This content planning strategy will change your Instagram life! seriously...

I am about ready to spill the tea on a content planning strategy that will change your Instagram life. ☕ I am not even joking!

Before we dive in …

I wanted to share a very exciting announcement with you: Creatorly Media is hosting our first-ever workshop this fall! Back to Social is your chance to get back on track with your Instagram goals for 2021 and crush it in the fourth quarter of the year. After a summer of relaxing, fall is the perfect time to get your content strategy back in order to finish out the year strong. In this one-hour-long workshop, we're going to be getting you up to speed on the latest Instagram growth strategies and walking you through our signature content planning process. With your registration, you'll get a copy of our Content Calendar template, which we'll walk you through filling out in the workshop - plus, an Instagram Strategy workbook, and 10 of our custom Canva templates that you can use to create all the content we plan together in the workshop. The workshop will be live on Saturday, September 11th at 10AM EST with a follow up Q&A later in the afternoon at 3pm EST - and don't worry, if you can't make it live, because everyone who registers will get access to the replay indefinitely after the workshop. If this sounds exciting to you - we can't wait to host you at our first-ever live workshop, you can register by clicking the button below - you'll get the hour-long workshop, the follow-up Q&A, the workbook, the content calendar template, and the Canva templates all for $85!!! 👏👏👏

Register Now

Let’s break this content planning strategy into 4 easy to follow steps.

Step 1: Brainstorming Sesh

With our Creatorly Media Instagram Content & Strategy package, we sit down with our clients for a one-hour strategy meeting to discuss their goals, get a sense of their brand & voice, and get an idea of what they would like to share with their audience in that given month - but when you are doing this on your own, I think it’s important to have a “strategy meeting” with yourself. There are two main questions you will want to ask yourself while you’re brainstorming:

What would be valuable for your audience to hear this month?

What are your goals for your business this month?

All of the content you’re going to create will relate back to these two questions. You can brainstorm alone or reach out to a friend to brainstorm with you, which I definitely recommend.. If you are brainstorming alone and feel stuck, here are a few ideas to help get those creative juices flowing.

Change your environment: Maybe working in a different room or taking a walk to nearby park, sometimes simply changing your environment will spark all new ideas

Read a book, article, blog, etc: Maybe you read an article and you disagree with an opinion you read about, this might trigger a whole topic you could discuss with your audience.

Write it all down: Set a timer for 5 minutes, grab a piece of paper or stack of post-its and just start writing. Write down every idea that comes to mind within that 5 minutes without stopping. Once the 5 minutes have ended, look through everything you wrote down and I am sure you will find some gems.

Step 2: Identifying your Goals

It’s now time to take that information from your brainstorming sesh and figure out how that translates into an effective Instagram Strategy that will help you achieve the goals you early decided were important for you this month.

Is your goal growing your audience? Then you will most likely want to focus on reels and shareable feed content.

Is your goal to make sales? If that’s the case, you will want to develop a cohesive sales campaign that expands across multiple forms of content - reels, IGTV, carousels, stories, etc.

Is your main goal to build your community? Then you will want to place your focus on providing value, making deep connections, and being vulnerable. These are all great at generating engagement.

As you can see, identifying your goal and establishing the purpose of your Instagram is a very important step in finding the balance of the different content you will post.

Step 3: Plan your content pillars

Creativity thrives under constraints, so this step in this strategy process is very important. It’s time to break down your niche into subtopics or what I like to call - pillars.

I will break down this entire process in our Content Planning Workshop, but in summary, this doesn’t always have to be a direct extension of your existing main niche - these can be topics that you are passionate about, but will also be relevant to your audience.

Step 4: Create the content calendar

Now that you have a general sense of the balance between the different types of posts you are going to use in your strategy, it’s time to build out our content calendar. You will actually get access to a free 90-day content calendar in the workshop so that you can plan your content for a full quarter.

In your content calendar, I recommend establishing the following categories:

Headline: This will be the first line of your caption and your overall post topic. You want to make sure that the first line of your caption is really engaging and intriguing - because that’s going to generate more engagement. This is a great time to go ahead and brainstorm what that “hook” might be.

Type of Post: This section would be where you can place the type of format you will be creating for your post. Will you be creating a reel, graphic, IGTV, meme, tweet graphic … the list goes on. This is just a general reminder for yourself, but also helps you plan the type of content based on the goals you established earlier.

What I need to create: Finally, you want a section where you can write yourself a little to-do list of what you need to do to accomplish this post. This might be a shoot list for a reel or maybe a photo you need to take of yourself doing a specific action that fits with this topic.

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Now, a little tip - if you feel like you’re getting stuck filling out your content calendar, I recommend you look back at your notes from your brainstorming session and I am sure this will help trigger some ideas or maybe even call a friend to chat about a specific topic, conversation is a great way to generate ideas.

Once you have developed all of your ideas and filled out your content planner, you are all ready to start scheduling your content. I really hope to see you in our fall workshop coming up at the end of this week - we will walk you through the entire content planning process and we will even provide tutorials on both Later and Canva. See you there!