How to Elevate Your Instagram Content Strategy: Do’s and Don’ts

Content is a vital part of any marketing activity. Social media marketing is not an exception; on the contrary, content strategy elaboration is a must on social media.

Promoted posts or automatic ways of the promotion will attract a new audience to your Instagram, but your content is the one to make them stay with you and buy your products and services.

In this article, we’ll figure out what you should and should not do while developing your content strategy.

Do’s

Things you need to do before, when, and after you work on your Instagram content strategy.

Know your audience and competitors

This is a basic pillar of the whole digital marketing strategy. Knowledge of your target audience, its demographics, fears, wishes, doubts, and motivation is the key to effective content. Before planning the captions, videos, or Stories for your audience, do your research and find out who these people are. Visit their profiles, at least some of them, to know them better, communicate with them in comments, live streams, Stories, and alike. Simply put, do everything to know and understand those people.

You don’t want to run your business and develop a marketing strategy in a vacuum, right? Then you need to track and analyze what your competitors do as well – how they communicate with their followers, what content they make and how often, why they do it, and so on. Analyzing them, you’ll find there and your own week points. Thus, you will have a chance to adapt their good ideas and discard the bad ones.

To do a basic competition analysis on Instagram, find relevant businesses by related hashtags, names, or keywords. Visit their accounts and tell what you like about their content and what you don’t. Imagine yourself as their client, what would you respond to in terms of their content? While planning your content, do this little exercise as well – always put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer.

Plan everything in advance

Or almost everything. While you’re planning the Instagram content, you will see what will work and what probably won’t. Everything always looks so neat in our minds, but when we put it on the paper (or on Instagram, in our case), it may be not as good as we thought it’d be. You can plan posts on Instagram from your smartphone doing drafts, but it’s not very convenient. Or you can use special Instagram planning tools like Combin Scheduler – a free Instagram planner.

With Combin Scheduler, you can plan Instagram posts and Stories for auto-publishing. Your content will be uploaded on Instagram down to the minute, even if you’ve planned it for days weeks, or months ahead without a quality loss. All you need to do is to select an image, date and time, write and format a caption if you want, add a location or hashtags – the app will do the rest for you.

Stories planning has never been easier, as well. Just select the required files and set the publishing date. One or multiple Stories will be published automatically.

With this tool, you’ll save your time and won’t have to worry about posting when you don’t have access to your account or being available to post when your audience is online.

Correlate your content with your business

To come up with a working content formula, initially, you need to test different forms of it. Knowing your audience, this will not be that hard. But the audience is not the only thing you should consider. To make your content convincing, resonating, and distinctive, you should correlate it with your own business. For instance, marketing agencies or other consulting services accounts often have loads of long captions and informative videos. And that’s fine since often, their main goal on Instagram is to attract new clients with their expertise. And clothing brands, or let’s say lingerie stores don’t focus on captions too much but the visual concept of their page.

Focus on the visual concept

Instagram doesn’t cease to be a visual social media channel. To interest genuine followers, no matter your business, your account should be visually attractive – have a unique conceptual style. Such profiles look aesthetic and usually have more followers because people want to see beautiful posts in their feeds.

Combin Scheduler in-app calendar allows previewing your grid layout and style the feed as you wish.

Don’ts

Now turn to things you should, by any means, avoid while working on the Instagram content strategy.

Duplicate your competitors’ content

Analyze your competitors to see what they do and learn on their mistakes or successes. Adapting the content doesn’t mean a wholesome copy. If you found a great article created by your competitor that will surely resonate with your audience, no need to publish it with your name under it. Adapt it and change the content according to your audience’s needs.

Be boring

Instagram is so full of exciting features for creating content – IGTV, various Stories stickers, polls, quizzes, chats, and so on. Use and test all of these. If your content is boring, no one responds to it. Thus, Instagram sees that you’re not interesting for people and shows it to a smaller number of users, even those who are willingly following you. As a result, poor engagement, number of followers drop, your account is nearly dead. To prevent this, always keep an eye on the latest Instagram trends and implement them.

Be inconsistent

In terms of posting time, the visual image of your profile, or your communication with the followers. To appear in your audience’s feed, post regularly but not too often – up to two times a day is fine. Use Instagram analytics to figure out what time is winning for your posts to show up.

You should also be consistent in communication with your followers. Customers should recognize your brand voice and the way you speak to them. Don’t ignore captions – these are a simple way of talking to people and promoting your account organically.

Be spammy

Don’t post just to post. Concentrate on the quality of your content, not quantity, and be respectful to your audience.

Ignore the whole social marketing strategy

Instagram growth strategy should always stay within your entire digital marketing plan. Set your goals and develop Instagram marketing leading to their achievement.

To make your experience even better, don’t forget to use special tools that assist you in your Instagram marketing.