Are your Instagram posts struggling to achieve traction?
With over 2 billion month-to-month lively customers, standing out on the platform requires technique and content material planning.
A content material plan is an important blueprint that will help you hold your posts aligned along with your technique and your general advertising and marketing targets.
Posting with no plan can simply be a wasted effort with out clear course.
To help your model’s conversion and success, this information has a free Instagram content material plan template and useful ideas you could customise in your model.
So, let’s attempt to seize a few of these customers.
1. Create Your Content material Calendar
A well-structured plan is your roadmap to information your path, allow you to meet your targets, and schedule campaigns successfully.
For this goal, our template comes with an Overview tab and month-to-month planning tabs with versatile weekly layouts to offer you a chook’s-eye view of your content material.
It can assist if you’ve met your objective and may readjust and analyze methods to enhance your content material technique in your subsequent one.
Plus, an Instagram content material plan can hold concepts, budgets, themes, and advertising and marketing initiatives categorized. It additionally helps you establish any content material gaps and construct consistency – a key to Instagram success.
Begin by downloading your Instagram content material plan and make a replica for your self.
Start with the Overview tab by outlining marketing campaign cycles, together with key conversion targets, strategic themes, and content material pillars with related budgets.
Transfer to the primary weekly sheet to refine execution. Resolve matters and publish kind, craft applicable captions, align with marketing campaign varieties, and outline CTAs that help your advertising and marketing funnel aims.
Lastly, after you might have the above laid out and preliminary captions, you may transfer to the following step: Create or assign the mandatory key visuals or belongings.
Breaking content material planning into smaller, actionable steps makes it simpler to create a content material calendar.
Bonus Tip: Sync With Present Advertising and marketing Initiatives
With a useful overview or dashboard (included in our Instagram Content material Plan), you may map out your seasonal themes, align your matters with days you’re posting, and have your captions and hashtags prepared to simply copy and paste if you’re able to schedule your content material.
Screenshot by creator, July 2025If you have already got some advertising and marketing initiatives, it’s the right time to include them into your advertising and marketing marketing campaign. For instance, perhaps you might have a brand new product launch.
You’ll be able to then construct a content material collection round it. Tease the product launch with a couple of posts, run a giveaway, function an influencer utilizing the product in a video, and spotlight key advantages all through.
Occasions and holidays supply alternatives to spice up engagement and entice new clients. They’re one other enjoyable and optimistic strategy to get clients speaking about your model. Vacation giveaways or offers are one other strategy to develop model consciousness and acquire followers.
If in case you have an occasion developing, you may create a marketing campaign hyping the occasion and discussing the audio system concerned, merchandise that will likely be there, or superior seize baggage you’re freely giving on the occasion.
We suggest pairing our Advertising and marketing Calendar for 2025 when creating your Instagram content material plan to tie in your artistic campaigns with holidays and seasonal themes for the week, month, and even quarter.
2. Outline Your Targets
After getting your content material template and earlier than you propose your posts, what you need to do is create your Instagram targets.
What do you need to accomplish? Is it to develop your viewers, drive extra engagement, or improve product sign-ups?
As soon as this, you may set the important thing efficiency indicators (KPIs) to mark totally different factors of research you need to observe alongside along with your Instagram marketing campaign.
For instance, you need to develop your viewers by 20% by the top of the marketing campaign cycle, otherwise you want to improve your engagement price to at the very least 0.43%.
After you choose your conversion targets, it’s helpful to interrupt down your objective into milestones you want to attain.
This fashion, you may map out the kind of content material wanted for every and monitor your progress utilizing the KPIs you’ve set above.
Screenshot from creator, July 2025Ask your self: What milestones are you able to mark to attain that objective alongside the best way? What kinds of content material, matters, or content material collection are you able to create to extend engagement?
Write down all of the targets you suppose your model can fairly obtain (Professional tip: the trick is to make it SMART).
3. Hold Your Theme And Tone Constant
If you wish to hold your posts partaking, guarantee visible and tonal consistency by creating a model information. You’ll additionally need to keep a cohesive theme throughout all posts, together with fashion, typography, and shade palette.
For inspiration, you may have a look at your web site, content material, and logos to assist create the right tone and theme in your posts.
Take into consideration the look of your content material for each footage and movies, and take into account a constant angle or filter to set the fitting tone and search for your content material.
It’s additionally very important to create customary working procedures (SOPs) about your messaging, whether or not for captions, feedback, or responses to direct messages, as a result of likelihood is, a number of individuals are managing the account.
The way you reply to shoppers on Instagram issues, particularly when you have a number of individuals responding to feedback and messages, to make sure it’s throughout the model’s tone.
4. Showcase Your Creativity: Instagram Publish Varieties (With Examples)
Instagram is extra than simply an aesthetic photo-sharing app. It’s a major platform that may showcase your product in several codecs to entertain, have interaction, and educate audiences.
There are numerous methods to create content material for Instagram that may spotlight your model and improve engagement.
Let’s speak by them for finest practices for every use case:
Photographs
Footage are a good way to showcase merchandise’ USPs, share thought management quotes, relatable memes, or announce new function updates.
It’s additionally nice for posing questions you could reply in your picture caption, or selling offers or giveaways by the usage of compelling captions.
- Instance: HubSpot’s AI-generated meme of its customer support rep as a toy determine catches consideration and serves as a dialog starter.
