How to Create A Simple Instagram Content Calendar That Fits Your Needs [+ Template]

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Are you looking for an Instagram content calendar to help publish content consistently?

If so, you’re in the right place.

A content calendar for Instagram can provide an overview of your posts for a week or month and keep your publishing efforts organized.

But how do you create a simple content calendar that fits your needs and helps you publish more?

That’s what I’ll show you in this guide.

Why use a content calendar for Instagram?

You’ve probably heard that a content calendar will bring some benefits to your Instagram publishing efforts. Here are a few of the benefits:

• Consistent publishing: To achieve your Instagram marketing goals, you need to publish content consistently. With a content calendar, you can assign posts to days you want to publish content throughout a month.
• A healthy balance of post ideas: Without a content calendar, your content can skew towards a particular post idea without exploring other Instagram post ideas. A content calendar for Instagram lets you explore multiple post ideas like UGC, testimonials, tutorials, giveaways, and more.
• Effective collaboration: If you work with a team, a content calendar can keep every team member on the same page.
• More content ideas: You can jot content ideas on your content calendar. And these ideas can lead to even more Instagram posts.

Now, let’s see the steps to create a simple and effective content calendar for Instagram posts.

How to create a content calendar for Instagram

1. Set Instagram content goals

Whatever you do on Instagram, you do it to promote your business or product. That said, every Instagram post shouldn’t be about direct selling.

This is why you should set other goals for your Instagram content. These include:

• Brand awareness: Posts with this goal aim to put your brand in front of more people who can buy your products in the future. You can use the number of followers, hashtag usage, and brand mentions to measure this goal.
• Product awareness: With this goal, you aim to put specific products in front of more people. You can measure the goal by using the number of post reach, product hashtags, and product mentions.
• Engagement: This involves getting more likes, comments, and shares. A high engagement can encourage Instagram to recommend your posts to more people.
• Increase in followers: This goal involves getting more followers to reach a bigger audience.
• Lead generation: Collecting followers’ information lets you contact them in the future. You can use the number of leads generated to measure this goal.
• Sales: Some posts are to get you more product sales. You can measure this goal through the number of products sold or customers acquired.

When setting a specific goal, you must define metrics that show you’ve hit your target.

These metrics will set the direction of your monthly content. Then, they’ll determine what information goes into each slot on your content calendar.

So, once you set goals, the next thing is to determine how many monthly posts can achieve the goals.

2. Specify content publishing frequency

Publishing frequency is the number of times you publish posts on Instagram daily, weekly, or monthly. And this also includes the frequency for each post type. 

For example, a monthly publishing frequency for a brand can be:

• Instagram Feed Posts  ×10
• Instagram Reels ×5
• Instagram Stories ×40
• Instagram Live ×1

Once you settle on the number of posts you want to publish monthly, it’s easier to determine the number of times you’ll use post ideas like UGC, tutorials, use cases, and more.

That said, you don’t arrive at a frequency arbitrarily.

Before you arrive at a post frequency for your brand, you have to consider your Instagram goals, audience needs, and the number of posts that can help achieve your goals.

After deciding the number of posts you want to publish monthly, you can move to the next step.

3. Determine the best days and times to post

Generally, no day is better than another. But for your brand, some days are better to publish Instagram content.

The best days and times to post are when most of your audience will be on Instagram. Publishing at these times will expose your posts to more eyeballs and increase chances of higher engagement.

Since the ideal audiences for various businesses differ, the best time to post will also differ.

This is reflected in many studies on the best time to post. Some of these studies arrive at the best days and times for various industries.

You can use these studies as a starting point for your publishing schedule. Over time, track your engagement metrics and adjust accordingly.

Then, put yourself in your audience’s place and think of the time they’re likely to be on Instagram.

However, how will you know the right time if your audience is from multiple time zones?

In this case, the answer will usually be in your Instagram analytics.

To see it, visit your Instagram profile and click on “Professional dashboard” below your bio. Doing this will take you to the dashboard, where you can find insights and other tools.

Next, click on “Total followers” and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You’ll see the “Most active times” section. Instagram lets you see both days and hours.

From this section, you can see when your followers are most active on Instagram.

If you use a social media management tool for publishing, this can also help with the best time to post. Most tools suggest the best time to publish your post.

And as you publish more with the tool, it gets better at predicting the best time based on your post performance data. 

Overall, as you publish more posts, you’ll have more accurate data to predict the best time to post.

Once you know the best time to publish your post, you can now decide on the types of posts to publish during a month. 

