When you’ve put all the hard work into creating a fantastic event, the last thing you want is for it to be a flop. The last ingredient in a successful event is promotion – and how you market your event matters. Instagram offers huge potential for marketing it to a wide audience and through one aspect of the platform – Instagram Stories – you can create a sense of urgency amongst your viewers that will build enormous hype around your event. Let’s find out how to promote your event and bring in the audience you deserve.

What Is Instagram Stories?

Even if you’re familiar with Instagram as a platform for promoting your products, services and events, you may not have encountered Instagram Stories. Stories were brought out by Instagram in 2016 and have grown into a popular part of the site with hundreds of millions of stories published daily. “The USP of a story is its temporality – stories, once posted, are time-limited to 24 hours, and then they vanish,” says William Samuels, a social media marketer at Draftbeyond and Researchpapersuk. “This means that users feel a sense of urgency when clicking on stories – instilling this FOMO (fear of missing out) in your audience makes your event unmissable.”

Leveraging Influencers

Influencers are a big deal on Instagram and can offer you a way to reach a wider audience, providing authentic engagement with your brand and the event you’re running. People are seeking social proof of brands before they commit so influencers are a way you can prove that your event is worth attending.

Reach out to local influencers – you can find them through geotagged posts or industry-relevant hashtags – and see if you can collaborate on posts with them to promote your event.

Story Strategies

Planning your Stories campaign is important as there are a number of variables that you need to align for a successful promotion. In advance of your first post or collaborations, figure out what information you need to include in your posts, what the optimal time to post your stories is (remember, they’re only up for 24 hours!) and which hashtags you’re going to be using.

Creating a bespoke hashtag for your event is a great way to start a conversation amongst your users, letting your event spread organically.

Attention-Grabbing Visuals

When someone clicks on your story, you only have a few seconds to make an impression. A story can be a maximum of fifteen seconds long but if users don’t have their attention caught within the first few seconds, they’ll be swiping away.

Designing some portrait-oriented attention-grabbing visuals for your story is essential. These can be images, design or video – the story mode is customizable so you can get creative! 

Key Information

With just a brief period to inform your audience, you’ll need to pare back the information on offer. Overloading your audience will mean that the important details of your event are lost. When, where and why the audience should attend your event are essential – but you can use your visuals to tell part of this story.

Think about how your event is going to offer value to your audience, and make sure this comes across in your story. You should be solving a problem they may not yet even recognize they have.

Utilize All The Features

“There are some business-oriented special features on stories that you can take advantage of to offer more information to your audience,” says Peter Walker, an event manager at Writinity and Last Minute Writing. “For example, you can now embed a link in your story and allow users to swipe up to follow the link – this can direct users to your website or event page where more information will be forthcoming.”

The countdown feature can inject even more urgency into your story. Users will see a ticking clock, bringing them ever closer to the action and ensuring they sign up for your event.

Save To Your Highlights

Although the ephemerality of a story is part of their appeal, they don’t have to be gone with the wind. You can save your stories in your ‘highlights’ so they’ll appear permanently linked on your Instagram profile.

This can become a valuable source of information for your users, so sort your stories into folders and pin them to your profile. One series of highlights can be dedicated to your upcoming event.

Enjoy Your Success

The final step? Sitting back and watching a successful event unfold. Thanks to the time-limited factor on Instagram Stories you’ll have created fever-pitch hype around your event.


Ashley Halsey is a professional writer at Assignment Help and Gumessays.com. She is a content marketer who specializes in helping brands use organic strategies to expand their reach, utilizing social media and word of mouth campaigns.