The Step-By-Step Guide to Creating A Top-Notch Content Plan For Your Instagram Business Profile

One of the keys to a successful Instagram presence is the ability to constantly create engaging content for your audience.

Without a proper plan in place, it is easy to fall behind on content creation and lose the organic reach that you have worked so hard to build with the Instagram algorithm.

Today, we are going to talk about how you can create a content plan that will keep your content flowing and grow your audience and engagement consistently on Instagram.

1.    Establishing an overall theme for your content

This is probably the most important part of the puzzle – your content theme.

To begin with, ask yourself – What does my business/brand represent? If you had to summarize what you bring to the table in a few words/adjectives, what would those be?

Are you an educator? A motivator? A funny, quirky presence? Or a little bit of all of these?

Once you have a broad idea of what your presence should feel like to your audience, you can get into more specific things like color palettes, style of photography and grid layouts.

Keep in mind that the more consistent and congruent your feed is, the more appealing it will be to new people who happen to visit your profile after discovering a piece of your content.

2.    Planning a content calendar

Once you have an idea about your theme, you need to start thinking more specifically about the goals you want to reach with your Instagram content.

Are you looking to sell more products? Build a large following? Do you want a lot of people commenting and sharing your content?

These questions are important because they will guide what kind of content you should be creating specifically. You should also consider at this stage how much time you have to spend on creating Instagram content.

Once you have this figured out, you can start building a calendar that will outline exactly what you should be posting and when.

To keep your content fresh, consider posting a mix of photos, videos and filler content like quotes or reposting content from your community.

3.    Building all of the essentials you will need for content creation

Unless you’re already employing an agency, you will have to get your team to do the content creation for your Instagram profile. 

Small businesses who don’t have dedicated employees for social media content often fall behind because they only post sporadically when they have a bout of inspiration.

If you’re starting out, you need to make sure you have a bunch of different assets ready to go and a pipeline for building fresh content.

For example, if you are going to be posting a lot of quotes or motivational content, you should pick one or two layouts and stick with them. You don’t have to design these yourself – apps like Spark Post and Over provide thousands of free templates and stock photos that you can adapt to your brand.

If you’re going to be posting a lot of video content, it might be worth it to get some basic, cheap lights and a budget microphone so you can speak into the camera or interview other people.

4.    Strategically laying out your schedule

Once you have created a few pieces of content in advance, it is time to schedule them so they go out whenever your audience is most active.

Look at your Instagram Insights to see the times and days of the week where your followers are most active – this is when you want to post for maximum impact.

There are plenty of scheduling tools out there, both free and paid, which will work according to the scale of your content. If you’re just starting out, using the free plan from Buffer or Hootsuite will work just fine. 

If you want more advanced features, you can look at solutions like SocialPilot or Later that offer greater flexibility for a small monthly fee.

5.    Optimizing your content for maximum reach

Regardless of what anyone says, hashtags are crucially important for getting noticed on Instagram. The right hashtags can make the difference between a picture getting 100 likes and 1,000 likes.

If you’re just starting out, make sure you add in a list of small to medium competition hashtags (less than a million total posts) in conjunction with your branded hashtags.

6.    Adjusting to market feedback in real time

One of the most important aspects of a content plan is the ability to adjust to market feedback. If your content isn’t being received the way you want to, change things up. See what other competitors in your space are doing. 

On the other hand, if a particular type of post is doing really well, consider making more of that kind of content. After all, you want to give your audience what they are asking for if you want more engagement and growth.

An Instagram content plan is the cornerstone of any successful Instagram brand. It takes away the guesswork and confusion that is usually involved in content creation and allows you to focus on building your business in the real world without having to worry about your social media presence.

We hope you implement these steps to build your own Instagram content plan for fun and profit. All the best!