---
title: 'How I Plan My Instagram Content for Growth (fresh ideas, no stress)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=R_tWmWv3EvM'
video_id: 'R_tWmWv3EvM'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 0
---

# How I Plan My Instagram Content for Growth (fresh ideas, no stress)

> Source: [How I Plan My Instagram Content for Growth (fresh ideas, no stress)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=R_tWmWv3EvM)

## Summary

This video presents a practical weekly routine for planning Instagram content that balances consistency with work-life balance. The creator shares their personal five-step process, from selecting content formats to scripting, all while achieving audience growth. The focus is on strategic, intentional posting rather than high-volume content.

### Key Points

- **Consistent Posting Schedule** [0:13] — The creator posts 4 intentional pieces per week, not 15 daily. This helped them break a growth plateau and reach 200k followers while maintaining work-life balance.
- **Format Menu** [1:34] — A pre-defined list of content formats (voiceover vlog, chat to camera, tutorial, trend, etc.) provides creative constraints and makes idea generation easier.
- **HubSpot Content Calendar Template** [3:11] — HubSpot's free social media content calendar template is recommended for scheduling, tracking engagement, and planning across platforms.
- **Weekly Goal Setting** [4:05] — Set a weekly content goal (e.g., email list growth, audience growth) to guide the content's purpose without killing creativity.
- **Idea Generation Techniques** [5:56] — Generate ideas by limited scrolling, checking comments/DMs for FAQs, and analyzing past top-performing content using Instagram Insights filtered by 'follows'.
- **Matching Ideas to Formats** [8:02] — Match each content idea to multiple formats to repurpose the same subject matter and reach different audience preferences.
- **Scripting and Outlining** [13:46] — Write scripts and outline visuals in advance so filming is efficient and focused.

