. But again, if, if, if you're a hub student, I go and you're listening to this, I go into all of this in like great detail inside of your portal with video tutorials. And if you're not in the hub.

Why not? Seriously. DM me. Let me know. I think we still have an active coupon code podcast that'll get you 100 off. So use the code podcast, hop in the hub. The price is going up this fall because we are adding, a lot of the posts already have Reels hooks on them, but we're like going through and QAing everything and adding Reels hooks to like every post that we can.

So that's going to be a giant, or it's already, we've already started. It's like a giant undertaking. So. Want to raise the price when we do that, but I digress. I'm going to end this with a couple, uh, story ideas that you can do today. The first is super simple and it is open appointment times. So if you want to even like take a screenshot of your scheduler and blur out names and be like, hey, last minute new patient appointment tomorrow at two.

If you're just getting started and you have a lot of appointment openings, you Maybe you could, instead of doing a screenshot of the scheduler, you could just throw out like three to five specific times, because people are more likely to pick a specific time than just saying like, we have spots for five new patients this week, I think, I could be wrong, test it, see which, see which works better, and then, um, go to the square, smiley, smiley.

Icon at the top of your stories and then there's inside that menu, there's a little hyperlink option so you can hyperlink your online scheduler if you have it. If you don't have an online scheduler, you can have your phone number pop up, which is like I really wouldn't recommend because how are people going to like what screenshot it and then like write it down and call you.

I would probably just do a like DM me to book or something like that. So that's a super simple one to do is your appointment openings. Another simple one to do is the types of patients or clients you saw that week in your practice. These really help paint the picture for people. If you don't, obviously you don't, I'm not saying give people's names, but like you could do like a photo of your office and then be like types of patients we saw this week and then like list out like three to five different things you saw.

Same with if you're an online business. Another type of story that I love in that same. like idea is if you happen to have time, which I know for a lot of you who run really packed, like tight clinics, this is, you know, probably nearly impossible. But when you're doing your notes at the end of the day, or if you're an online business, this is something that's a lot easier to do, like right as you, you know, hit end on your zoom, hop on your stories really quick and be like, just got off a call with a client or just got finished with a appointment.

You know, if you're the brick and mortar, just finished up with a patient. And we had a really interesting conversation about. ear infections or something like that. Or, and my client was really having trouble getting 30 grams of protein for her breakfast. And here are some things. So just really train your brain.

I promise you, even if you're not a marketer and your brain doesn't think and marketing ideas and opportunities, you can really train your brain. It's your reticular activating system. All of you know what that is. Train it to look for these little opportunities. And so you can talk about that. Also, again, this is a little more effective if you are brick and mortar, but I still like to use this if you are a virtual like health coach too.

But if you're out at a local coffee shop that has an Instagram or your hair person or, you know, a boutique or a restaurant, anything that you can tag businesses in the local area and the hopes that they will then reshare your post to their stories is just going to be great. Because what's better than one audience?

Right? Especially, like I said, if you're local. And even if you aren't actually physically there, we, um, for clients in our Instagram management agency who are on our top tier package, our growth package, we highly recommend this is what we do for our clients, but you can do this easily on your own. And again, I teach this fully inside holistic marketing hub.

You can also get the step by step of this in my engagement checklist. If you just go to mollycahill. com slash engagement, but go find. other local businesses in your area, whether you know who they are or not, and just start sharing their post to your stories. And again, you have to like, tag them again.

They're not going to know you shared their post to your stories unless you mention that you did. For example, even if you know, let's say like, you're having a football party and you want to get custom. sugar cookies made for your favorite football team. And you're like, how cute are these custom sugar cookies?

Like if you just like find them out and about, even if you've never used them, that's totally okay. This is something that you can reverse engineer. If you can't find them right on Instagram, just by Googling local businesses in your area, you can maybe look at the chamber of commerce, click through businesses that, you know, you think look interesting, go to their website and you can find their, um, Instagrams there.

But think outside the box, like realtors, photographers, um, all kinds of things like that. Another type of story that I absolutely love are polls. Often I hear people say, well, no one's voting in my polls. Well, it's usually because there's not an option in your poll for everyone. So first of all, if it's like a, Would you like to hear more from me about what I eat in a day?

And it's like, absolutely, we'd love to. And then the other option is. No, stick to your chiropractic content or something like that. Like a lot of people aren't going to want to be mean and vote no, just make sure you're framing the answers in a way that people are going to feel comfortable voting for.

And then I also like to have a third option that's like just here for the results or like, I don't know, just always including some type of poll option that everyone would have an ability to vote on. The question box is another good one. I will say that one's kind of hard to get people to answer unless it is super duper duper specific.

So, um, if you're going to use the question box, I wouldn't ask things like, what do you want to see more of on this account? Because that's way too broad for someone to answer. I would do something more like, When you open Instagram, do you typically watch reels, posts, or stories, or I don't know, I don't, I'm just saying be really specific with the question.

I also talked already, like I said, a lot of like personal, um, story prompts that you can do like, you know, your makeup or your, your supplements. Like, I just did my supplement cabinet the other day and it was one of my highest viewed stories. My highest viewed story of all time was when we first moved into our house two years ago and I did like a house tour before we actually moved our stuff in.

And then, uh, one of the last ideas that you can do is Just always be hyperlinking your stuff. Like if you have a full script, if you have a free download, if you have online scheduling, and if you do this once, twice, three times and like no one's clicking, then just keep doing it. Either you didn't make the button prominent enough, put a big arrow, do something.

Even if you get two clicks, that's amazing. So I hope you loved this episode about Instagram stories. Please let me know what follow up questions you have and I'll make sure to include them on another episode of Summer Shorts. Thank you for listening to Holistic Marketing Simplified, and hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast?

Well, that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce, to bring you free information. So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could, please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day to leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram stories and tag at Molly A.

Cahill. C A H I L L. I would greatly, greatly appreciate your support. I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.