How to Create Instagram Content Plan for Your Business?
The importance of content is discussed by marketers here and there. Everyone teaches to create valuable content and to prove expertise with Instagram captions. But does it always matter? Here we’ll try to figure out which content resonates with your type of business and your audience.
Main principles of content planning for Instagram
Visual concept. Since Instagram is still a visual social media channel, your grid’s beauty, or at least some aesthetic consistency is a must. It’s been said many times before, so we’re not going to pay some specific attention to it here. Just a simple rule: the grid should look conceptual. So before starting managing your Instagram profile and pumping every single penny into targeted advertising and influencers, work on the visual part of your page. And that’s not being related only to images. Stories and IGTV are also significant.
Consistency. Considering the total misunderstanding of what this actually is, it would be helpful to say that this is not only about timing. Yes, timing may play a vital role if you’ve properly analyzed it and found the right one for your account. So when it comes to Instagram, consistency should be easily tracked in your visual part, captions, your brand values, and the way you talk to your audience. More and more marketers pay attention not only to numbers and stats like ER but also to the fashion you communicate with your followers.
Audience understanding. This principle should probably be your main one. Your content may be genius and super engaging in theory but irrelevant for your followers since you don’t know them.
Knowing not only the demography of your audience, but its motivation, fears, doubts, and wishes is one of the basic rules of conventional marketing. So to understand your customers better, visit their profiles every so often, scroll their following, make polls in Stories, host live webinars or live streams to talk to them real-time and search user-generated content that mentions you to see what people actually talk about your business.
Competitors’ content strategy analysis. Find your competitors on Instagram and check what, how, and, more importantly, why they implement in their Instagram content plan. That’s needed to be done for a deeper understanding of their strong and weak points, analyzing their audience’s feedback, and adapting successful ideas.
Practical tips on creating your Instagram winning content plan
Concentrate on why you post
Ask yourself what you want to say and achieve with every particular publication. Do you want to sell? Or build a loyal community? Or get to know your audience better? Keeping this question in mind, you’ll get rid of irrelevant and random content that doesn’t resonate with your audience and business.
Test everything
What does your audience like better — single images or carousels, videos or images, long or short captions, or maybe no captions at all, emojis or their absence, loads of Stories or none at all, IGTV videos or clips in the feed? Can you answer this question from scratch? If no, keep on testing. Try various types of content and constantly analyze what your audience responses to. But again, be consistent and yet creative — brainstorm and make your team think with you.
Use content planning solutions
Planning Instagram content can be a daunting task, especially for digital agencies who schedule content in bulk. So it’s vital to find an auto-publishing assistant to work with. Combin Scheduler is an easy-to-use, effective and free Instagram scheduler.
Within the app, you can effortlessly plan your posts and Stories for ahead sheduling or instant publishing, write captions, tag other users and add hashtags, add a location tag, set the publishing data, and simply forget about Instagram for a while.
And to make sure the visual concept looks sleek, use the in-app calendar that serves you to style your grid.
Correlate your business and the content
Content strategy for different businesses should vary, obviously. And it’s not only about belonging to the B2B or B2C sector — that would be too vague. We’ve analyzed our audience and their businesses, and here are the tips we want to share.
How to correlate the content with your business
Analyzing our customers, we’ve concluded that the majority of them are marketers and digital agencies; representatives of visual businesses like photographers, designers, illustrators; software developers and owners of software developing startups; consulting entrepreneurs from different areas; and e-commerce companies.
Considering this, we’ll concentrate on these fields and alike to give you relevant tips. It’s impossible to write down content marketing tips for any type of business existing, but you can still leverage some of the below in your own occupation to power up your content.
Digital agencies and marketers
For such a business, it’s vital to develop expertise and prove it with successful cases. Marketers can publish charts, studies, success stories of their clients both in photo and video formats. But aside from all the valuable and useful content, pay attention to the visual style and engaging posts. Keep an eye on the latest marketing trends and share insights for free to earn people’s trust.
Apart from the above, make sure your business account has a face. Introduce your team to the audience and share your routine life from time to time.
Consulting
It’s pretty much the same as with digital agencies, but here we imply entrepreneurs who work for themselves and earn with consulting not as part of an agency or a company. These include fitness or health bloggers, legal advisers, psychologists, economists, and alike.
Here, as well, is the need to write captions, give working tips, and get the most of Stories and IGTV. With Stories, you can create polls and quizzes to check the audience’s knowledge about an issue related to your professional field. For instance, you’re a dietician, so you can ask your followers, which of the two products has more calories or which food is healthier. And then, start a live video with detailed coverage of the issue.
Visual Businesses
Photographers, designers, creative agencies, makeup artists, fashion stylists, Instagram stores with clothes, cosmetics, and hundreds of other similar businesses where the visual image is what matters most, should first and foremost focus on this.
If you feel like writing long stories under your posts, go for it. Sometimes it’s really on point, but if you sell lingerie, for instance, everything you should write in most cases is available sizes and price. If that seems to be too dull or price-tag-like, add a short description. But there’s definitely no need to write captions with maximum available 2,200 characters. No one will read them. Save your time for a quality photoshoot or editing the visual content, instead.
IT, Software, and Computer Technology
Software and computer technology are the fields where it’s challenging to bet on the visual part. But still, you can edit all your images in one conceptual style and create your grid in similar colours.
In this case, you can try uploading how-to videos, show your product in action, post gifs with tricks and hacks for your clients, and host Q&A sessions with your support team.
In conclusion
While creating the content for your Instagram business page, make sure you put yourself in a place of your typical client. If you are a customer of a similar company, what content of theirs catches your eye? Do you often read captions or watch IGTV? All the tips above may work for one business and do nothing for the other, so you should test everything and analyze what resonates with your company and audience.
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