Are you struggling to come up with ideas for your Instagram content? And even if you had some ideas, you need some templates to put them into action? It’s a lot out there for the modern content creator, trying to keep up with the latest trends and get engagement. Let me take some of the pressure off you by showing you some simple tools you can use to generate ideas and make your content look fabulous. Yes, we’re leveraging AI content planners and Instagram templates.
Why Content Creation Feels Overwhelming
You might be sitting there, scratching your head, wondering what on earth you should post next. You might just feel tired and have a tad bit of decision fatigue trying to think of something. It might also be tough balancing your creativity with deadlines. Whatever the reason, it all just feels too much. And you don’t want to be in a situation where you don’t have any plan at all.
How AI Content Planners Take the Pressure Off
AI content planners are not there to take your creativity away. They are just there to give you start, to help you get some ideas. You can choose which ones to use and which ones you can throw away. You’re in control and you can put together a plan that suits you.
In my AI Instagram Content Planner tool, you fill in certain details about your page in order to customise a unique plan for you.
You will:
- describe your page
- give details about your target audience (gender, location, age, interests)
- say what kind of content you normally do (e.g. educational, entertaining, promotional)
- list content pillars: these are the themes that you often use e.g. parenting, kid’s toys reviews, home, technology, collaborations etc.
Once you’ve identified information about your page, the next step is to specify what kind of content you want and the duration that you want it for.
- number of days
- content mix e.g. reels, stories, carousels, static post (it’s a good idea to have a mix). You can also leave this blank for the AI to provide a mix. (see more details on the tool page here)
Instagram Templates: Making Visuals Easy and Consistent
On Instagram, image is everything. You want to create a cohesive look with similar colours so that people recognise your branding. Combining tools like templates and Canva is an awesome way to bring your vision to life.
So what are Instagram templates and why should I care?
Templates are a link to something that’s already half done for you. All you have to do is personalise it. Normally this link is often given in Canva, so that you can open it up there and create your own thing. But I’ve also learnt how to save a Canva document in PowerPoint, so if you have any problems opening things up, let me know and I’ll send you the PPT document.
It really beats starting form scratch because it gives you ideas and it also provides you with a good idea of sizing. With Canva, it’s also very easy to change sizing. I can switch from a YouTube cover to a Instagram reel cover very easily.
You can personalise your template with your own brand colours and font. Right now, on SA Mom blogs, I have different shades of green. (Darkest green #2A3B19, White #E6E7E2, Murky green #A4B792, Dark green #3D5919)
How do you figure out which hex codes to put in Canva for the colours that you want? It’s easy: you use ColorZilla Chrome extension. You just click on it and move your mouse to where you want to pick up the colour and it will put it on your clipboard.
Types of Templates
You can check out my shop and see the kinds of templates that I have:
- Square – Classy Instagram Collection , Essential Instagram Posts
- Mockups – to display digital products that you want to sell: Classy Minimal Mockup Collection (I have used these a lot to display products and I love the shadow effect here), Mockup Canva Templates (more variety to display products)
- Carousels – Specifically designed sets. Carousels are doing really well on Instagram at the moment. Five sets of Carousels
- Portrait shape – used for stories, reel covers or Pinterest Pins: Pinterest Pin Template, Story, Reel, Idea Pin
An example of how I used these tools:
I fed my information into the content planner. I also used ChatGPT to figure out more of my content pillars. It’s useful to do this to identify things that you may have missed (I certainly didn’t think about collaboration, but it’s something that I definitely do), and even the specifics of my location being my actual town as well as South Africa.
Using the example of the blogging tips on the content planner, I then used the Five sets of carousels to bring this task to life.
So, below you can see the two videos of the two steps, using the content planner and then using the template. As you can see, I was already doing a lot of other reels at the time so I didn’t need more ideas on that, but it helped to have some ideas for content.
How I used the AI Instagram content planner tool:
How I used an Instagram Template (5 sets of Carousels) to bring the content to life:
Conclusion
Content planning doesn’t have to be a headache. In this day and age we have got the tools to make things easier for you. You don’t have to use them all the time, but when you are really stuck for ideas, they can make a big difference. Consistency beats perfection every time. Go ahead and try out the AI planner and templates and share this post to others who you think it help. I’d also like to know what you have tried and what has worked for you.
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