4. List out important post ideas

Post ideas are the concepts you use in your Instagram posts. Instagram post ideas include:

• User-generated content
• Influencer collaboration
• Tutorials
• Discounts
• Giveaways and contests 
• Instagram polls 
• Instagram quizzes 

Keep in mind that some of the ideas work better for some Instagram post types than others. For instance, an Instagram quiz is more suited to an Instagram Story than a feed post.

Listing out the post ideas for a month will guide the content that goes into each publishing slot on your calendar. This way, you can put variety in your Instagram posts so that you don’t put your audience to sleep.

How do you know the best post ideas for your content?

It depends on your Instagram goals for each month. Here are some post ideas that may work depending on your goals:

• Product awareness: You can create tutorials, feature user-generated content, and show product use cases.
• Engagement: You can run Instagram giveaways and contests, feature product use cases, and repost influencers’ posts.
• Sales: You can run discounts, create unboxing videos, and expand on product specifications.

To uncover more content ideas to use, read the Instagram post ideas guide.

Once you list out the post ideas you want to use, you can flesh out specifics for individual posts in the Instagram content calendar.

5. Flesh out content ideas for a month

After preparing an overview of your content for a month, you now have to dive into individual posts. 

This involves providing details of what goes into each post like post idea, caption, hashtags, goal, media type, and content creator. 

While you don’t have to get every post publish-ready, you should have a skeleton that only needs finishing touches during the month.

Of course, there should be a space for spontaneous posts when the need arises.

Fleshing out content ideas will deliver more information about each post in the content calendar. But since the amount of information here may be too much for your calendar box, you should have another page to house extra information in your content calendar.

On this page, you can enter the information about posts. This way, if you work with team members, they’ll know what to do to get each post ready for publishing.

6. Use an Instagram content calendar template

Once you have all the information about your content, you can now create your content calendar from scratch…

Or use a content calendar template.

With a template, you only need to enter your information into the cells. And if you need to add more columns or rows, it will be as simple as drinking water.

So, where do you find these templates?

Instagram content calendar templates already exist online for tools like Google Sheets, Notion, Trello, and more. So, find and use one that fits your workflow.

But since you’re here, I’ll share an Instagram content calendar template that you can start using in minutes. The Google Sheets template has two sheets.

The first sheet contains the calendar. Here, you can enter a few details, such as:

• Post idea
• Post type
• Description

This will contain a summary of your posts.

However, on the second sheet, you have a table that can house more details about each Instagram post you want to publish. These include:

• Title
• Goal
• Caption
• Hashtags
• Creator
• Post status

You can access the Instagram content calendar template here.

Note: You have to make a copy of the template as you can’t edit it directly.

This template is just a starting point, and you can edit it to fit your needs.

However, if you need a more sophisticated option, you may have to go for a social media management tool.

Instagram content calendar tools to plan content

Most social media management tools today have calendars for an overview of your content. 

But while a traditional Instagram content calendar only provides a content overview, a social media management tool also lets you schedule an Instagram post to publish at a specific time.

So, it saves you the time of uploading posts manually to Instagram.

Here are 4 social media management tools that offer robust content calendars:

Meta Business Suite

Meta Business Suite has a planner section that shows you a weekly or monthly calendar.

Here, you can create drafts or schedule posts. You can even set goals to increase reach or grow followers in 28 days.

While scheduling posts, Meta can suggest the best times to post based on your audience’s active times.

If you only publish content on Facebook and Instagram, this can be a good calendar option.

Vista Social

Vista Social has a content calendar that shows both weekly and monthly views. But beyond that, you can see small or large post previews and an enlarged view when you hover over a post.

You can also get post ideas from holidays across religions and countries. Then, filters or labels let you sort social media posts.

You can read my full Vista Social review to learn more about the tool.

ContentStudio 

ContentStudio’s planner lets you manage your social media posts. You can see the number of posts in each status and add labels to posts to categorize them.

Another view you get is the Instagram grid. So, you can see how your grid will look once your Instagram posts go live.

Read my ContentStudio review for more details about how the tool works.

Pallyy

Pallyy has a robust content calendar that allows the monthly, weekly, or list views. You also see media files, which you can drag to a date to schedule a post for that day.

Finding posts is also easy, as you can filter by post types, labels, or social media channels. If you need post ideas, Pallyy lets you import holidays of various countries.

For more information about this tool, read my full Pallyy review.

You can check out the full list of the best social media management tools to explore more options.

Conclusion

A content calendar for Instagram will set your eyes on your Instagram marketing goals and the content that will help hit the targets.

This is why creating an Instagram content calendar is critical to your overall Instagram strategy.

So, whether you want to create an Instagram calendar from scratch, use the template, or use a social media management tool, take a step to have one today.

And if you have a friend who needs this calendar template, please share this post with them.