Your Guide To Instagram Content Planning

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Whether you’re a business owner, an influencer, or a digital marketer, or social media agency it’s likely you’ve wondered how to optimize your Instagram content strategy and create an Instagram content plan. Not to mention that you want to improve your lead generation and boost engagement for increased sales. The tried and tested way to personally interact with your audience is efficient, but you don’t always have the time. Above that, you must also consider Instagram’s smart upgrades, which can lead your business to lose followers if you’re not ready to pivot. Nevertheless, if you don’t have a top-quality content strategy ready, you’ve already prepared to fail. But even so, you shouldn’t have just any strategy in place. It must be agile and scalable.

The mobile-only and visual posts on Instagram (IG) determine people to make impulsive purchases daily.

All you need to do is create different types of top-quality and helpful content, show up and you’ll increase conversions before you know it. That's the basics of an Instagram content plan. But there are a few simple things you need to know on how to plan content for your Instagram marketing strategy and I will show you how to do it.

So, if you’re looking to grow your brand’s awareness and boost sales, here’s a brief on the keys to create a killer Instagram content plan.

What’s Makes a Killer IG Content Plan?

An Instagram content plan records your brand’s sponsored posts, but also the entertaining and helpful insights you want to distribute through Instagram. It’s how you create consumer trust by guaranteeing consistent, clear messaging, and maintaining a positive brand image. Also, you’ll reduce your marketing and stress costs through automated interaction with followers and generate lead acquisition. Above that, it’ll save you time and provide a clear framework, which you can modify and adapt according to current social trends.

Strategic Instagram content registers and measures your marketing progress so you can achieve your goals on the platform. It’ll save you time and money and prevents you from worrying about what to post when it’s time for new content. Even better, you’ll always know what to publish and when it’s the best time to do it. Create an informative, structured, and clear content plan for the next month and you’ll be setting the grounds for your brand’s social media success.

It’s difficult to organically grow a new Instagram account don't ever buy fake followers if you want to see real organic growth I covered this in depth in one of my previous posts which you can read more about here. Additionally, accounts that grow fast usually publish viral content or they’re selling trending products. These accounts mainly depend on their followers doing the advertising for them, without additional effort on their part. Usually, such a result can only be achieved by highly skilled and experienced eCommerce merchants.

Sketching Your Content Plan

You can design your Instagram content plan in different formats such as excel spreadsheets, pdfs or simple notebooks. But for a

more professional approach, you can leverage dedicated apps including CoSchedule, Later, Any.do, or Evernote. These apps will automatically post your content according to the times you’ve established.

As with all aspects of business, you should keep your content plan simple and clear. To clarify, take a perfume brand, for example. The content schedule for a day could look like this:

8:00 A.M. Good morning. An intriguing post with a soft promotion of your products. 1:00 P.M. Exciting post with the new perfume your brand is launching. 4:00 P.M. Survey asking your audience how often they buy new perfume. 8:00 P.M. Promotions for customer loyalty. 10:00 P.M. A brief on how you created the new perfume.

The above topics clearly show you what type of posts you must publish and at what times. So, by planning, you always know what to prepare. But before establishing the times and days for posts, make sure you know your target audience’s peak activity levels. There’s no use in publishing when your prospects are sleeping or busy.

How Often Should You Post?

You won’t find a magic formula to this proverbial question. That’s because what works for one business, doesn’t work for the other. Take, for example, National Geographic and Nike. While National Geographic posts between 5 to 7 times a day on Instagram and reaches an average of 225k likes on each post and a 0.23 percent engagement level, Nike only posts several times every month but has an average of 315k likes on each post and engagement of 0.38 percent.

For more info on what is the best time to post for your business, you can visit this post.

So, both accounts reach huge numbers with different publishing strategies. You can check different case studies about what strategy worked for a variety of brands, but don’t confuse their strategies with yours. Instead of searching for the perfect solution, focus on consistency, top-quality content and sticking to your objective so you can measure the performance of your posts.

Always Keep Up to Speed with Trends

Even if you plan your content in advance, you should craft is to feel “in the moment”. Leave a few posts without captions, so you can add them in real-time later. Another technique is to use Instagram Stories to keep your content fresh and up to date. You can post daily “good morning” Stories to ask your audience what they’re planning to do on that day. Stories will also help you determine how your content will perform when you post it. Consider holidays and other important events which are trending on Instagram.

Choose the Right Photos for Your Posts

Photos are the backbone of your Instagram posts. And batching your photos is essential to planning your feed. You can create original content, use stock photos or curate photos. Arrange, edit and include your photos in your publishing calendar to have them ready for your upcoming posts. The best approach is to curate content daily.

Sketch and Schedule

After arranging your photos, you should visually plan your posts. You can use different tools and software such as Planoly, Iconosquare or Content Planner to rearrange your posts for the right balance to create an aesthetically attractive feed.

Once you’ve arranged your photos, you can schedule your posts. Use analytics to understand when it’s the right time to schedule your posts and automate the process with specialized software such as Iconosquare.

Originally published at https://www.mysocialmotto.com on September 5, 2019.