5 Steps to Creating The Perfect Instagram Content Plan

Having an Instagram content strategy is what differentiates accounts that convert to sales from those that only bring in a handful of likes.

Creating a winning content plan for your Instagram account doesn’t need to be painful—in fact, today, we’ll walk you through the steps to creating the perfect Instagram content plan.

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7 Steps to Building Your Instagram Content Strategy

Ready to accelerate your Instagram presence? Let’s explore our best practice tips for creating a winning Instagram strategy.

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

Before you dive into creating content for Instagram, you need a clear picture of the person you want to tap the “follow” button on your Instagram profile.

You wouldn’t plan a menu, music, and decor without knowing who your guests are, right? The same goes for your Instagram content.

Start by painting a vivid picture of your ideal followers:

What’s their age range? Are they mostly men, women, or a mix of both?
What are their likes and dislikes?
Where is your audience based?
What kind of content do they consume and engage with online?

Then, take it a step further.

As you start posting content, and people engage with it, return the favour.

Respond to comments, send out polls, and ask questions in your Instagram Stories. Interacting with your audience helps you build a strong community and uncover more information about your followers to guide your strategy and create better content.

The key is to view your audience as real people with problems and aspirations – not a number on your screen. Humanizing your followers allows you to create relatable, engaging content that resonates and ultimately converts. The more you understand your audience, the better you can serve them with content they’ll love.

Plann Tip: If you’re not starting from scratch and already have 100 followers, you can use the Insights feature to see your follower’s demographics. You can use this information to confirm your strategy is attracting the followers you want or if you need to course correct. Or, use your Plann Analytics to learn advanced insights about your audience demographics!

Designing a strategy makes posting on social media a breeze.

Step 2: Set Instagram Marketing Goals

Setting clear goals for your Instagram strategy is like plotting a course for a journey. Each one is a milestone on your map, guiding you toward success. It adds focus to your content creation, ensuring each post, Instagram Story and Reel serves a purpose and is aligned with your overall strategy.

Without these goals, you’re just posting for the sake of posting, missing the opportunity to connect with your audience.

Here are some examples of goals for your Instagram content plan:

Increase Your Follower Count By 20% in Three Months: Your action items to achieve this could be launching an influencer campaign, running targeted campaigns, hosting a giveaway and using popular hashtags that align with your brand.
Increase Engagement on Your Posts by 25% in Four Months: Your strategy might involve creating content your audience feels compelled to share, hosting live Q&A sessions, replying to all your comments, and encouraging users to chat with you in the DMs.
Increase Website Visits From Instagram By 15% in Two Months: If you’re a blogger or selling anything online, getting social media users off the app and onto your site is an important goal. Entice users with compelling calls to action, use clickable links on Stories, and create an Instagram bio that has a reason for someone to click through.
Increase Your Content Reach By 30% Within The Next Three Months: Use Instagram’s various formats, like Reels and Stories, to tap into different audience segments. Analyse which content types work best for increasing your reach and tweak your posting strategy accordingly.

Plann Tip: Review your goals monthly or quarterly. Use Instagram Insights to see what’s working and adapt your strategy accordingly. For example, if your Reels and Instagram posts about travel hacks consistently drive higher engagement, that’s a sign to create more of that type of content.

Step 3: Create Your Content Pillars

Crafting strong content pillars is essential for a cohesive Instagram strategy. Think of them as the backbone of your content, providing structure and consistency. Plus, it makes it a lot easier to brainstorm post ideas!

You’ll always have a clear set of topics to post about, and over time, your audience will associate you as the go-to expert for those topics.

If you’re a fitness influencer, your content pillars might look something like this:

Workout Routines: Share workout plans catering to different goals. This can include your leg day routine and tips for proper form.

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A post shared by Sophie van Oostenbrugge (@gainsbybrains)

Nutrition Tips: Share what you eat in a day with your audience or how you achieve a specific nutrition goal. Create a step-by-step tutorial highlighting the macros and nutritional benefits of your favourite recipes.

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A post shared by Arash Hashemi (@shredhappens)

If you’re a travel influencer, your content should go beyond sharing beautiful destinations. Instead, you should use your niche to guide your content pillars to create content that speaks to a specific audience.

For example, let’s say you’re a solo female traveller. Your content pillars could look like this:

Safety Tips: From navigating a new city alone to choosing destinations and finding safe accommodation, you can unpack a lot of actionable advice for your audience.
Travel Planning & Budgeting: Traveling alone is usually more expensive, and there’s no one to help with the logistics. Discuss budgeting tips, finding affordable accommodations, and cost-effective travel hacks.
Exploring Destinations: Highlight unique destinations, hidden gems, and adventurous activities. Also, highlight how you’re navigating a destination by yourself and share any solo travel tips with your audience.

Plann Tip: Use Plann’s Visual Planner tool to visualise and organize your content pillars within your content strategy. It’s the best and easiest way to create a consistent posting schedule for your brand pillars.

Maximize your content pillars with Plann’s visual planner and drag-and-drop strategy pillars

Step 4: Choose Your Content Formats

Adding variation to your Instagram content calendar is essential for keeping your feed engaging and building a relationship with your audience. Each format serves a unique purpose and has its place in your conversion funnel to turn someone from a casual social media lurker to a true fan.

For your Instagram marketing strategy, you’ll need to decide which formats make the most sense for your goals, resources and audience.

Instagram Lives

Live streams help create a more personal connection with your target audience and build rapport. Use them for live Q&As, product launches, or behind-the-scenes tours. If you’re a coach, you can also leverage Instagram Lives for real-time coaching sessions to give your Instagram followers a taste of what it’s like to work with you one-on-one.

