Today I’m going to be sharing with you how to create an Instagram content plan. You do need an Instagram content plan so you can batch your content, and be able to focus on what you do best.
Here are the three simple steps that you can do to create your Instagram content plan.
#1: Decide on your content pillars
Content pillars are essential topics that your business will consistently focus on when sharing on Instagram.
Other terms that you may have heard are content categories, content themes, or content buckets and they are all the same. Let me give you a few examples of how you can create your own content pillars.
If you are a marketing strategist, your focus could be around entrepreneurship, marketing tips and mindset.
A fitness coach could focus on types of workouts, meal prepping, and health tips.
A business coach could focus on limiting beliefs, mistakes, and business tips.
With the content pillars, there are no set rules on how many content pillars that you can have. But it would be great if you can come up with three to five content pillars of your own.
#2: Write down the sub-content pillars for each content pillar
Sub pillars are broken down into more specific topics. You can create anywhere between three to five sub-content pillars.
Let’s take the fitness coach as an example. When it comes to the type of workouts, we can break it down into different types of workouts. It could be workouts for toning abs, or it could be quick workouts for biceps.
For meal prepping, it could be meal prep ideas, or your meal prep for the week. When it comes down to the health tips, we can break it down and focus on the type of foods for fat loss, or even high protein foods to eat when bulking up.
This gives you an idea of how you can create your own sub-content pillars for your content pillars.
#3: Create and plan your content calendar
By having a content calendar, you’re able to plan your content. You can plan for either a week fortnight or bi-weekly. In Australia, we call it a fortnight or a month, do what feels right with you and according to your marketing schedule.
If you cannot plan that far ahead, then just plan for the week. There are three tools that can help you with that, which are Google Sheets, Airtable and Trello.
I will share with you how I plan my content on a Google Sheet. It is simple, easy and free to use. You can even share this with your team or a social media manager that you work with if you have one.
All of the updates can be seen on both sides. Even when I was working at the social media agency, we only used Google Sheets. We shared them with the client and it worked well for us.
No fancy apps are needed. But of course, if you would like a nicer interface to work with, Airtable and Trello work great, too.
You can try to go and open up Google Sheets. Start to create columns with the different titles that I’m about to share with you.
The first column is the date and time
- This allows you to see how frequently and consistently you are sharing content.
The second column is for the caption
- This column is where you write your caption for your contents.
The third column is for your hashtags
- You can put all of your hashtags in that column and remember, have several groups of hashtags that you can rotate and use in your caption.
The fourth column is your media
- You can choose to put in the link of the graphic or video and you’ll be able to see that in that spreadsheet. If you want to see if all things are going great with your media, then click on that link, and you’ll be able to get to where your media is.
For example, if a video was created on Canva, all you have to do is copy and paste the Canva link and put it into the media area. Everybody can click on that link, and be able to see what sort of video has been created and whether it is good to go.
The fifth one is the status
- It is the status of your posts. You can create a drop-down menu in the Google Sheet with different types of statuses.
In my content calendar, I have four different statuses – review, revise, approved and scheduled now. I share this content calendar with my virtual assistant in order to see what is happening with the content.
When I review content, I look and see if it is relevant. If there’s anything that needs to be changed, then I’ll switch it to revise. When everything is all set, I have it approved which means that that content is ready to go and good to be scheduled.
This is what I use and do in my own content calendar and for my clients as well. This works in terms of communicating with all of the people involved in the spreadsheet.
Once you have all of your content written out and all of the information put into the Google Sheet, then it’s time for you to schedule them with a scheduler.
A scheduler really helps you to save time. There are many different schedulers on the market. I have tried two different ones, which is Buffer and Later and they both work great. Pick one that works well with you.
There you have it, how to create an Instagram content plan. Here is a recap:
- The first is to decide on your content pillars
- The second is to write down the sub-content pillars
- The third is to create and plan your content calendar
PS: I’m hosting a 90-minute Reels workshop for coaches and service-based entrepreneurs on Oct 19 where I go through step-by-step on how to create 3 killer Reels that convert and more. Want in on this? Join Now: https://bit.ly/ReelsThatConvert
