5 easy steps to create an Instagram content calendar for your business

Planning enough Instagram content to keep your account consistent can feel like a massive task, but it doesn’t have to be so overwhelming.

Use a content calendar and plan your content in advance. This way you can free up your time to work on the parts of your business that you love - and ensure that all your Instagram content is intentional and effective.

In this video you’ll learn 5 steps to create an Instagram content calendar for your business:

Identify your audience and content pillars
Brainstorm post concepts & topic ideas for each content pillar
Develop imagery for your posts
Distribute your ideas on a calendar
Write the captions and shoot the photos

Hi, I'm Katie. Steckly a YouTube creator, a social media marketing educator, and a lover of Instagram. Are you feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of creating enough content to fill out your Instagram content calendar for the next month? By the end of this video, you'll be ready to sit down and prepare an entire month's worth of content for your Instagram. In just a few hours. So keep on watching. It's so important that you think about creating content from the perspective of how can I serve my ideal audience this month, rather than just, what on earth am I going to post on Instagram.

Starting from the perspective of your ideal audience or your ideal customer, ask yourself, what kind of content do they like to see on Instagram? What kind of content do they share to their story? What kind of content do they comment on? Then start creating content that you think your ideal customer would want to see. Instead of being overly strict about a specific niche or topic area, I think it's more effective to think about who your ideal audience is and all the different kinds of content that they might find engaging or interesting.

This will help you to develop content that is less repetitive and speaks directly to the feelings and experiences of your audience. For example, if you're a business that sells organic latte mixes online, you might be tempted to make every Instagram post about the health benefits of beetroot powder and why you should start every morning with a matcha latte. And those are all great posts, don't get me wrong. You should include those.

But if every single post is just about the benefits and why you should buy your product, that's going to get repetitive and people aren't going to follow you for very long, because it'll all feel the same. So, instead think about what kind of content would your ideal audience member find relatable? So if you're selling organic latte mixes, maybe your ideal customer is a millennial woman who is health conscious and loves making lattes at home. So if you think about that as your ideal customer, there's all kinds of maybe travel, lifestyle or wellness content that you could make that would be interesting for her.

Think about what shows she watches on Netflix, what kind of music she likes, what kind of memes does she find funny. Create content that she will love regardless of whether or not it is directly related to the product you're selling. This is what creates a brand, rather than just a business. As a general guideline I recommend making one out of every five posts directly related to your product and four out of every five posts tailored to entertain, encourage or educate your ideal audience.

Using this framework, you can create a list of five content pillars. One of these pillars should be your product and the other four can be topics that would be relatable to your ideal customer. So using our example of organic latte mixes, the five content pillars might be one health and wellness, two mindfulness, three self-love and four self-care tips and advice. And of course, number five, latte powder.

Overall, it's essential that you're thinking about how you can create content for your audience, rather than just sell to them all the time. Using these five pillars, create a chart with five columns, label them with each of your five pillars and then start brainstorming post concepts within each of those categories. A lot of people fall into the trap that Instagram is all about sharing a pretty photo with a random caption slapped underneath.

Instead, I want you to create your Instagram content thinking about the caption first. And then finding imagery or creating imagery that would suit that caption. If you approach it like writing a blog post you'll end up providing a lot more value than if you try to retrofit a caption to fit an existing image. When you're coming up with these post ideas, I recommend coming up with what I call headlines, AKA the first 125 characters of your Instagram caption that appear before the show more button.

You need to make sure that these first 125 characters really count, because that is going to determine whether or not people read your entire caption and spend more time engaging with your posts. When it comes to creating a full month of content, I would recommend coming up with four different post concepts for each of your five content pillars. That will create a nice round 20 posts, which will fill out your month really well. Now that you've got a solid 20 post ideas ready?

It's time to come up with the imagery that you are going to associate with those post concepts. There are a ton of options available. You could shoot a photo of yourself. You could create a graphic, you could even create a carousel of graphics or images, or you could fill a video. And if that video is more than one minute long, you could create an IGT video. There really are so many different ways that you could bring these post concepts to life.

Let the topic of your post guide the type of imagery that you're going to create for it, ask yourself what is the best way to communicate the message of this post in a visual way. It's also important to keep in mind the balance of all these different kinds of posts you don't want to make all of them just images. You don't want to make all of them just videos. It's important that you rotate through all the different kinds of posts that you can make on Instagram, so that you can provide value in many different ways to your audience.

Once you have your post concepts and your images already, it's time to organize them in a calendar so you can see how your content is filling out for the month. You can do this on a spreadsheet or in a word document, or you can use an organizational app like Trello, which is what I prefer. I've actually created a free content calendar template for you that you can grab at Katiesteckly.com/calendar. And you can use that to organize all your posts. Start assigning your posts to different days, trying to keep in mind a balance between your five different content pillars and all the different formats that are available to you on Instagram.

Now that you've got your editorial calendar in place with instructions around what each caption is going to be and what the imagery is going to be. It's time to actually go and execute on that and create that content. Set aside some time for yourself to write these captions and to source your images, whether you're going to shoot your own photos. Or use stock photos that are applicable to your brand. Then once all of that is prepared, you can use a scheduling platform, my personal favorite is Later, to actually schedule those images with their associated captions so that they can automatically post on Instagram for you.

With this method of content planning and creation, you can use your time wisely and efficiently and ensure that you have valuable content to post throughout the month, rather than stressing about what you're going to post on Instagram on any given day. Best of luck with your content calendar and thank you so much, watching.

Make a copy of Katie's content calendar template and start planning.

Check out Later to schedule all your Instagram posts in advance.

In this lesson you’ll learn what lifestyle photos you can shoot. These photos can be used within one of your content pillars, as well as on your website.