Instagram Stories

Think of Instagram Stories as the building blocks for an engaged audience. Unlike your Instagram feed posts, Stories are far more intimate, allowing your audience to get to know you personally and develop a deeper connection with your brand. Use interactive content like polls, quizzes and Q&A sessions and encourage your followers to engage with you further in the DMs. With clickable website links, your Story is a powerful way to drive website traffic, whether it’s for your online store or to read your latest blog post.

Instagram Reels

Instagram Reels is a gold mine for brand awareness. They’re the best content type to attract new users and grow your following. With only 90 seconds per video, you need to keep your video content engaging and leverage trending sounds and music to maximise your chances of going viral and reaching new Instagram users.

The type of content that works well for Reels is “quick wins”. What can you teach your target audience? How can you inspire or entertain them in 90 seconds? These are your “content hooks that will convince someone to keep watching, start following you, and consume your other content types.

Carousel Posts

Carousel posts are another way to build brand awareness and deepen relationships with your followers. They are ideal for step-by-step guides, before-and-after comparisons, or weekly photo dumps. With more photos to view, they keep users on your post for longer, boosting retention and engagement. However, the algorithm doesn’t prioritize photos or static feed posts as much as Reels. If your goal is follower growth, you’ll want to include other post types, like Reels, to keep your reach up.

Step 5: Create a Content Calendar and Posting Schedule

By following a posting schedule as part of your content plan, your Instagram audience will trust your brand more and see you as an industry expert.

Start by identifying key dates and events for your brand and audience. These could be holidays, product launches, industry events, or cultural moments. Plot these dates on your social media content calendar to keep yourself accountable, and start creating a content bank for these post types.

Next, decide how often you want to post on Instagram.

If it’s 3x a week, make that commitment non-negotiable. Next, use your content calendar to visually plan your content for the upcoming week or month. Using your content pillars and content types will speed up brainstorming content ideas and make sure your content strategy is full of variety.

Once you know what content to create, you can streamline your production process and bulk-create everything you need. When everything is shot and edited, use a tool like Plann to schedule posts. It will make posting consistently 10x easier, and you can easily cross-post content on other social media platforms like TikTok or YouTube Shorts.

Plann Tip: If you’re experiencing a bad case of writer’s block, we’ve got your back. Plann has a built-in AI caption generator tool to help you write all your Instagram captions in a few minutes.

Step 6: Develop an Instagram Hashtag Strategy

When done right, a hashtag strategy can increase the visibility of your Instagram posts and attract the right users to your profile.

Look into hashtags relevant to your niche, popular within your community, and specific to your content. Tools like Plann and Instagram’s search feature can help you discover the best hashtags to use in your posts and create hashtag sets.

Plann hashtag research and planning tool

What are hashtag sets?

A collection of hashtags around a specific topic, like female travel or coffee. But the key to creating a powerful hashtag set is to use a mix of different types:

Broad Hashtags: These are highly popular and widely used, like #travel or #food. They have a vast reach but also face stiff competition.

Niche Hashtags: These are more specific to your audience, like #solofemaletravel or #veganrecipes. They target a smaller, more engaged audience.

A social media scheduler interface displaying a cafe photo with a caption and suggested hashtags like #hospitalityindustry, #supportsmallbusiness, and #smallbusiness. The interface includes features such as post preview, hashtag search, and a strategy label "Social Coffee." | plannthat.com

Add your hashtag sets to your Instagram posts with Plann

Plann Tip: Limit the use of very popular hashtags, as your post can get lost quickly in the sea of content. Instead, focus on medium-popular and niche hashtags where your content is more likely to stand out.

Step 7: Analyse and Adapt Your Instagram Content Plan

The final step in your Instagram content plan is to analyse, tweak, and repeat.

Regularly reviewing performance helps you understand what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t, strengthening your strategy one post at a time.

We recommend taking a deep dive into your Instagram Insights at least once a month. You’ll want to look at key metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and saves to understand what topics and content types drive the most engagement and help you achieve your goals.

Here’s an example of how you can analyse your Instagram performance metrics:

Step 1: Go to your profile and open your Professional Dashboard.
Step 2: Navigate to “Content Shared” and choose a post type (e.g. Reels), a time period (the last six months) and sort by a metric (e.g. reach, shares, saves, etc.)
Step 3: Analyse your top-performing posts for each metric as well as your worst-performing posts. Are there any similarities? How can you repeat the success or avoid a post-tanking in the future?

You might find that your voiceover posts about unique stays in Australia do really well, but lip-syncing to trending audios doesn’t get any traction. That’s a sign to double down on voiceovers and create more accommodation content.

Lastly, track your progress against your goals. If you’re not seeing an increase in engagement, adjust your strategy and try something new. Maybe a new posting time, an updated hashtag set, a different content type or a new content pillar is what you need to finally start seeing progress in the right direction.

Track the performance of your Instagram content plan with Plann’s advanced Instagram analytics suite

Tip: You can also find all these Instagram analytics inside your Plann account under “Results”. With everything on one page it’s easier to absorb and filter the data compared to the Instagram app.

Master Your Instagram Content Plan

Wahoo! We hope you’re ready to start your new Instagram content plan.

Plann can help with AI-generated captions (aligned with your brand voice), cross-posting, content pillars, post ideas, analytics, hashtags, and so much more. You can even turn on the auto-post feature of your Instagram posts, saying goodbye to accidentally missing a push notification and hello to consistency with the ability to schedule posts ahead of time.