For today’s busy marketers, planning is everything. Due to this fact, most of them leave Instagram content behind their sphere of marketing interest. Marketers believe that Instagram is all about spontaneous content and that it doesn’t support any regular posting. In their mind it sounds like users just take photos, post them, and followers click the "like" button.

This way of thinking is super-limiting! Schedule-maniacs can prepare numerous posts beforehand and even let your phone do the posting job for you.

We’re providing you with an easy way to create a one-hour Instagram content plan for a whole month and increase engagement on your posts. After reading this, you will learn how to create, upload, and schedule your Instagram photos out of turmoil.

Manage Collaborators All in One Place

If you collaborate with other Instagram users or photographers or manage multiple Instagram accounts, you need to track your content. With several media sources, this might be difficult. Nobody wants to miss something great or post the same images for the second time!

To keep everything in order, you can streamline the process and collect content from people you follow.

Anyone who contributes to your content should be able to upload photos or videos directly into your content library. Then you can accept the content you like, and schedule it to your social profiles. There are numerous apps to help you with this (Contributors or The Preview App).

Know Your Best Time to Post

When choosing Instagram as a marketing channel, you realize that making captivating content is crucial. You need to make a lot of effort not only to create really breathtaking photos, but also, make sure that people will actually see them.

To make sure that your audience gets the most of your account, you need to post photos when they are most active. Some experts claim particular parts of the day more and less suitable for posting.

Well, maybe this advice works, but only in case the proposed time matches your personalized best time to post. That is why finding your own days and hours of activity is much more efficient.

First, you need to view the analytics of your page. Enter Instagram Insights, then go to the bar-chart icon on the top, find the tab called Audience, and view the data. Enter the Followers section, and you will see the chart that presents your personal statistics.

Instagram will show you the most popular days of the week and hours when your visitors are most active. This is an excellent hint for you. Post photos at the most popular days and hours, and you will see that more likes and views appear in your posts.

Craft Your Captions Before Publishing

Creating captions for your photos in advance is an integral part of your Instagram content plan. You might want to create categories for your photos. Doing so, you will quickly draft several captions. Make them flexible, and you will find a way to match your pictures with pre-written text. 

For instance, let's imagine that you plan to post some personal stories this month. This might be a motivating story, a career-oriented post, and a sweet, heart-warming story.

First, find some photos you would like to post. Then, plan the captions and see which of your photos match them. Here are some ideas:

• Photo of you doing some hiking – a motivating story about reaching the heights despite difficulties;
• Photo of you sitting with your laptop on the green grass – a post about how you got into working for online assignment help companie as a freelance writer;
• Photo of your dog – a heart-warming post about friendship and understanding without words.

All you need is to write the captions, make some matches, and add a couple of hashtags. Divide your photos into categories, and you won't have to waste too much time inventing some ingenious Instagram content for every single post. Dozens of planning apps will help you see your future feed before you post anything, so use them for a more efficient automatic workflow.

Create a Strong Content Calendar

Image source: shebold.life

Considering the information you have received from your personal statistics, you may want to create a Instagram content calendar. Based on your retrieved data, decide how many posts per day you will make. Some of them might be pre-scheduled, the others – real-time. Maybe, you want to publish pre-written posts in the morning and add real-time content in the evening.

Remember, we were talking about the categories for your Instagram posts? You can go further when creating yourself a calendar. Once you have a list of categories, you can add some more and devote each day of the week to a specific theme. For example:

• Motivating posts on Mondays – inspirational quotes, personal achievements, ideas;
• Anecdotes on Tuesdays – funny stories, jokes;
• Professional advice on Wednesdays – guidelines, tips, advice;
• Communication on Thursdays – posts where you encourage your audience to take part in a conversation;
• Promotion on Fridays – advertisement, product presentation;
• Lifestyle on the weekend – your activities, places you visit, interests and hobbies you have.

Schedule Your Posts and Include Relevant Hashtags

When you’re scheduling your posts, you will easily prepare the captions as well as hashtags in advance. Remember that your hashtags are connected with the captions you add, so you will need to plan both since the tags must be relevant.

To improve your posts and let people find you easily, you need to add the best hashtags. Here is how:

• Research your audience’s interests

A win-win way to find the best hashtags is to look through the posts of your audience. Make fast research to collect hashtags they use most frequently.

• Research your competitors

Your competitors will do the same thing: researching the target audience. Maybe, they have found something/someone you didn’t notice! Take a look at their pages and see which tags they add to posts.

• Related search

Instagram has a Tag search that provides suggestions of similar tags. This might be a perfect source of industry-related ones.

Fill in Areas with Tips and Tricks Related to Your Niche

Make your Instagram not only good-looking but also useful for the viewers! Share your professional knowledge with people and give some real-life stories connected to your career, as well as tips, advice, and guides. This is an excellent way to:

• Increase your authority
• Increase brand awareness
• Add diverse content
• Share practical knowledge

Non-promotional texts that give your audience a helping hand are great in many ways. They don’t include any adds, staying relevant and shareable.

Conclusion

Some marketers claim that there is no room for spontaneous actions in your campaign. Well, there is no need to be that radical when you use Instagram for marketing purposes. This platform is great for spontaneous photos, but if you take it seriously (and you do), then you should plan and schedule your content as well.

Using the tips listed above, you will efficiently complete a plan for an entire month in an hour. Keeping your post-flow in balance, you will avoid the hustle and get more free time. Isn't it something we all want to reach? So enjoy presented advice and happy posting!

Author's Bio:

Jeff Blaylock is a freelance copywriter with a great interest in social media marketing. However, his attention goes far beyond writing.

Jeff tracks the latest trends and researches the way media materials work for efficient advertising. He has experience in blog and service promotion and gladly shares his ideas in articles and posts.