Do You Need a Content Calendar to Stay on Top of Your Instagram Marketing? Yes!

Whether you are marketing on Instagram or another social media platform, it’s crucial to have a content calendar. You may feel that you can do without one, but this will likely lead to a lack of organization, making your task much more stressful than it should be. Learn exactly what a content calendar is and explore some of the most important reasons you should be using one.

What’s a Content Calendar?

To better understand why you need a content calendar for your Instagram marketing, you need to know what it is. Think of the calendar as your hub for social media marketing. It contains your plans for all of the content on your social media page. It will include information on what is due when, planned topics, what’s done, and who are assigned to each project. Simply put, it lets you plan and track your Instagram posts, Stories, and Reels.

With that in mind, we expound on the reasons you need a content calendar.

Why you need a Content Calendar?

• 1. Stay Organized

  At the most basic level, a content calendar will keep you organized. Social media marketing has a long list of moving parts to keep track of. From topics to progress to the content itself, you need a streamlined way of being able to check relevant information in seconds.

  With a content calendar, you know exactly where to look if you or anyone on your team have any questions about your Instagram content.

• 2. Keep Everyone on the Same Page

  

  The fact that anyone on your team can check the content calendar is also crucial. This ensures that every member of your team is on the same page. A content calendar saves your team from wasting time asking for information that can easily be accessed in the calendar. It also prevents people from doing a task that someone else has already done.

• 3. Keep People Accountable

  Because the content calendar includes task assignments, it keeps people accountable. A member of your team can’t just say they forgot or didn’t realize they were assigned a given project. The calendar makes it easy for everyone to check what they and their teammates are supposed to accomplish within a given timeframe.

• 4. Post Content on Time

  With a content calendar, you are always organized and know exactly where to find the content when you need it. This way, you are sure to post the content on time at your agreed-upon schedule. You need not scramble at the last minute to come up with content, as you have already planned it days, weeks, or even months ago.

• 5. Consistently Post Content

  Because your content is ironed out ahead of time and listed in the content calendar, you will be able to post consistently. Whether consistency for your brand means once a week or once a day, posting regularly is important. Maintaining a consistent schedule for social media posts reflects well on your brand and means that you want to engage your audience with fresh, new content.

• 6. Plan for Special Posts, Events, Seasons, Holidays, and More

  

  Smart Instagram marketing includes posts that are relevant to current events, such as holidays or events. Using a content calendar lets you ensure that you have thematic content for these occasions.

• 7. Coordinate With Other Marketing Efforts

  Your Instagram marketing likely interacts with other marketing efforts. Whether it’s social media, product launches, or general ad campaigns, using a content calendar that includes various social media platforms lets you easily coordinate all these. Maybe you want to post similar content on various platforms. Or you can also opt to keep each platform unique, using the calendar to make sure you don’t post the same content on different platforms the same week.

• 8. Reduce Stress

  A content calendar helps you manage and prevent undue stress. That includes the stress from worrying about last-minute deadlines because your content will be created ahead of time. It also includes the stress associated with planning, as your events and holidays would have been plotted in advance.

• 9. Boost Audience Engagement

  Using a content calendar helps to keep your audience more engaged with your brand. To start, you’ll be posting content relevant to the season or current events. Because you have carefully planned and plotted a schedule, your posts will be unique and not repetitive. Your timely and consistent posts will also encourage your audience to regularly check your page. All those factors boost audience engagement, as their experience following you on social media is seamless and well-planned.

• 10. Brainstorm With Ease

  

  You may not realize it but having a content calendar also helps significantly with brainstorming. That’s because you can easily see what topics and activities are planned. These can be used for inspiration or for ensuring that all your content is relevant and fresh, not boring and cyclical. In other words, content calendars reduce the risk of repeating content on Instagram.

• 11. Track Performance Easily

  You’ll also notice that tracking the performance of posts becomes a lot easier with a content calendar. You can check analytics to see how a specific Instagram post performed. But with the calendar, you can also analyze other information and connect trends back to your posts. For example, you can easily confirm if your sales of holiday gift baskets increased after you announced them on an Instagram post.

  Tracking your Instagram marketing lets you confirm that you can attain your goals. It also helps you spot areas for improvement.

• 12. Get a Big Picture of Your Instagram Marketing

  On top of everything else, a content calendar will give you a useful overarching view of your entire Instagram strategy. You can view everything related to content marketing at a glance, making it easy to plan or spot trends over weeks or months. Use this big-picture view to adjust your strategy, like changing content types or the frequency of posts.

What to Do Now

Your content calendar can be as simple or as complicated as you want. Various third-party programs are available to help you plot out and schedule your Instagram posts. You can start with a simple spreadsheet with links to content drafts. Whatever kind of content calendar you choose, you’ll find that it helps you get organized and enables you to meet multiple goals with just one tool.