## Transcript

Thanks to HubSpot for
sponsoring today's video.
Okay, so I know you think being
consistent on Instagram is
impossible, but I promise you,
you can do it. You just need the right
routine. And today I
thought I would show you mine.
For the past several weeks, I've been in
the routine of posting
about four times per week
on Instagram. I know that might not sound
like a lot compared to the
15 posts per day that you
hear from some gurus on YouTube, but
these are four pieces of
intentional and strategic content
that align with my brand and my current
goals. And in fact, the way
I've been posting lately has
allowed me to get out of a bit of a
growth threat and finally hit 200,000
followers over on Instagram.
But I think most importantly, this
posting schedule has
also allowed me to maintain
some work-life balance. And in fact, I
kind of have a bit of a
weird schedule for the past
three months. I've been road tripping
through Scotland in my
camper van. So I usually spend
about 50% of my time exploring and 50% of
my time working on my laptop. I'm
actually currently in an
Airbnb in London though, because I am
going to be heading home to Canada in
just a few short days.
But I wanted to show you the content
planning routine that I've
been using on a weekly basis
throughout my travels to stay consistent
and grow on Instagram while
still also having a life. So
today is actually going to be part one of
my series where I'm going to take you
behind the scenes of
my Instagram content creation workflow.
And we're focusing
specifically on planning content,
how I consistently come up with ideas to
stay consistent and to
actually grow. So I'm going
to take you along with me and hopefully
we'll have some Instagram
content planned by the end of it.
So let's get started. Okay, so the very
first step in this
process is to select the formats
that we're going to use for our content
this week. I have personally
found that the best way to do
this is by using a format menu. Just like
options of food at a
restaurant, this is a list of options
of different formats of short form
content that you can create. It's
basically the packaging that
the content is going to go into. And
we'll worry about like the
subject matter of that content in
just a few minutes. So here's a look at
my format menu. We've got
voiceover vlog, a chat to camera
video, a tutorial or a trend. These are
just four formats that I
have found work pretty well with
my audience. You could definitely have
some other options on your format menu
like get ready with me
or green screen videos or different types
of carousels. I find it's
helpful to have a format
menu like this because it provides
creative constraints. It
might seem counterintuitive,
but it's actually really, really helpful
to your creativity to have some
boundaries around what
you're going to create. If you just tell
yourself to come up with
Instagram ideas, that is so broad
and open ended. It's really hard to even
start. But if you tell
yourself, okay, I need to come up
with a voiceover vlog, it gets you
started down a path, which is just way
easier than, you know,
starting from a blank page. So for this
coming week, I think we'll do two trend
videos. I definitely
want to do one voiceover vlog and one
carousel as well. So as for the strategy
of how I'm selecting
these formats, one consideration is just
variety. I haven't done a
voiceover vlog in a while, so I
want to do one again. Another
consideration is ideas that I already
have floating around, which
we're going to talk about in just a
second. But I have a couple things in the
back of my mind that
I think would work well as trend or like
text on B roll format videos.
So I want to make sure I add
those to my calendar so I can make use of
those ideas. KV from the
future here to interrupt myself
very briefly. So I want to let you know
that if you want to schedule
your content in a structured
format similar to how I do, then you
should check out HubSpot's
free social media content
calendar template. It's a completely free
resource that helps you
plan your content strategically
month by month. It basically covers every
platform Instagram
YouTube TikTok Snapchat
Facebook, LinkedIn. So no matter which or
how many of those you use,
it's got you covered. All you
need to do to get started is add it to
your Google Drive or
download it as a spreadsheet if you
prefer. Then you can pick the platform
and content type, write the
caption, and if it's sponsored,
you can track those details as well. The
template even helps you track your
engagement rate over
time, which is super helpful when it
comes to pitching for
those brand deals. My personal
favorite part is this calendar view
because it helps you keep track of all
your planned content
across formats. As I mentioned, this free
guide was developed by
HubSpot who sponsored today's
video. You can get it for yourself for
free using the link in my description.
The second step is to
choose a goal or a focus for the week.
Now, admittedly, you could
definitely do this first.
In fact, a lot of the steps in this
process, you could kind of scramble them
around and do them in
different orders. I find it helpful to
start with picking the
formats because it provides
those creative constraints. With those
formats or that packaging in mind, now
we're going to come up
with what our goal is, the cohesive theme
or the purpose behind the
content that we're making. Some
examples might be promoting your
affiliate links, growing your email list,
selling your digital
products, getting people to watch your
YouTube videos or listen to
your podcast. There's lots
of different results that you can get if
you craft your Instagram content
strategically. So just
consider what you might want that to be.
Other than that, you might
just be aiming for audience
growth and that's totally valid too. So I
think for myself, I want
my content for this week to
generate new email list subscribers.
Honestly, I know this is
something that I can neglect and I
have been neglecting for a long time, but
it's actually like so
easy to connect it into a lot
of content, you know, basically telling
people about like my free
offers that will get them onto
my email list or even like promoting my
weekly creator letter to
send it every Monday. So this
