Improve Your Instagram Story Strategy To Boost Sales

If you are not getting sales calls booked and signing up clients from Instagram every single week, then something is broken. And nine times out of 10, that thing is Instagram stories, your Instagram feed. While you can make call to actions on it, you definitely can get into conversations and sales. Typically it's better for like nurturing and to get you on the explore page so that you have new people come to your account. In reality though, the money is made in Instagram stories. The problem is that most coaches don't know how to use them. So in this video, I'm going to run you through exactly what myself and my students do, which is why we tend to average between 5 and 15 sales calls per week just using Instagram alone. Grab a notepad and pen, because we're going to go deep and I'm going to give you an exact seven day story calendar as well as I'm going to teach you a little hack that will triple or even quadruple your current story views. So before we jump into the actual CTAs themselves, I just want to give you a quick visual demonstration of how I think you need to start looking at Instagram. Let's start with the end in mind, which is that somebody has signed up with you, somebody has paid you money. Like this ultimately is why we do this. This is the end goal. But what happens before that stage? Well, typically it would be a sales call. But how do we get a sales call booked? Well, usually from Instagram it would be the dms. So so far, hopefully you'll agree that a dm, if done correctly, will lead to a sales call. And a sales call, if done correctly, will lead to a sign up. Before we do that, to get into the DMs we need to have opportunities in place for people to raise their hands and show interest so that we can converse with them, get them through our DM flow, get the call booked, turn them into a client. So the whole purpose of this video is to get you focusing on these hand raising opportunities here, which we're going to be using Instagram stories for. Let's kick off and let's look at what you could do across a seven day window. And what I would advise is you either go pause this video, grab pen and paper, or even take a screenshot of what I'm about to show you. Because you can literally run this on your Instagram stories for the next week and probably get two to four sales calls booked and maybe one to two clients out of that. And not only am I going to give you the seven day schedule. I'm also going to break down how best to use each form of story. Cta, as always, excuse the handwriting, hopefully the value more than makes up for it. Now you're going to see here that we have different types of CTAs that we're rotating and using throughout the week. First thing I want to point out is that it's also really important that you show up and just document, you know, life behind the scenes, show some social proof, all of that good stuff on top of of what I'm about to teach you here. This is the money making side of it. But you also do want to build goodwill and trust with your audience, of course. Let's kick it off with Monday and an indirect poll. Now, you might be wondering, what is an indirect poll? So what we want to do here is we want to have like an opening story where we talk about a struggle that one of your clients perhaps has gone through or something that you were confused with. We then want to show the result of, you know, getting through it. And then we want to do a poll that I call an indirect poll, which means they can also raise their hand and show that they're struggling. Let me give an example. It could be something along the lines of, hey, I know when I first started training I was super overwhelmed when it comes to supplements and my kitchen cupboard looked like a pharmacy. I wasted so much money I didn't have a clue what worked and basically I rattled when I walked. So that could just be a written piece of text on a story. The next slide could be a photo of you looking shredded, jacked in amazing shape, whatever it may be. And somewhere over that image you could put, now I just take three key supplements and it's been the result of me looking like this. And on the third slide, you could now have a poll that is like, are you really overwhelmed when it comes to what supplements to take? Have you been guilty of wasting money on supplements? Which supplement do you think actually works? And you could list out a few examples. So you'll basically see that this is not like a direct sales type poll. This is figuring out like a problem that your audience or your prospects might have and then allowing them to just tap it and be like, yeah, I struggle with that. Oh yeah, I've wasted money on that. And this gives you an opportunity. Opportunity to then slide into the DMs and be like, hey, so and so, saw your vote in my stories. Listen, I went through the same thing. Think I've got some ideas. Are you Cool if I ask you a couple of questions? So Mondays are great for doing these indirect polls. Either you or a client show a piece of social proof, run through an issue that you had, and then link it and give them an opportunity to raise their hand in the fact that they are struggling with the same thing. Next up, Tuesday, I would just show some social proof. Nothing really more to say here. I just don't think you need to make an offer every single day. I think like three to five times per week is a sweet spot. So on Tuesday, I would just show some client results and just celebrate your clients. Now, on Wednesday, I would do a sticker tap. So a sticker tap is when you go to your list of options on stories and you find the one that's like a little circle with an emoji in it and you can change the emoji to whatever you like. There are different ways that we can run the sticker tap, but one that can work really well is doing almost like a bit of a direct offer. So it could be like, I'm looking for three women that want to drop two dress sizes within the next eight weeks. Tap below if this is you. And then the emoji, the thing that they would tap could be, you know, a flame, it could be a weight loss chart, it could be a princess emoji, it could be a hand raise emoji, any of those things that the prospect will tap. And then of course, you can reach into their DM inbox. So off the back of quite a direct offer in terms of that sticker tap, we would now move to Thursday and do what I call a this or that poll. And the reason that we do this is because it gets really high engagement, which tells Instagram that this story is worth viewing and showing to more people. So how the this or that polls work is you're going to find popular themes, topics, things that oppose each other, and you're going to basically have your followers pick which one they prefer. Some easy examples could be Coke or Pepsi, Red Bull or Monster, winter or summer. So you would run between two to four of these and you'll see that obviously they're just fun, they're light hearted, they're engaging, and your audience won't be suspecting anything. So they'll just tap away, tap away, tap away. Which will then show your stories to more people. After the third or fourth light hearted one, you're then going to switch it into something like, are you struggling with training or nutrition? Is your current goal fat loss or muscle growth? So you would basically just run one to two of these that are a bit more now coaching related. So it's almost like we've hooked them in with these light hearted polls and then we've like done a bit of a bait and switch into either nutrition training, fat loss, that sort of thing. And again, you guessed it. Your job is to just reach out to them politely and go, hey, I see that you're struggling with nutrition a little bit at the moment. I think I've got some ideas as to how you can help, you know, get through that. