Managing an Instagram account can take time, so as social media strategists, we are always on the lookout for ways to make our job easier. And a great way to do that is by taking advantage of Instagram templates.
Instagram Template is a reusable graphic or video template that social media managers can easily customize over and over again for sharing Instagram content. These can be used for Posts, Reels, Stories, etc.
The job of a social media manager has many moving parts:
- content creation
- Content Scheduling/Publishing
- caption writing
- online engagement
- community hall
- analysis and reporting
- even more
Why give yourself even more workload by requiring yourself to create Instagram content from the start every time, Especially because many marketers are managing multiple social media accounts at a time.
So let’s talk more about Instagram templates—why you want to use them, how they might look, successful brands that are already making the most of their own templates And Free downloadable templates that you can use.
Why Use Instagram Templates?
Instagram templates make content creation fast and easy. Which may be necessary as content creation can be a time consuming process.
Some influencers say that it can take a few minutes to a few minutes to create an Instagram post month, depending on everything involved in the process (ie, brand partnerships, photo ops). And the same can go for brands.
Visme’s social media strategist, Chelse Hensley, says, “A piece of content created for Instagram can take anywhere from 5 seconds to 3 hours. You can use features like Instagram Stories, Polls, Q+A to reach out to your audience. Can engage in split-seconds, or you can create more complex pieces of sticky material like reels, which require more time from idea to editing to execution.”
But using a template is a great way to cut down some time in that build process, and there are many benefits to doing so that aren’t just about saving time.
Build a visual content strategy and brand aesthetic
Using Instagram templates isn’t just about laziness—far from it, in fact. Having a set of templates helps give your feed a more cohesive feel that matches your branding and the type of graphics or patterns you use in your brand visuals.
Take a look at this grid from the Instagram planner tool Planoly:
Their reel covers use the same style for sharing reel themes/titles. They also use similar fonts. And we can easily recognize a post from this brand if it shows up in our feed, because they have a very distinctive aesthetic all their templates come down to.
Plug-and-play Instagram templates save time
Creating templates that match your branding can take a while—unless you use a design tool like Canva or Visme that have thousands of pre-made options—however, once you have a solid set of templates set, you don’t have much extra work to do.
This is what we mean by “plug-and-play”. Once you’ve got your basic design, every time you need to go in and create new Instagram content, you can replace the old content, adding a few colors to give the template a different look and feel. You can adjust, download and share. Very easy.
Highlight text-based posts
Information-based or B2B brands often have a tough 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 into a visual format, reaching and engaging audiences across Instagram.
8 Instagram Template Examples From Brands
You can create recyclable Instagram templates for both your Instagram posts and your stories. Take a look at these eight successful brands and their template usage to see what types of content you’ll want to use templates for.
instagram post template
There are many reasons to use a template for your Instagram posts: sharing a testimonial, inputting educational information, and more. Let’s take a look at some real life examples of Instagram post templates.
religious rites
A common Instagram trend lately is taking a tweet and placing it on a template to share on your Instagram feed. Ritual does the same with some of his tweets as well as some of his 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.
parallel health
It’s also a great time to share educational tips for using templates. This example from Parallel Health uses a similar look for each of their main graphics before diving into the carousel, with even more facts for their audience to read and learn. Some templates have a photo in the background, some are a gradient and others are a solid color.
Maintaining an aesthetic vibe while making sure each template is different is a great way to keep your feed cohesive as well as unique. The last thing you want is for every one of your graphics to look exactly the same. Your audience will get bored very quickly.
wegamour
Vegamour is also the queen of the educational carousel. Their feature photos show a closeup of someone’s hair with the name of the subject they’re discussing, before moving on to similarly designed text graphics. It’s smart to use something like this carousel with an actual image as the cover photo so that it blends seamlessly into your feed.
classy career girl
Who doesn’t love motivational quotes? Classy Career Girl uses a simple template for her quote graphics, sharing a classic #QuoteOfTheDay every now and then to break out some of her other Instagram content. You can do the same thing for sharing testimonials, case studies, etc.
instagram story template
While your Instagram Stories give you more freedom to share unstylized, behind-the-scenes content, you can also choose to create graphics or templates to share recent blog posts, educational tips, and more.
hungry root
Hungry Route created a template for sharing graphics based on its partnership with wine company Vinc. They created the same template to update with different food and wine pairings, using the same fonts and logo placement throughout. This template is stunning, simple and attractive, which makes it extremely effective.
flowdesk
Email marketing software Flowdesk often has an Instagram takeover on their profiles and they save them to a new story highlight each time. Uses the same template as the first image in Highlight to keep each takeover cohesive. Hosting acquisitions are a fun way to engage your audience as well as create mutually beneficial partnerships so that both you and the taker can reach new audiences.
Career Contessa
Career Contessa has several story highlights, many of which use templates to create a similar look. If you’re sharing the same information across multiple stories, it’s a good idea to use the same template for all stories to make sure your audience knows they’re related. You can then change colors or other elements as you move to a different story, theme, or series so that your audience knows you’ve switched gears.
the everymom
EveryMom took advantage of some of Instagram’s story features by leaving room for a link sticker 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 testing the performance of Instagram template posts
Just because you’ve created a set of templates doesn’t mean they’re a winner. Be sure to A/B test your new template and consider making a few different varieties to see which set performs best. Also pay attention to which color schemes perform well—some colors in your branding may work better as dominant colors than others.
You can take advantage of analytics tools like Sprout Social to monitor your growth in followers, as well as track the number of impressions and engagements each of your Instagram posts receives.
Testing on social media is the key to making sure you’re sharing the most popular content that you can. What really grabs your audience’s attention? By A/B testing your Instagram templates, you can arrive at the best options for your feed.
Free Instagram Templates to Use in Your Strategy
Make managing your Instagram much easier by getting started with templates. Using templates for both your Instagram posts and Instagram Stories can drastically cut down on your design time, as well as improve the strength of your brand. To start creating your own stunning Instagram content, download our free customizable Instagram templates with both 1:1 and 9:16 formats. You can also resize images for Instagram using our free social media image resizer tool.
The Complete Guide to Post Instagram Templates [+ free downloads] Sprout appeared on Social for the first time.
