8 Steps & 6 Apps to create your Instagram Stories Strategy

Having a robust strategy for all of your marketing is imperartive. Stories is no different! While it’s more of an ‘on the fly’ aspect than other areas that require more curation and editing, Stories should still be strategic and made to work for you! Instagram Stories are only around for 24 hours so don’t need to be ‘perfect’.
Done is better than perfect! Let’s get started on your strategy:
- Decide on how personal you want it to be. Are you the face of your brand? Even if being on video doesn’t appeal to you (let’s be honest here — not many of us are budding actors!) it is important that you are visible. People build a bond with a brand by getting to know who is behind it. If they get to Know — Like — Trust you then they are more likely to Buy from you. That said, you don’t need to be a talking head 100% of the time! Don’t let fear of video hold you back. If you’re not feeling fabulous then have a backup, but you DO need to be present some of the time — it’s only there for 24 hours!
- Build some theme templates. Using Canva (app) or, our favorite, A Design Kit (app) you can design some story templates or tiles that you can write on for your stories. Keep these in the photos on your phone for quick and easy access when you need to edit & upload them.
- The size for Instagram Stories is 9:16 or 1080 pixels wide by 1920 pixels tall. A Design Kit has a preset for this size or you can use the custom setting on Canva to achieve it. We built 3 different ‘tiles’ (backgrounds) that we can write on and use to start/finish stories or post a quote. This helps us to stay on-brand when we’re posting a story.
- Plan when you’re going to publish stories. You don’t need to publish a story every day, although this is a good idea to build followers and watchers. What we find really helpful is to have some in reserve that fit with the content strategy we’re using across our platforms. This way we can keep things consistent in our messaging, but we still have the option to dive in and publish an ad-hoc story in between. 3 of the 5 days during the working week our stories will be planned, for example.
- Creating your stories. Instagram Stories videos are best posted natively, in the app. You can record video in the 9:16 format on your phone to upload later or use it live, if you prefer. You can also record live in the app, store to your phone and upload when the time is right. You have a number of options in stories to add location, hashtag, stickers, polls and tag your friends, businesses or collaborators. Here’s a quick ‘how to’ video to get you started.
- Content! Getting content for IG Stories is a lot easier than you think. When you come to write your blog, or go about your daily tasks you have an opportunity to showcase what you’re doing on IG Stories. Take, for example, the Instagram pro, Jasmine Star. Her feed is beautifully curated but her stories are often a lot more ‘raw’ and use snaps from her daily life; the gym, coffee house, dog walk, holiday… you get the picture! The key thing is that whatever content she uses, Jasmine manages to tie it back to her brand and content topic she’s working on. Following the 80/20 rule, she manages to bring you in to her life while building trust with you so you are more inclined to consume her content and buy her products.
- More content! Get into the mindset of ‘everyday marketing’ with your content. Your daily routine will have a lot to do with your business, because that’s what you do! Your goal is to find ways to bring this in to your social media without it intruding on your life and friends.
For example;
Today I’m going to be coaching one of my Social Media Mastery clients. She’s local so we’re doing it at my house.
To put this in context I’ve spoken to camera explaining who is coming and what i’ve got planned for her, filmed myself tidying the desk (which i’ll speed up as it’s pretty dull!), taken a snapshot of us working through her content plan to show what happens when a client comes over. When she leaves I’ll do an ‘outro’ post to wrap things up.
If you’re out and about you might take a short video of your journey (from the passenger seat or hands-free!), a face-to-camera chat about what you’re doing and where you’re going, a little bit while you’re there and then the final bit once you’re done.
The best thing is it doesn’t need to be staged. Quite a lot of my intro/outro bits happen in the car before I head off to meet someone and afterwards reflecting on what we’ve been doing in the meeting. While I’m with them I might take a few photos and tie that to the story as I edit it. I rarely post these ‘live’ as want to order them and make sense of it all before doing so, add music, badges, hashtags etc. It should all still be quite quick and easy — this isn’t something you’re going to spend hours editing in iMovie or FinalCut Pro — it’s only going to be around for 24 hours, after all!
When you’re not feeling too video-friendly you can add a sequence of images that tell your story. These can be stills from the day or event, linked with some video between them, for example.
3. Apps to make this SO much easier!

These are the apps I use for Instagram Stories. Aside from the YouTube Audio Library, these are my go-to:
- Canva. This is a great image editing tool. You can use it to build backgrounds, templates, logos and branding cards to include in your stories.
- Snapseed. Another awesome photo-editor with a vast range of options for you to use.
- Pixabay is a free image selector. Ensure you select images or clips that are CC (Collective Commons) and so free for you to use commercially.
the next 4 apps are video related and discussed below, (except Clips which we mentioned above).
Uploading to Instagram Stories:
From your profile, tap the circle with your account name from the top left corner. You will then have a screen appear like this one

You can select images or video clips that you have saved on your camera roll / photos app by clicking on the square on the left where you see my face!
Your other options to make something in-app are along the bottom. The record/new-photo button is central, the arrows swop between cameras and the face with stars opens the face filters.
On the bottom menu the ‘Type’ option gives a coloured screen which you can change by tapping on the circle on the left. You can then type on the page, highlight your text, and change the style of the font using the top-central button.
TIP!
If you select and open a photo from your camera roll you can then cover it with a colour block and erase sections to make them visible.

