All right, welcome to day five of Insta with intent. So today we're going to talk about important tools other than your bio and your hashtags that you probably know about, but maybe you're not using them to their fullest potential, or even correctly. Okay. So then, the first couple of things, we're going to go over our highlights and stories, highlights and stories are what put your brand awareness front and center. It's also the way to organize your content so that when a new visitor comes to your page, they can easily find what they're looking for. So anytime you add a new image or story to a highlight, it bumps it to the front of the list, and I'll talk about that.

You'll see in the next couple of slides What I mean by that. So the purpose of using highlights and stories are really to connect with your audience. Make sure that your users, your visitors, your followers, your potential visitors Customers are seeing your content, seeing the new images that you post on your page, seeing that you offer promotions and specials and announcements and updates and things like that help show off your expertise and authority in your niche. And then again, this is a really great place to create scarcity promotions, so Instagram Stories are only up for 24 hours. Now we can have access to them in our archive to post to our highlights later on, but they expire to our audience in 24 hours. So really, what this does is it creates urgency to tune in to your content.

So use it as you know, a reason to tell your viewers that hey, I posted a new post today go check it out. Um, this creates kind of that sense of FOMO. So if you have a promotion going on, that's just for today or just for this week, or just for the month of December. Then it creates a little bit of that scarcity. So you could put in there like, hey, book your appointment for December right now in the next 24 hours, and you'll get X, Y and Z. But you have to book within the next 24 hours, sometime in the month of December.

Okay, so you can create some of these Promotional Advertising and promotions for your business and it creates that urgency to book with you right away. posts on your page are your highest quality content. So the post that you see on your Instagram page, your scrollable online magazine, are going to be your highest quality content. So think of it like that, okay. But your stories and your highlights or your more, you know, behind the scenes, you can have a little bit more fun show a little bit more personality, kind of less serious content. It allows your viewers to get to know you and or your brand a little bit more but then once they go to your page, they can see that it's been Beautifully curated on your page.

So this is just as important, or it could be more important than your regular posts, because this is what gets people to engage with your your posts. This is what is boosting your followers, what is boosting engagement on your page. So this is what helps boost you in the algorithm. So the more that you're using stories and your highlights, Instagram actually likes seeing that more. And when they start to see that you're engaging more in your stories, then they actually are going to show your posts from your regular page to a bigger audience. It's going to be like, Oh, this person is active in stories.

We like that. So we're going to start showing her posts to more people. Okay. Um, they this again, like this just opens up an avenue for people to contact and connect with you on an entirely different level. So the way They work is you can upload pre recorded videos, you can upload, you know, take already images from your phone, you can do live streams you can do, you can use images within your Instagram page already. So you can take an Instagram post and go and share it to your story.

And then you know, maybe add it to a highlight, you can take photos directly through the stories, part of the app. So all kinds of thing, it's a very robust tool. And if we're not using it, then we're not getting the most reach that we possibly could. So, the first five highlights that show on your page, which I'll show you in just a moment. Um, the first five highlights there you'll see and then you can scroll to the right or left to see more of your highlights. If you have 1012 highlights.

You can see those by scrolling left to right. But what I want you to think about is think about your most five, your most important five highlights that you want to highlight. So my suggestions for Any type of beauty professional is, um, is going to be what you see here below. But it can vary depending on your target audience, your MKC, um, your niche, your demographic, that kind of thing. So you have to kind of decide what is going to be the best for you. And there aren't currently a limit on how many highlights you can have.

So have fun with this. But the most, the five most important ones that I'm going to tell you to have are doing about me. So think of this sort of like your website, okay? So think about those, you know, really high level things that people go to your website for, they want to learn about you, they want to get in touch with you. They want to learn about what you have to offer for your services. They might want to see your portfolio and of course, they want to see reviews and client testimonials.

So those are going to be my top five that I that if if you had to only choose five, choose these five, um, in the way that you do. This is you You post, what I what I do is, is I will create a cover image in Canva that fits in a nice circle. So I'll go and create those beautifully in Canva. And then I'll upload them to my story. And you know, make sure that you take location, make sure that you, you know, add something fun, you know, to it, something that, you know, get people excited about it engaged, do some kind of an announcement that says, hey, I'm adding you know, these highlights to my page, make sure to you know, tune in and check them out every once in a while. But once you've got those created in Canva, upload those to your story.

And then what you'll do is you'll click on the plus sign on the highlights tab, right on the front page of your Instagram and add highlights and then you add it from your stories. And then you can edit it so that it fits nicely within that little circle. And then every time that you go in Create a new story that falls under one of these categories, then you can edit the highlight and add it to that highlight. Okay? So again so like about me, do some lifestyle, your personal stuff. This is where you can put in like, you know your kids, like don't put pictures of your kids on your business page on a regular post, but you can definitely add that stuff to your lifestyle, highlight your about me highlight.

