Posted by Small businesses are consumed by the process of creating and selling products. They often miss the most important part which is targeting the correct audience with the best-suited content.
Through this post, we’ll go through how small businesses can plan, create content and ensure it reaches their potential customers.
Planning
Step 1: Understand your niche.
You must first understand and identify a niche for yourself and your business.
This is important so that you can classify your audience.
Once done, ensure you’re planning content that will be mostly be consumed by your target audience. This makes it easier to boil down to ideas and only think straight about a specific set of audiences.
There is also a possibility you might have two different sets of audience. In this case, you must plan content for both of them individually.
Step 2: Visualize the format you’d like to communicate
Once you know your niche and set of audiences, the next step is to visualize the format of your content.
Are you looking at creating content for your Instagram feed, stories or Reels, or every feature available within Instagram?
Are you also going to have a theme for your business?
Once you’ve made your decision, you can then visualize it and put it down from pen to paper or brain to doc.
Step 3: Create a content calendar
Now that you’re sure of the content format, and the types of content, it’s easier to create a calendar.
This calendar would be your go-to content calendar as per the content you’d like to publish on your Instagram account.
These could change every month, but you can also have a relation between a hashtag and what you post about it on a particular day.
For Example, you can do a whole #Tuesdaythoughts, #or #SocialSaturday, etc.
Creating
Once you’re done planning and have a content calendar in place, you must start creating in advance. Before creating two steps to keep in mind should be –
Step 4: Pick a theme and tone for your business account.
Aesthetics play an important role while scrolling through a feed. Especially for someone who is new and has come across your profile.
Since your profile acts as the face of your business, the content on it should be relatable, and cohesive to an extent.
There are multiple themes you can choose from like — Checkerboard, Pastel, Repetition, Flatlay, Color pop, etc. You can read more about them here
Step 5: Look for apps that help you create your planned content.
Once the content calendar is in place and you have decided on having a theme or not, you can move on to creating content.
For this, you can make good use of the apps and tools available to create content.
These could be a mix of all the different features Instagram allows.
So, you can go about listing/ scripting some of these—
1. Reels
2. Images
3. Video content
4. Gifs
5. Stories
Step 6: Pick a location or create a DIY studio
It’s best to create a DIY studio within your workspace. This is not only cost-effective but also feasible in terms of saving time to create content in a single flow.
Below are a few things that you can consider including in your DIY studio:
• Backdrop- You could use any cloth or piece of fabric or even just a piece of solid color paper to put the focus on your subject in the frame.
• Camera- A good quality camera is essential to capture the subject.
You can use a phone camera as well, but it should be good enough to nature;;y capture the subject.
• Props- Anything that complements your products in photos and videos could be kept handy. This could be anything from a metal frame, a vase, or other props based on the subject you’re shooting.
If it’s food, you can use ingredients as a prop in the frame.
• Light- Natural lighting is great but it’s not the best idea. to rely solely on it. Having a ring light is super useful as the more light, the better are the images you shoot.
• Reflector- Reflectors are light enhancers and must be used if there isn’t enough light in the space you’re shooting in. It could be a piece of metal or fabric. You can even create a reflector at home using aluminum foil on a piece of cardboard.
• Tripod – It may not seem important at first but a tripod for your camera or phone is important/ This helps with image stabilizing and is also handy when you’re shooting all by yourself.
Step 7: Create and ensure you have content at least for a week or two ahead
Once you’ve picked your apps and have a setup, go ahead and start creating content.
The next plan of action should be to keep creating enough content that you are a week ahead.
Also, while creating content you must keep in mind the dimensions for each of the features you’d be using on Instagram. This is because the aspect ratio differs for Stories, Reels, and Feed posts.
You must also keep in mind that you may have to eventually opt to go ahead with cross-posting to multiple social platforms.
As for the type of content, this can be executed as per the calendar you created in Step 3.
Publishing
Step 8: Schedule your content
Once your content is in place, you must be able to schedule it eventually for the future.
To publish your posts and stories, you can choose to publish them directly on the native app or you can use a scheduler like – Crowdfire.
Currently, if you’ve linked your Business Instagram account to Crowdfire, here are the features that can help you-
1. Scheduling – Schedule your Instagram posts to make sure that you post consistently. Use the Crowdfire best time feature to make sure that you post when your audience is most active. This will help you get higher engagement on your posts.
For Instagram stories and carousels, you can publish using Crowdfire’s notifications on your mobile device.
2. Image recommendation- Crowdfire will recommend fresh images often, to keep your account active and get you the right followers. These Image Recommendations depend on the number of relevant content we can fetch from the creators for your account and the topics that you’ve added. This is to ensure you get maximum engagement for such posts which in turn helps you reach more audience.
3. Mentions – You can reply to all the comments and DM’s on your Instagram posts from the Crowdfire app. Engaging with your audience is the key and it helps in beating the IG algorithm.
4. Analytics – You can measure your current engagement and can adjust your posting strategy based on the concrete data.
That’s it, folks! 
Let me know if you found this post helpful?
Also, If there is anything you’d like to read more on, do share your suggestions in the comments and I’ll get put my brains, hands, love, and research all into it! 
With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. Try it for free.