Hey everyone, Jason here digital marketing consultant and in this Instagram content strategy
guide, you're going to learn three actionable strategies to ease the burden of creating
Instagram content.
So if you've ever been staring at your phone wondering how on earth to caption the photo
you're looking at or worse, you haven't even taken an Instagram picture for the day and
you're supposed to post today, this video is for you, because we've all been there just
staring at our phone and going “I'm supposed to post to Instagram, but I have no idea what
the heck to post or say”.
So links in the description to some other helpful videos that will walk you through
how to grow your Instagram account, how to make stories and of course how to make quote
posts if you decide that is for you.
So let's go ahead dive right in the very first strategy is batching your content.
And there's three steps to batching your content.
The very first step to batching your content is making sure that you a head of time of
planned, when you're going to post and what type of posts are going to make.
So the easiest way to would be to just show you an example, so this is actually a Google
sheet I tend to be a little nerdy with this stuff.
So we made a Google sheet that essentially plans out a month's worth of content.
So we post three times a day two videos and one quote post.
And so this way there's never any anxiety as to what type of post or when I'm supposed
to post, because we know ahead of time we have an entire content calendar ready to go.
Now, this is important whether you're posting three times a day like I am or you're just
posting three or four times a week.
It doesn't matter how often you're posting, what matters is you know when you're going
to be posting.
Just remove that anxiety of how many times you're gonna be posting per week.
And then once you have your content calendar the second part of batching is taking all
of your photos in one fell swoop.
This is something that a lot of big Instagramers do.
You don't necessarily take the photo and then have to post it the exact same day.
It is okay, you're not breaking any rules by taking pictures ahead of time.
And in fact, this is what I highly recommend doing, where you just take a day or two and
you go take all the pictures that you want to take for your Instagram account and it
will feel a little weird like you're doing a professional photo shoot, but of course
you do want to make sure that you change up your wardrobe a little bit.
For me personally, I can attest to the power of creating all of your content in one fell
swoop.
It is so much easier, because you're able to get into that kind of creative mode if
you're making videos or writing mode, if you're writing your captions giving away the third
part here.
But just make sure that you do everything in one fell swoop, because then you can kind
of get into that mode really get into the zone and just blast through it.
As opposed to trying to do it once every week or worse like once every day where you wake
up and you try and be inspirational or be creative, it's really hard to do that every
single day as opposed to just saying, “okay, you know what?
The next five or six hours, I'm going to make all of the quotes or all of the captions for
my posts for the upcoming month”, which is the third part of batching and that is
making sure that you write all of your captions and do your hashtag research ahead of time,
because when it comes to actually posting you pick up your phone, everything should
be good to go.
All you need to do is be opening the Instagram app.
I don't recommend using any of those autopost things just because there is some data that
shows that Instagram doesn't really like that.
So it might limit you reach and so all you need to do is upload the photo, copy paste
your caption, copy paste your hashtags.
Almost forgot what that was hashtags.
And then you'll just be good to go posting to Instagram.
I personally have all of this written out before we even go to posting, so that there's
no thought process when you're actually posting to Instagram.
So that's the very first actual strategy.
If you do nothing else on this list, that's going to save you the most amount of time
headache and most importantly anxiety, when it comes to posting to Instagram.
Now, the second strat-- I said three, the second strategy for saving time when it comes
to creating your Instagram content, is not creating new content at all, just repurposing
old content.
So if you have a YouTube channel, you're doing anything on Facebook, maybe your-- you have
a blog, you can go ahead and repurpose that content or if you're doing a podcast and post
it to Instagram.
So I have a couple of examples here one for video one for audio and then one for blogging.
So we'll do blogging first, because this is actually the hardest type of content to repurpose
especially if you're doing really long-form tutorial style blogs, but what you want to
do is essentially take out a quote or maybe take out a graphic from your vlog, reformat
it for Instagram and then write a brief summary or one actionable take away from your blog
post as a caption.
And so that's how you can take that content and repurpose it for Instagram.
Foundr is a great example of this.
Although, he actually has some video content in there as well.
But the primary part of their content strategy is their magazine.
So this is a good example of an account you can follow if you're a blogger.
Now, if you're doing audio, then you can check out this one by Mike Dillard.
He does the self-made man podcast.
And as you can see here, he just takes his podcast thumbnails and re uploads them.
And he also takes snippets from the podcast and just uploads them as a 30 second video.
And adds a little bit of visualization around the guest speaker, so it's not just an image
with some audio playing in the background.
You can find templates like this really easy on something called an Envato elements market.
Now, when it comes to video, this is probably actually it could be the hardest or easiest
depending upon how creative you are and how comfortable you are with video.
But something that we do here with this channel is our video editor will just take a 60 second
clip from a Content video like this, and then add a headline add some captions and then
post it as a post on Instagram.
That way, I don't have to redo a bunch of Instagram content or videos, we can just repurpose
what I'm already making.
And if you don't want to manually go through the process of making captions for your videos,
you can check out this video by Primal video where he goes through a bunch of different
free and paid solutions for adding captions to your Instagram videos or you can just check
out Rev.com which is kind of the go-to source for adding captions to your videos.
Now, that does it for repurposing content from other platforms.
If you're only on Instagram, then you can actually repurpose your old photos collections
of photos or captions.
So something that really large Instagramers do, is when they find a caption that gets
a lot of comments and engagement, they'll actually reuse that caption three or four
times over a three to six month period and then just change out the photo.
So you-- if you find a caption that works really well, you can just rewrite it and pretty
much have the same message or you can literally just use the same caption a week or month
later, because if you're adding a new photo, you're most likely going to be hitting a different
part of your audience.
Now, if you really like writing captions and you're not so up on the photo taking part,
then you can actually create little collages or grids of previous photos, so you can take
a collection and just grid them all together or you can go ahead and just change up the
filter or add a quote on top of one of your old pictures.
So there's nothing against repurposing content, just make sure that you're not making the
exact same post over again.
Now, if you're still feeling like you don't have enough content after all of the strategies
we just talked about, then the old and proven way to make Instagram content is just making
some quote posts.
So these could be as simple and fancy as you want those going to be a link in the description
on how to create quote posts using some a free tool called Canva.
But essentially all you need to do with the quote post is go to a place like pixels or
unsplash.com find some nice-looking pictures and then add some quotes on top of them, using
Canva or whatever free photo editing app you like to use.
And this is just a great way to fill in some content gaps, because you might have batched
all of your pictures or you might be writing out captions and during your content calendar
and life happens, right?
Sometimes you find that “you know what?
I really don't want to post this picture” or “oh my gosh!
I forgot to take a picture and now we need something” and so this is a very nice and
easy way to kind of fill in the blanks.
I definitely don't recommend having it as a long, long term content strategy.
I think it's a good complement to your overall Instagram content marketing strategy.
So thank you so much for watching.
If you still have questions about how to produce your content or just need some content ideas,
go ahead and comment below, because I read a reply to every single one.
And other people will be able to get inspiration from your questions and insights.
So go ahead and hit that like button, subscribe for more Instagram marketing and content marketing
strategy videos just like this one and until the next, keep building the business you love.