What is a content plan of stories and why do you need it
Account promotion on Instagram without a content plan is almost impossible. A blog might be regularly filled with posts, it might be arranged prettily, yet the statistics of its development will constantly be fluctuating. It's the same as if a person doesn't know the road, driving without a navigator or map. He seems to be moving forward, but he doesn't know where he's going.
A content plan is, first of all, a helper for a blogger, which provides structured information about further publications in the profile/stories.
The benefit of forming a content plan
Before you start writing this plan, you need to identify the main goal of blog development in social media. They can be different:
- Sale of goods or services. Typically, stores and other commercial accounts have this goal. Such a blog does not hide that it sells something, and at what cost.
- The attraction of potential customers. A blog is created for the attraction of the specific target audience so that in the future some followers become clients. That is, the main task is not to sell, but to attract.
- To gain popularity. The main purpose of the account is to make the brand or personality recognizable, popular. And the content plan will be created to promote the personal brand.
- Interaction with clients. There are no sales in this case. It is just communication with followers, who can become clients of the company in the future.
A content plan itself will not bring you any followers and will not make an account more popular. Its main purpose is to facilitate the working process in the account.
The first steps of creating a plan
The first thing to do is to choose the program and device to use the content plan conveniently. Many people like to make a plan in the form of a table.
What should necessarily be in the table:
- Date (day.month.year);
- Time of stories publication (sometimes you can just specify morning, noon, evening);
- Type of content (entertaining, informative, pre-sale, sale).
With these principles in place, you begin to write the content plan. If you already have stories ready for publication, you can save them to cloud storage in separate folders or save them in draft stories on Instagram.
The second step is metric
The content plan should effectively influence the engagement of followers. That’s why it is crucial to analyze every story to fix your mistakes in the future. Special metrics exist for these purposes.
Metric is a tool in the form of an app, which allows evaluating the published stories according to content plan, to carry out comparisons of the set tasks with the fulfillment of them.
What metric does:
- It shows what reach and how many views did a story have. Namely, it is important to monitor how many people watched a story in general. These metrics influence the cost of an ad. The more accounts are reached, the higher cost can be set for the ad mockups placement in stories. In addition, it has now become popular to organize marathons. Bloggers participate in them as speakers and pay for the participation. And the cost of participation directly depends on the amount of reach.
- Tracking "forward" or "backward" actions. In this case, you can understand which stories the followers were most interested in. If there was a game, you can easily see which questions/tasks were difficult for people.
- Exit from the stories. This metric is quite unpleasant for bloggers. One should monitor it during ad placement. This is how it can be identified whether the ad was useful and whether it is appropriate for the target audience.
- Subscribers' reactions to stories. It's important to monitor followers' interactions with the blogger and their stories. These metrics will increase with the emergence of response stickers or surveys.
It is convenient to place metrics in the content plan. This allows to visually assess which stories are of interest, where it is best to add stickers, which ads should not be placed in the future, and so on.
The third step is filling a content plan
What should be placed in the columns of the content plan? It is best to describe each story and each action in detail. Here is an example:
Monday - show the product on sale, tell what's available and what's on order;
Tuesday - explain what to look for when choosing a product in this store;
Wednesday – tell about current special offers;
Thursday – tell the story of product appearance.
This content plan is too simple. You can write out one story each day. For example, in the morning you can wish your followers a good start to the day; an hour later you can tell them how you're doing and what the blogger had for breakfast; in the afternoon you can post a commercial, and in the evening you can make a quiz.
The more detailed is your plan, the easier it would be to be on Instagram. Also, it will make the analysis process easier.
It's important to understand that no matter how good the stories are, there's no point in just being happy that they generally exist. It is necessary to regularly monitor how subscribers react to the content, what interests they have. In general, the effectiveness of any business, including the development of an Instagram profile depends on proper planning.