Posting quality content on Instagram consistently can be a challenge, and sometimes it’s hard to stay motivated to keep up with your Instagram account, especially if you want to post every day! To help you stay inspired to market your business on Instagram, here’s what you can learn from 10 creative brands:
1. Work With a Color Palette
If you hop over to Ames and Oats Instagram (@amesandoats) you’ll notice something cool as you scroll through their feed: a progressive color scheme. It’s great to select a specific color to theme your content around (or even brand it with your own colors), but feel free to change this as time goes on to mix it up for your followers (and keep you inspired!)
TIP: Use Later’s Instagram grid preview (now available on mobile!) to create and plan a unique color scheme or visual style for your feed.
2. Share the Lifestyle
Simple, chic, and balanced: Madewell’s Instagram (@madewell1937) has a great color scheme and focuses on lifestyle branding to show how their fashion items are worn in the real world.
TIP**:** Lifestyle product photos work best, so style your product in a way that shows the value and appeal of the item against a familiar backdrop or on a model to show how the item looks. You can encourage your followers to shop your feed with Later’s Linkin.Bio feature for your Instagram bio.
3. Think Outside the (Instagram) Box
Sunday Suppers (@sundaysuppers) makes their Instagram feed stand out and appear well curated by adding a white border to their landscape/portrait photos. This disrupts the traditional format of the Instagram grid, but can be aesthetically pleasing to the eye if it’s properly balanced throughout.
TI**P**: Use Whitagram (iOS) to add borders to your photos before you post!
4. Keep Your Feed Fun
This Palm Springs hotel appears fresh, hip, and fun from what they share on Instagram! The Saguaro (@saguarohotels) excels at sharing photos that capture the color and energy of their brand in each photo, which makes their Instagram feed as inviting as a visit to their hotel.
TIP: Capture your brand’s emotion and voice in every photo that you share to encourage your community to take action and invest time in your brand story. You can learn how to create your brand story by taking a Later Workshop, join our Facebook Group to see when our next online workshop takes place!
5. Share a Story in 9 Photos
The swim company Aare (@aare_swim) curates their feed in a series of nine squares. This is an interesting way to break up your Instagram feed, while also sharing a series of short stories in the grid of nine.
TIP: Curate your feed ahead of time and plan how your series of photos will look beside each other to share a broader visual story for your brand.
6. Go For the Bigger Picture
Rather than post photos about their products, Patagonia (@patagonia) uses Instagram to inspire and educate their audience on the environment. Their feed shares dynamic adventures and outdoor photographs collected from their community members.
TIP: Use Later’s Search & Repost to collect content from your core community members and repost with credit to the owner of the photo.
7. Add Texture to Your Feed
Boheme Goods (@bohemegoods) does a great job of playing with textures and adding contrasting elements in their photos. The textual elements within each photo complement the product, but also break up the visual style of the feed.
TIP: Texture is attractive to the eye, but a feed that is too busy may turn-off followers. Alternate posting photos with white/neutral backgrounds with photos that involve a lot of textures/ colors/contrast to break up your feed and keep it balanced.
8. Mix Up Your Product Shots
Posting product shots on your Instagram can get repetitive after a while, but Kikori Whiskey (@kikoriwhiskey) breaks up stylized product shots by sharing photos of their whiskey in natural, lifestyle settings. Their feed also shows how their community can make the best whiskey cocktails or teas!
TIP**:** Post photos from your community members that you collect with a branded hashtag, and optimize your post visibility with well-researched hashtags.
9. Stick to the Same Filters
A VSCO company, Artifact Uprising (@artifactuprising) edits their photos to have complimenting color tones for the feed as a whole. This helps them curate a feed that is harmonious and balanced.
TIP: Use VSCO to edit your photos and save the exact steps you took to edit each photo. This way you can adjust the steps if you need to, but also edit each photo in a similar fashion to complement your entire feed.
10. Split Your Photo into Multiple Posts
This is one account that takes full advantage of their Instagram feed by posting photos that take up more than one square in the grid. Feed like Phillip Lim’s (@31philliplim) that disrupt the traditional formatting are visually attractive to the eye, and inspire new methods to create engaging visual media!
TIP: Plan your content ahead of time using Later. To curate an interesting account and split your photos across multiple sections, this requires a bit more time, planning and editing! Later’s dashboard has a calendar, grid preview, and bulk upload to help you manage this process! The best part? It’s free!
Take your Instagram seriously with Later, the platform that helps you plan, manage, and schedule Instagram posts.