To do this select a photo, pinch to resize how you want it, select the ‘felt tip’ option (far left circle) from the menu bar at the top of the screen
select the colour you want and then press & hold your finger on the picture on your screen until the colour fills the screen.

Next, select the eraser tool (4th from the left) and erase the section over the part of the image you want to show, until it looks something like this:

You can add text, emoji’s, GIFs and some really fun & engaging tools to your post, whether static image or video.
These are found by selecting the square face on the top of the screen, which launches a drop down and slider menu with 3 pages of options. The interactive options are on the 1st page and include:

— Location — you can tag where your story relates to, or was shot.
— @Mention allows you to tag another user / account (Instagram)
— #Hashtag allows you to enter a searchable hashtag. Suggestions will come up as you type.
The really cool features are the Poll, Slider, and Questions options. These all generate a good deal of engagement and are still new enough to be interesting and fun!
The camera icon allows you to take a picture and add it to the image on screen.
Now, what next?
Editing your videos for Instagram Stories: The Quick & Dirty guide.
Music and Sound on your story
Instagram has recently removed the ability to add music directly in stories from business accounts. While this is ok-ish as you’ll mainly be speaking, if you want to add music you need to do a bit more work. Remember — if you’re adding music to a commercial (business) account then you need to have a commercial license to use the music — UNLESS — you use a track that is not subject to copyright issues such as one carrying the CC (creative commons) label. Check that the policy of the track you want to use allows commercial use and whether or not the owner requires you to give credit (exactly the same as you would for a photo) on your post.
Youtube has an audio library of tracks cleared for your commercial use. To access these go to: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary and select your chosen track.
Before you download it for use check whether attribution (giving the author credit) is requried — you can do that by clicking on the icon on the fight under where it says ‘Creative Commons Attribution’ .
To add music to your story you’ll need to have a video editing app such as one of those listed below. NB: at this time iMovie and Clips do not support the 9:16 video size in their editing suits without A LOT of faffing around…
If you’d rather do it without an app you can play your selected track on your phone while recording (if the background noise isn’t too much!) while you film your story. This isn’t top quality but serves a purpose.
15 Second clips…
Each Instagram stories video clips is a maximum of 15 seconds long. You can stitch a load of video clips and images together but each must last no more than 15 seconds…
Many of you will find it far easier to record your Instagram story in 1 sitting using the video function on your phone, rather than using the native recording inside the Instagram stories app where you are limited to 15 seconds (Unless going ‘Live’). Once you have around a minute or two of content you need to chop it up into 15 second long sections to upload to Instagram Stories.
Apps to edit Instagram Stories.
1, InShot.
I mentioned this briefly earlier but it really is a little workhorse of an app and makes IG Stories so much easier!
I paid for the music upgrade (£2.99) which has been entirely worth it! The music library requires you to give credit on the post to the origin, but it also has a really neat function where you can air-drop tracks that you’ve downloaded from sites such as YouTube AudioLibrary
InShot (no affiliation — just genuine love for this app!) is worth it. Period. It edits video to all the formats you can think of. You can stitch videos together, cut and edit, add ‘B roll’, stickers, animations, music, narration and even sound effects! Outside of video, you can also edit photos (to add to your stories) and make collages. See what I mean about ‘workhorse’?!
All this. In One App: Magic!
Here’s one I made in just a few seconds…
InShot Example
2, Unfold
Unfold is the glamour app for Instagram Stories. It has beautifully curated templates and themes that you can download (some free, some paid for) and populate with your video.
Unfold allows you to use a template background and have your videos running within it. You can have 1 video and 1 image, 2 videos playing at the same time, or editorial style templates that look really slick when posted to stories. Some of the templates are free and others come with an in-app purchase of between 99p.
Unfold downloads to your camera roll /photos app in 15 second bursts. Remember to check the part of the video you want to show is visible in the 15 second clip you upload.
Here’s one I made earlier ;-)
Unfold Example1. Unfold Example 2.
3, CutStory for Instagram.
This is made far easier by a range of apps — we use CutStory for Instagram
Stories which is free or has a 99p upgrade to remove the logo on the videos you edit through it. The beauty of CutStory is that it also sorts the music issue for you ;-) we’re not affiliated with CutStory (yet — hey @CutStoryApp — DM me for promo rates!)
CutStory takes the video you have shot and cuts it in to 15 second clips, ready for Instagram Stories. Thankfully, it saves the clips in order to your photos app. Once you’re in IG Stories you just select them in the order they appear, and upload; Voilà!
CutStory Tutorial
So that’s it! A quick & dirty guide to getting started with stories! I hope you’ve learned enough to get going — remember: Better done than perfect!
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