Managing an Instagram account can be time-consuming, so as social media strategists, we’re always looking for ways to make our jobs easier. And a great way to do this is by taking advantage of Instagram templates.
An Instagram template is a reusable graphic or video template that social media managers can customize over and over again to easily share Instagram content. These can be used for posts, scrolls, stories and more.
The job of a social media manager consists of so many moving parts:
- Content creation
- Content planning/publishing
- Writing the inscription
- Online engagement
- Community building
- Analysis and reporting
- And more
Why burden yourself with more work by asking yourself to create Instagram content from scratch every single time? Especially because many marketers are managing multiple social media accounts at the same time.
So let’s talk more about Instagram templates – why you want to use them, what they might look like, successful brands that are already making the most of their templates AND free downloadable templates you can use.
Why Use Instagram Templates?
Instagram templates make content creation faster and easier. Which may be necessary because content creation can be a time-consuming process.
Some influencers say that creating a single Instagram post can take anywhere from a few minutes to several month, depending on anything involved in the process (eg, brand partnerships, photo opps). And the same can happen for brands.
Chelse Hensley, social media strategist at Visme, says, “A piece of content created for Instagram can last anywhere from 5 seconds to 3 hours. You can engage your audience in a fraction of a second using features like Instagram stories, polls, Q&A, or you can build more complex sticky content pieces like Reels, which take longer from idea to idea. from editing to execution.”
But using a template is a great way to cut some of the time out of that creation process, and there are some benefits to doing so that aren’t just time-saving.
Create a visual content strategy and brand aesthetic
Using Instagram templates isn’t just about laziness—far from it, actually. Having a set of templates helps give your resource a more cohesive feel that matches your brand and the types of graphics or designs you use in your brand visuals.
Take a look at this grid from Instagram’s planner tool Planoly:
Their reel covers use the same style to separate the theme/title of the reels. They also use similar fonts. And we’re able to easily recognize a post from this brand if it were to appear in our feed because they have a very specific aesthetic that all of their templates fall under.
Plug-and-play Instagram templates save time
Creating templates that match your brand can take some setup time—unless you use a design tool like Canva or Visme that has tons of pre-made options—however, once you have a solid set of templates, there’s not much extra work to do. done.
This is what we mean by plug-and-play. Once you have your basic design, whenever you need to go in and create new content on Instagram, you can replace the old content, adjust some of the colors to give the template a different look and feel, download and distribute. Easy peasy.
Highlight text-based posts
Information-based or B2B brands often have a difficult time with Instagram marketing because they don’t have a visual product. However, that doesn’t mean they can’t still hop on the bandwagon. Using templates, brands can put educational information or text in a visual format, reaching and engaging an audience across Instagram.
8 Instagram Template Examples from Brands
You can create reusable Instagram templates for both your Instagram posts and your stories. To see what types of content you might want to use a template for, take a look at these eight successful brands and their use of templates.
Instagram post templates
There are many reasons to use a template for your Instagram posts: sharing a testimonial, inserting educational information, and more. Let’s take a look at some real-life examples of Instagram post templates.
ritual
A common trend on Instagram lately has been taking a Tweet and putting it into a template to share on your Instagram feed. Ritual does just that with some of their Tweets as well as some of their mentions.
This is a great way to promote cross-platform content, especially when you have a fun voice on Twitter and want to share it with your Instagram followers as well.
Perelel Health
Sharing educational tips is also a good time to use a template. This example from Perelel Health uses a similar look for each of their main graphics before diving into a carousel of even more facts for their audience to read and learn. Some of the templates have a photo in the background, some are a gradient, and others are a solid color.
Keeping an aesthetic vibe while still making sure each template is different is a great way to keep your feed cohesive yet unique. The last thing you want is for each of your graphics to look exactly the same. Your audience will get bored very quickly.
Vegamour
Vegamour is also the queen of the educational carousel. Their feature photos feature a close-up of someone’s hair with the name of the topic they’re discussing before transitioning to similarly designed text graphics. It’s smart to use a carousel for something like this with an actual image as your cover photo so it blends seamlessly with your feed.
Career style girl
Who doesn’t love a motivational quote? Classy Career Girl uses a simple template for their quote graphics, sharing a classic #QuoteOfTheDay every now and then to share some of their other Instagram content. You can do the same for sharing testimonials, case studies, etc.
Instagram Story Templates
While your Instagram Stories give you more freedom to share unstyled, behind-the-scenes content, you can also choose to create graphics or templates to share things like recent blog posts, educational tips, and more.
The hungry root
Hungry Root created a graphic sharing template based on their partnership with wine company Winc. They created a single template to update with different food and wine pairings, using the same fonts and logo placement throughout. This template is stunning, simple and eye-catching, making it extremely effective.
Flodesk
Flodesk email marketing software often has Instagram handles on their profile and they save them in a new Story highlight every time. Each uses the same template as the first featured image to keep each shot cohesive. Shopping hosting is a fun way to engage your audience as well as create mutually beneficial partnerships so that you and the host can reach new audiences.
Career Contessa
The Contessa career has a number of main stories, some of which use templates to create similar looks. If you’re sharing similar information in several stories, using the same template for all stories is a good idea to make sure your audience knows they’re connected. You can then change colors or other elements when you switch to a different story, theme or series to let your audience know you’ve switched gears.
Every mother
Everymom took advantage of some of Instagram’s stories features by leaving a space for link stickers right inside the template above. Stories offers a number of stickers, such as questions, polls, links, quizzes, and more, so you might want to consider creating a template that you can use to add creative backgrounds behind these stickers.
A/B test the performance of Instagram template posts
Just because you’ve created a set of patterns doesn’t mean they’re winners. Be sure to A/B test your new designs and consider creating a few different varieties to see which group works best. Also pay attention to which color schemes work well—some colors from your brand may work better as dominant colors than others.
You can take advantage of analytics tools like Sprout Social to monitor follower growth, as well as track the number of impressions and engagements each of your Instagram posts have received.
Social media testing is key to making sure you’re sharing the most popular content you can. What really grabs your audience’s attention? By A/B testing your Instagram templates, you can find the best options for your feed.
Free Instagram templates to use in your strategy
Make managing your Instagram much easier by starting with a template. Using templates for both your Instagram posts and your Instagram stories can exponentially reduce your design time while enhancing the power of your brand. Download our free customizable Instagram templates in 1:1 and 9:16 formats to start creating your own stunning Instagram content. You can also resize images for Instagram using our free social media image resizer.