is going to be my personal guiding
principle for the content that I'm going
to plan today. Remember,
just because you're setting an overall
goal for your content
doesn't mean that everything needs
to feel like it's out of a marketing
campaign. The goal tie-in can be as
simple as making the
caption of your real a call to action to
joining your email list. I
personally think it's really
important that we don't let strategy take
out all the fun of content
creation, partially because
that's why most of us got started in the
first place, but also
because I think that's really
where the magic and authenticity comes
into play and what makes
people actually like consuming your
content. So it's always a fine balance,
right? Having some strategy and
overarching purpose to
what you're making so that you can work
towards your business
goals, while at the same time,
leaving things open ended enough that you
can really let your
creativity shine. So yeah,
don't let the goal setting like take
over, but just something good
to keep in mind. The next step
is to reference our existing list of
ideas, which admittedly is a
bit of a cheat code. I know,
but this is part of my regular practice
as a content creator. I
just keep an active note in
my notes app on my phone where I add
ideas as I come across stuff when I'm
scrolling or something
just pops into my mind or shower thoughts
or whatever. Okay, but I
get that just like telling
you to look at your previous list of
ideas is not super helpful.
So while I am going to do that,
I did want to share some tips with you in
case you're starting from
scratch and you need some
guidance for coming up with your first
ideas. Okay, so here are a
few things you can do. One thing
is set yourself some limited scroll time,
set a timer for like 15 or
20 minutes and scroll through
your Instagram reels feed or even your
TikTok for you page
intentionally looking for content
inspiration. You might want to keep an
eye out for audios that
you're seeing again and again,
or formats that seem to be going viral
right now. Like if everybody's
using the same structure of a
meme, maybe you could find a way to use
that too. Second thing you
can do is to scroll through your
recent comments or DMs keeping an eye out
for frequently asked
questions or common themes that
just pop up again and again. That's a
good indication of
content that your audience would
be interested in seeing. And the third
thing that I would recommend you do is
look back through your
past content and see what has performed
the best for you. Now,
depending on that goal that we were
just talking about what the best is might
change. If your main goal
is audience growth and reach,
then of course, you can look and see what
reels got the most views.
However, remember that a lot
of reach doesn't necessarily equal
audience growth. So if you're
specifically looking to gain
followers, what you might want to do is
go into your Instagram
insights, go to the professional
dashboard, tap into content you shared,
let's maybe look at like
the last three months to get
a broader sense of it. Then you can
change your filter for the
metric to be follows instead of
views. I recommend leaving as sort by
highest and then tap apply. Now we can
actually see the content
that generated the most followers for me,
not just the most views.
So I'm going to take a look
at this content and think why do I think
that it generated more
followers for me and how can I use
that same strategy in the content that
I'm coming up with for this
new week. So in this next step,
we get to play matchup. We're going to
connect the ideas that we came
up with to the formats that we
chose earlier. Now I'll be honest with
you. Normally I would
just do this in my head or on
my computer, but I wanted to make this
really clear because I honestly feel like
if you can understand
how to strategically mix and match the
ideas that you have for content with the
way that you package
those ideas, I think that's like a
superpower for content creators.
Oftentimes we have one idea,
we share it in one way and then we kind
of just let it go and try
to move on to coming up with
something new. There's actually so much
potential in each idea to
package it in multiple different
ways. So let me give you a real life
example of this. After I
made a video about how to write
better voiceovers and that performs so
well for me, I wanted to do
more content about voiceover
tips. So I had the idea to share five
different voiceover prompts
to give you a starting point
for like writing your voiceover and I
ended up making two pieces of
content out of the same idea.
One was a carousel where I put each
prompt on a different slide
and the other was a trending
reel where I had the prompts listed in
the captions. So you can
see how this is the exact
same subject matter. I've just packaged
it in two different ways.
You'll get way more out of each
individual idea if you start approaching
it like that. I've written
down the ideas that I came up
with through scrolling, through just like
writing down my shower thoughts
throughout the week and
what I also have here are the different
formats from my format
menu. When you realize that you
can take one idea and match it up with
several different formats and create
basically four pieces
of content out of one idea, that is such
a hack for consistency
without so much effort and stress.
Especially when it comes to getting inspo
from content that we see
online. I think the best
magic happens when you see something
creative that somebody else made and not
only do you put your
own spin on it, your own unique take, but
you also do it in a slightly different
format or packaging.
So one example I would say for this is I
had seen this trend going
around on reels that was like,
"I'm not scared of aging because this is
what my mom looks like at
50." And the trend in this case
was a video of basically showing off how
young and hot your mom
still looks, how like she still
looks like she's 25. That was the
inspiration for this post that I made
that first of all I did as
a carousel rather than a reel. So I
changed the format or the
packaging, but I also had my own
fresh take on it, which was, "Guys, why
do we care so much about whether or not
our mom has wrinkles