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? Now we come to Friday, which is where we do what I call the direct poll. What you're going to do for the direct poll is lead into it with a little bit of social proof. So this can be between two and four slides maximum. So slide one might be like a before and after of a great client result. Slide 2 again would be a phenomenal result that clients achieved. And then you could either do another one or you could now transition it into the poll. And the poll itself, because it's direct is going to go something like this. Do you want to achieve results like this? Yes. No thinking about it, or yes, DM me? No, I'm good. Having a bit of a negative option in there is actually not a bad thing because some people will click that and it will still register as engagement from Instagram's perspective. And you guessed it, what you're going to do, anybody that votes on this poll, you're going to reach out to them. Now, a little hack that you might or might not know is that by not posting for a period of 24 hours and what we call the story reset can actually end up doubling, tripling, even quadrupling your story views. So I would recommend that we pick at least one day each week to just let your stories run out and don't post a thing. I typically do this over a Saturday, but you can pick any day that works for you. What you'll then find is the following day when you do start posting again, your story views should be much higher. And a way that you can try and amplify this is to make sure that your first story back is something that is quite engaging. And I'm going to give you three options for this one. Now, if you feel that you need to build goodwill with your audience and you just want to really push story views up, you might want to reset it and come back with something humorous. So if you've done something with your partner at home. And it's funny, like they've made a mistake or they've said something, they've done something that's funny. You could share a funny reel or meme and again put like a laughing sticker with it. Anything that's basically light hearted and just chases engagement. If you're not fussed about the views and you just want to get people into the DMs and get opportunities to sell, then I would do one of these two things. Either a link sticker or a two step. And by the way, you can just alternate between these as well. So it's not like you're married into one. You could do like this Sunday could be a link sticker and then the following Sunday could be a two step, back to a link sticker, back to a two step, and so on. Now when I talk through a link sticker, there's a difference between a sticker tap, which is the little emoji that people tap, and a link sticker which is basically directing people away from Instagram. And it's like a clickable link. You want to use these sparingly because Instagram doesn't really like sending people off the platform. But it can be useful to send people to either like an application form or a calendar, or even if you're uploading videos to YouTube, you can even share that and get people over to your YouTube channel. Out of those examples, my suggestion would usually be an application form. So on a Sunday, for example, you could put up a story that's like, it's Monday tomorrow. If you've eaten too much over the weekend, if you want to get your week back on track, why don't you give me some details, let's see if I can help. And then below that will be a link that will take them to your application form. They fill that in and then you get to them as quickly as possible. The other option that I'd mentioned was the two step. So a two step is basically where you have a resource, a guide, a case study of a client result that you've done and your first story back would be you advertising this. A quick example of a good two step could be something like, if weekends are where you fall off, don't worry, I've just put a guide together that runs you through exactly how to navigate fat loss during the weekends and how to eat out socially. Just comment the word weekend and I'll get it straight over to you when the prospect reaches out. Bingo, you got it. You take them through the DM script, you get the Call booked. I know that was a lot of information. So let's do a really quick recap. If you want more clients in your business and ultimately to be able to grow your income, then your time needs to be spent on the left hand side of this equation and working on how do I ethically get as many people to raise their hand and get into my DMs as possible. All of these story tactics that I've just given you slide into these boxes here and then give you an opportunity to get into the DMs unless they beat you to it, and then push them to a call and sign up people as clients. At this point, here are a couple of things that I think that you should do. Number one, you should go back, you should screenshot that little story planner that I just gave, and you should roll over the next seven days. Number two, if you're not 100 confident in how to get somebody through the DM process, then I've shot a video that I'll link to below or somewhere on screen that will walk you through exactly what to say to somebody in the DMs. Now, it's all well and good getting somebody from the DMS and onto a sales call, but if you don't know what you're doing with sales, then luckily for you, I've also shot a video on that, so you can head to that link and again it'll be on the screen or in the description below. Go check that out as well. But actually, if you don't even want to have to watch those videos and you just want my team and I to roll up our sleeves and just help you build your business for you, then the very first link in the description will give you a short video on how you can look at working with us and what we can do to help you build your coaching business.