How to Create Content Plan to Drive Instagram Traffic

The ever-growing popularity of Instagram gives businesses and marketers a great marketing opportunity. Instagram can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, but to maximize its effect, you need a strategy. Without a strategy, you can’t deliver regular, high-quality, and engaging content. Without such content, you can’t drive Instagram traffic. What you need to build your Instagram marketing strategy for driving traffic is a content plan. A content plan will keep your posting schedule consistent and your efforts streamlined.

Planning out your Instagram content will give you more control and help you direct your actions towards the goal – driving traffic. Stop making your content decisions based on instant ideas and desires. Turn your Instagram account into a traffic-driving magnet. To help you with that transformation, we present you with relevant tips for creating a content plan that will drive Instagram traffic.

You May Also Like: 

• How to Create the Best Instagram Content Calendar for Free
• How to Create Content for an Instagram Marketing Strategy?
• Run The Best Instagram User Generated Content Campaign

Be Consistent

Consistency is golden when it comes to Instagram. Posting every day has proven to drive much more engagement than posting less than 7 times a week. Even Instagram has proclaimed that recency is a factor in prioritizing posts in users’ feeds.

A regular flow of fresh content will give you regular opportunities to drive new traffic and motivate current followers to keep coming back.

To deliver consistency without affecting the quality, you need to plan your Instagram feed. Content planning should take place at least 2-3 weeks before its publishing date.

Posting a new post every day isn’t easy. However, the content plan will make daily posting manageable. You can plan out your posting schedule, surface new content in advance, and schedule it for posting.

Experiment with Different Types of Content

Even the same target audience has different content preferences. If you incorporate different content, it will resonate with more people and thus bring you more traffic.

The type of content you can play with depends on your brand style, target audience, and niche. However, some types of engaging content for Instagram are:

• Infographics
• Themed content (related to an event, holiday, etc.)
• Product-related content
• Humorous content
• Educational tips
• Motivational content
• Aesthetically-pleasing or artistic content

Your content marketing team needs to figure out what type of content you should include in your content plan. When you pinpoint the content types, you can focus on researching and creating that content in advance.

Use your current content data to define what type of content drives the most traffic. Based on your findings, you’ll know what kind of content suits your target audience best.

Incorporate the VALUE Framework

You need to provide users with valuable content if you want to earn their interest. What can help you with that is the VALUE framework.

The VALUE framework allows you to plan out Instagram content for five weeks at a time. It also helps you provide Instagram users with content that is worthy of their attention.

This framework will guide you to the type of content you can post on your feed to drive traffic. In fact, VALUE is an acronym that stands for the types of content you can post:

• Valuable: Informative content that teaches the audience something new.
• Aspirational: Motivating content that aspires users to accomplish a goal.
• Lifecycle: Content that encourages action, nurtures relationships, or builds awareness.
• Unique: Brand-related content.
• Evergreen: Relevant content that will be useful in the future as well.

To create a 5-week plan with the help of the VALUE framework, you can pair it with weekday rotation. Here’s how:

The VALUE framework lessens the burden of figuring out what kind of content to post. It also ensures consistency and gives you opportunities to attract a new audience to your Instagram page.

Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags act as effective helpers in driving traffic. They are practically a must for business owners and marketers who want to grow their audience on Instagram.

Why hashtags, you ask? Here’s why:

• Hashtags make your content discoverable.
• They attract your target audience.
• Hashtags encourage interaction.
• They can bring you closer to industry trends.
• Hashtags can make your Instagram content viral.

However, simply sprinkling some hashtags in the description won’t do the trick. The hashtags you use need to be relevant. That’s the only way to drive relevant traffic.

The types of hashtags you can use to bring your content closer to the right people are the following:

• Niche-specific hashtags – To direct your target audience to your content, you need niche-specific hashtags. For example, for the sustainable fashion niche, the hashtags could be #fashionrevolution, #ecofriendlyfashion, #ethicalstyle, #sustainablebrand, etc.
• Trending hashtags – Inquire about the most popular hashtags within your niche. For example, food-related hashtags that were trending in 2020 are #FoodPorn #FoodPhotography #Foodie #Foods #Foodstagram #Foodgasm, etc.
• Branded hashtags – Don’t forget about Instagram users who might be searching for your brand specifically. Create and include branded hashtags. For example, Nike’s branded hashtags are #nike, #justdoit.
• General hashtags – The most common hashtags also have their benefits. They can be used for various content throughout the year. For example, #food, #love, #happy, etc.

If you wonder how many hashtags per post are best for driving traffic, recent research showed that Instagram posts with 11+ hashtags have the highest engagement.

 Note: Wanna add multiple hashtags to Instagram posts simultaneously? Check out this video: 

Choose Your Theme

Instagram is all about aesthetics. If you don’t keep up with Instagram’s high standards in visual style, you’ll lose users’ interest.

A content plan can help you improve your visual format. How?

It gives you a chance to create a captivating feed with aligned colors and style.

To maximize your aesthetic appeal, the visual style needs to reflect your brand identity. What you need to pay attention to when choosing your color palette and style is:

• Your brand’s colors
• Types of content you post
• Filters you can use

Use your content plan to timely pick and edit content so that it matches your theme. A unified page theme will draw users’ attention, give them a reason to stick around, and motivate them to recommend or share your content.

 Also Read: Perfect Instagram Profile: 10 Tips to Grow Your Business

Bring Useful Tools to the Team

Putting your content plan into action will be much easier if you use the proper tools. To create the content plan, you can use a simple spreadsheet such as Google sheet. Make sure that the spreadsheet allows collaboration within the team.

You can also use scheduling tools. In this way, you won’t have to worry about forgetting to publish a post.

Figure out whether you have every part of content creation covered. For example, if you want to speed up content writing for future posts, you can hire the best essay writing service to create compelling descriptions for your Instagram posts.

Track the Results

The final step in your content planning journey is to track the results. There is no better way to work on driving traffic than to learn from your experience.

Pay attention to parts of your content plan that drive the most traffic. Adapt your content plan to include more such actions and eliminate content that isn’t up to the task.

Tracking your content performance can help you time your content, hashtag optimization, and choose the most effective content for your feed.

Wrapping Up

Creating a content plan is a challenge. However, if you embrace that challenge, you can be rewarded with great results.

To succeed in your plans to drive more traffic and grow your audience, you need a strategy that aims for those goals. These tips will help you form that strategy and turn it into a tangible form that is a content plan.

BIO:

Nicole Garrison is a content marketing strategist, writer, and editor. She is a dedicated and experienced content creator who pays particular attention to quality research. Nicole consistently attends different courses, seminars, and conferences that keep her knowledge up to date. Besides, she also writes term paper writing service reviews. In her free time, Nicole is a passionate runner and traveler.