or gray hair? There's so much more to
life than our appearance."
And so that's what I was trying
to highlight with that carousel. So
that's where I took the inspiration. Not
only did I put my own
perspective on it, but I also put it in
new packaging. Okay, so
let's do that with the ideas
that I came up with this week. Okay,
starting with the best phone tripod.
Basically, I got this
new mount for my tripod, which is like a
MagSafe adapter. I was raving to Dan
about how much I love
this thing and he was like, "You should
make real about that." So for
example, I could do this one
as a tutorial, right? I could kind of
demonstrate setting it up, all the
different features that it
has. And I may do that at some future
point, but I think for this
week, I would like to do it as a
trend kind of video. Basically what I
mean by that is just showing
B-roll of me like setting up the
tripod, my phone, maginating to the
mount, probably with some text on screen
that's something like
POV, "You found the best tripod for
creators," or I'll come up
with something better than that,
but that's the concept. Another one that
I think is going to go in
the trend category here,
I wanted to talk about the fact that
unfortunately, consistency does work for
content creators. I was
inspired by this reel, though I know many
take this format,
basically saying, "Yeah, you know
that thing that we all know that we kind
of need to do? That's
annoying, but yeah, unfortunately,
it does really work." Next up, I thought
I would talk about whether
or not van life is worth it. I
feel like a lot of people have a lot of
opinions about traveling,
doing van life, is it really as
glamorous as it seems. And recently I was
talking to some van life
friends of mine, and we were
discussing how van life is really a trade
off between like comfort
and freedom. And I thought
that was a really interesting concept. So
I kind of wanted to talk
about that in a reel. I could do
this as a little chat to camera where
I'm, you know, just discussing this
stuff, FaceTime style,
but I think it would be much more
effective as a voiceover vlog.
I have so much B-roll from my
time traveling in the van, and I want to
make use of it. So I'm going
to write a voiceover script,
and then basically put it over all of the
cutesy B-roll that I captured. And
finally, we have this
concept, which is, I really think we need
to rebrand trying and make
trying cool, because a lot of
people see trying as being cringy. Like
basically, if you're doing
something, but you're not good at
it yet, it's like cringe. I think it's
very cool. I think it's very
admirable. I think this is very
relevant to my audience of content
creators. So I could do this as a little
voiceover vlog, you know,
a script over top of clips of me doing
creator stuff. I could do
this as a chat to camera,
or even maybe I'm like getting ready and
doing my makeup or making a
coffee and talking about this.
I think what I actually want to do, and I
don't have this format here
right now, but I think I'm
going to do it as a carousel. Carousels
have been performing really well for me
lately. Like they're
actually getting more views than my reels
have been, which is kind
of crazy. And I kind of want
to try out this format of carousel where
you have like a little
screenshot of like basically text
bubbles over top of pictures. So yeah,
hopefully you're able to see
how any of these ideas could
be matched up with these different
packages. I'm just choosing to take this
approach because, you
know, I feel like it this week and for
the other reasoning I've
shared. But if there's one message
you take away from this video, I want you
to know that you could take
this one concept and pair it
up with any of these formats. And it just
unlocks the door to so much
more content that really makes
the most of those ideas that you're
having rather than just throwing them
away off of one format,
one time, you can reuse it and reach more
people and reach people
in different ways because
everybody has their format preferences,
right? All right, we have
reached the final step in the
process. I would personally say that the
most difficult work is
behind us because I feel like
we've got some momentum at this stage.
I'm going to script and outline this
content because basically
when I actually go ahead and set up and
film, I want to be able to
do it in the most efficient
way possible. I don't want to be thinking
about, well, what should I
say? And what was my idea
about that? I'm going to write out the
scripts for the voiceovers. So then
basically I'm ready to go.
Okay, so I've got some of my scripts
written and this time
around I just have like the one
voiceover and then the trend one. So it's
actually not a ton of writing, but I
thought I would show
you quickly what I like kind of format
these like. This one's quite
straightforward. It's literally
just the text like the script of the
voiceover. And then I'm going to go
through my B-roll library
and pick out some clips of like van life
and travel that I think
will work well with what I'm
saying. I also wanted to show you a
script from a reel I did a few weeks ago
to give you a better
example when I'm like planning out more
of the visuals. Here's a
look at a tutorial that I did
a few weeks back about how to make your
footage less shaky without using a
gimbal. This also gives
you a good sense of what this looks like
filled out in Notion. So
you can see like I typed the
caption into this form here because it's
so easy to just copy it and
then put it into my Instagram
caption. But yeah, here's what the script
looks like. So you see I
have the text all down the left
hand column and then on the right hand
column I have my visuals.
They're just descriptions of the
clips that I wanted to get that would
explain what I'm talking
about in the script. So there
we go. That is another week of content
planned. All that's left to
do is film and edit and write
the captions. Obviously there is still
quite a bit of work left to do, but I am
planning to bring you
along with me for that. So make sure
you're subscribed because
next week I'm planning to
show you my process for batch filming
reels. So you won't want to
miss that. I hope you're having
adventures and following your dreams and
I'll catch you in the next video. Bye!