How To Promote Your Blog via Instagram Stories

You just wrote up an amazing piece of content on your blog & now you would like to drive traffic from Instagram into your blog.

What should you do?

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories is just 1 of many ways, but for this topic in particular we will just focus on your creative & strategy to help drive your IG Audience into blog readers.

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The Creative is important because…

You need a way to capture your audience’s attention before they tap away from your IG Story. Trust me, people are skipping through IG Stories faster than punching their snooze button in the morning — that is if your creative doesn’t capture their attention fast enough.

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Let’s now break down a strategy.

#1 Create interesting snippets

The snippet/s should contain brief but comprehensive information about your blog.

It should a short form piece of content that is enticing and informative as a stand-alone piece of content – but it should build up enough curiosity that gets your audience to read the full article.

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#2 Make it brief

I know i said that already, but this is important because you don’t want to overwhelm your viewers.

Let’s dive into the examples.

Example #1

Bareburger wrote up a piece of content that discussing 12 Food Trends in 2019. Here is how they used Instagram Stories to build up enough curiosity for their viewers to read the full blog.

Bareburger launches their IG Story with a creative headline “What’s Next in Food Trends?!” with a cute illustration/graphic to represent their headline. It was easy to read & quickly caught my attention.

The following 2 stories provided some context on the topic headline. One of them was Hummus Ice Cream…wait, what? HUMMUS ICE CREAM?!?

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In addition, they included 2-3 benefits of Hummus Ice-cream and slightly hinted that the full recipe is on their blog (Hmmm…now if you love hummus and ice-cream you are probably more curious than ever to read about this)

The last IG Story is the hook! After sharing a few food trends & their benefits, it built enough curiosity such that if the reader wanted to learn about 12 more food trends then they can swipe up to read the full blog article.

Try to understand the strategy here. Quick breakdown

1. Catchy Headline
2. 2-3 Pieces of short valuable pieces of content that draws interest to the user
3. Ends with a strong call to action

In this example, Bareburger introduces pink shakes for the month of October and shares their story on their blog.

If the topic peaks their interest then it will drive traffic into their site and also showcase that Bareburger is participating in Breast Cancer Awareness.

Another example is from West Elm, a retail & eCommerce store where they sell Home Decor furnishings & accessories.

West Elm wrote a blog article that shared a few cocktail recipes perfect for the current season (mid-Summer).

Now they needed to develop a way to draw some of their Instagram’s audience into the blog to read it…and potentially purchase some of the glassware or bar accessories that they used in the article.

1st Instagram Story: “Heat Driving You Crazy”

Here you are catching the user’s attention since a majority of their audience are located in warm climate areas during the Summer

2nd Instagram Story: Brief Version of Recipe Details

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Last Instagram Story: A call to action to swipe up if they want to learn the full recipe

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Just imagine how blogs can generate sales and how Instagram stories can help you drive traffic organically if you’re really creative.