Carousels
What can your organization do when you might have a number of images out of your high-end photoshoot however don’t need to publish them right into a grid or oversaturate your feed? Attempt superbly crafted carousels to make sure return on funding (ROI).
Carousels have been a mainstay on Instagram since 2015. It’s a assortment of 10 images you may publish all of sudden, now expandable as much as 20.
To entice your viewers, make it attention-grabbing to swipe proper with chronological storytelling, collage/journal cutout parts, textual content overlays, or a story.
- Instance: Clickup’s photograph of its new AI calendar options textual content overlay, seamlessly transitioning between each static and dynamic images and tutorial brief movies.
Reels
Subsequent, movies are a wonderful strategy to present sneak peeks of one thing developing or create product teasers. It’s also possible to use movies for behind-the-scenes content material to construct product hype.
Think about using Instagram Reels, or brief movies, to showcase merchandise, share tales, and develop your viewers.
By the best way, Instagram discontinued IGTV, or Instagram TV, again in 2021, however you may publish longer movies in-feed. Manufacturers use these to go extra in-depth into describing a specific matter.
Tales
In the meantime, Tales are images or movies that final 24 hours (except you add them to your highlights in your profile), the place you may share posts out of your profile or publish new content material.
It’s a preferred strategy to acquire extra followers and interact with shoppers.
- Instance: Even when Tales expire after 24 hours, they nonetheless stay beneficial. Sprout Social curated its Tales into its “Trending” highlights, showcasing key occasions and social media insights, such because the Oscars, Coachella, and Artwork Basel.
Person Generated Content material (UGC)
Person-generated content material, or content material created by influencers, clients, or different customers, is a good way to increase your attain to totally different audiences and additional promote your merchandise.
Individuals are extra intrigued to find out about a brand new product if it’s promoted by somebody they already observe. Likewise, it will possibly assist construct belief with shoppers new to your model in the event that they see a publish by a buyer who already loves it.
- Instance: Slack featured its No. 1 “Slacker,” Rox (a senior social media supervisor at Gozney), as a enjoyable UGC publish, the place she apparently despatched essentially the most Slack messages in a yr.
However what content material goes viral? It may be helpful to take a look at what your opponents are posting on Instagram and put your model’s distinctive twist on it.
5. Craft Compelling Captions And CTAs
Whereas it’s nice to have high-quality footage and fascinating movies, the captions and name to motion nonetheless matter.
If you happen to hooked the patron along with your image or video, you continue to need to reel them in along with your caption and CTA.
Screenshot by creator, July 2025It’s important to craft the fitting CTA to make sure shoppers observe your web page, have interaction along with your publish, or buy your product.
Contemplate A/B testing to establish the fitting strategy in your campaigns. A compelling call-to-action is obvious, concise, and written in an lively voice.
6. Select The Appropriate Hashtags
Researching and choosing the proper hashtags is essential to make sure your posts attain the meant viewers and a few new ones that may be eager about your area of interest and model.
Hashtags permit your content material to succeed in customers past your profile’s following as you create content material for particular hashtags. Observe which posts carry out notably nicely.
That manner, you may create future posts for particular hashtags that may improve your content material’s visibility to a broader viewers, serving to you obtain extra model consciousness.
7. Know The Finest Time To Publish
Planning posts forward of time can assist alleviate some stress from social media technique.
You should utilize Meta Enterprise Suites to schedule posts for Fb and Instagram and set posts for every week or a few weeks.
If you happen to’re not sure when to publish, listed below are prompt days and occasions the place evaluation factors to the place you’ll get essentially the most engagement and views.
It could be helpful to perform a little research particular to your trade to see the most effective time and day so that you can make your posts.
One necessary factor to remember if you’re planning your content material is the upcoming holidays.
Are you going to publish celebrating the vacation, use the vacation to do a promotion or give away, or select to not publish on that day altogether?
It doesn’t matter what you choose, conserving holidays in thoughts is essential.
8. Measure Outcomes And Regulate
Instagram Insights, each on the app and thru Meta Enterprise Suites, can present what number of views a publish will get and statistics on the engagement with the posts that will help you see which kinds of content material are working finest. You’ll be able to see your content material’s likes, shares, feedback, and saves.
Manufacturers can even use Insights to get metrics on the paid exercise. Insights are a good way to see developments to be able to alter your content material technique.
You’ll additionally be capable to see metrics about your followers to see what number of you’re receiving, the age of your followers, and data on when they’re most lively on-line. This fashion, you may alter your publish occasions to make sure you are higher at reaching your viewers.
Apart from Instagram Insights, discover strategies for measuring social media impression past self-importance metrics to achieve deeper perception into buyer sentiment and general model efficiency.
Wrapping Up
In case your Instagram isn’t getting outcomes, it could be resulting from a scarcity of planning.
Don’t miss the chance to tie your conversion targets, advertising and marketing campaigns, developments, holidays, and inventive campaigns collectively and provides it the well-planned, in-advance price range it deserves.
It might solely assist, not damage, to create a proactive content material plan in your social media crew to remain aligned, keep consistency, and ship measurable outcomes.
Reaching your targets by creating an Instagram-specific content material calendar guided by present advertising and marketing aims and data-driven themes will assist your model have interaction on the platform.
Obtain our Instagram content material plan and begin being more practical along with your Instagram technique.
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Featured Picture: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