The next one is, you know services or highlighting your signature offer or a few of your signature offer offers. The other one I like to highlight is promos offers advertising specials, those kinds of things behind the scenes is always really fun. And then of course reviews and testimonials is extremely important because what we're trying to do is we're trying to attract potential clients. So some other suggestions you could do announcements and updates you know, contact tools before and afters, giveaways questions, start conversations, share funny names conducted interview, do surveys, photos that don't make the cut for your main page, you know, put those up here. Um, you could announce events, you could do tutorials, there are so many things that you can do. So just be creative.

So here is what I'm talking about as far as what your your highlights are. So those circles that are halfway between halfway down the page are your highlights. And these people are doing their highlights pretty well. So they're, they're pretty branded, right? So, um, some of them have them, uh, you know, like, you can see these, these top, the top, second through the fifth one, those are all branded highlights. So they probably created those in Canva, or, you know, possibly, you know, Illustrator or in Photoshop or something, but Canva does the job just as well.

So create an image in Canva. Usually I like to stick to a square image in Canva, which I'll show you in a second. Have those in just a moment, and then upload those to your stories and then add them to your highlights. And then over time, you'll start to add more and more to these highlights. And then, and I'll show you here real quick, this is Canva like I mentioned. So here is the example of your, you know, design in Canva.

And I personally like to put a circle just more visually to make sure that like my, my image is my design is going to fit nicely in a circle so I use it more as a guideline. You don't have to keep the circle on it once you download the image, because if you want to upload that to your story, and you don't want to see that circle, then just remove the circle before you download it and upload it to Instagram but the circle is there just mainly for visually while I'm designing. I like to use That, to give me a good idea of what its gonna look like in a round highlight. Then I'm the tool number three that is one of the most important things is your book button. So when you offer a service on Instagram, you need to have multiple ways to get in touch with you to make it easier for the user.

By not using the book bucket button, you could be missing out on potential bookings. So this is currently in my expertise and opinion this is currently the most underutilized tool in the beauty industry. Now if I scroll back up to this page here, you can see I grabbed 10 beautiful pages that have you know, beautiful brands, you know, nice photos, photography, imagery, great BIOS, lots and lots of followers. But look at you can see that none of them not One of them is using a book button. And they are missing out on such huge potential. Okay, so this is the most underutilized tool in the beauty industry and probably the most important.

So when you are setting up your booking book now button, the best and most cost effective which actually is free. The software that I teach and use that integrates with Instagram is set more. This is by far my favorite free software and has an amazing, abundant robust interface that allows you to do so many integrations for free, there, their pro version is even better. That's where you can, you know offer text message reminders and things like that. But honestly the free version of set more is by far my favorite and the one That I find after testing a ton of different bookings as far as you know, acuity style seat Square Square is great for your payment processing and doing gift cards and things like that, which I absolutely love. But set more is awesome for integrating with Instagram, and they, they just have so many amazing tools that you can use inside there.

Um, next. Don't be afraid to promote your booking page through your stories and your regular posts. So this is huge, you know, selling is goes hand in hand with being successful on social media, okay, so don't be afraid to promote people know that they're coming to your page, your business page, they know that they're coming there to see what you have to offer, and potentially become a client. So don't be afraid to promote your booking page, through your stories and your writer posts and through your bio and those kinds of things. So We have to hold the hand of our visitors to take some kind of action and get them into our chairs. So continue to always point them in the direction of your page, whether that is Lincoln bio, or click that book button, whatever that is.

If you don't have set more, there are a ton of there are a list of free inexpensive booking options available when setting up your book button in the Instagram settings so you can see what there's available. There's, you know, acuity Vaccaro style seat booksy there's a bunch of different ones that are available to you. And so you can always use one of those. But what do you do if your online booking software isn't available to integrate with Instagram? I know a lot. A lot of hairstylist and beauty professionals are using square which like I said is awesome.

So if that's the case square currently doesn't integrate with Instagram. We're hoping that it will be In the near future, but make sure that your booking link is at least at the very least in your bio. So don't just put your website domain, you know, URL up in your bio, put your actual booking link up in your bio. And anytime you're posting or doing a story, that's your call to action. So that is your, you know, let's say at the end of a post, say, book now, Lincoln bio, okay, remember to guide and promote it on your stories, your highlights, and in your posts. So this again, here is where you would see the book button right down halfway down your Instagram page.

So for your homework for day five, I want you to think about your highlights. I want you to list out the five most important highlights for your business. And then eventually, like I said, you'll be able to add more highlights later on but add lists out