Instagram’s one billion users offer a huge opportunity for brands. Yet, even with smart ads and influencer partnerships, many struggle with the “what” and “when” of posting. That’s where Instagram tools come into play.

We’ve put together a list of the best Instagram tools and apps for businesses. These are designed to simplify content creation, optimize posting schedules, and maximize user engagement.

1. CutStory

Instagram caps Stories at 15 seconds. Uploading anything over a minute? Instagram cuts it off. Enter CutStory. This app lets you record videos, then slices them into 15-second segments, ready for Instagram. No need to limit yourself to one-minute recordings. Plus, with CutStory, you can add stickers, craft collages, and tweak backgrounds, right within the app.

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 2. Wave.video

Wave.video is a web-based video tool that allows you to craft Instagram Stories with a professional touch. While it offers foundational features for free, a $39 monthly subscription unlocks a plethora of advanced editing capabilities. You also get access to built-in Instagram Story templates, removing the hassle of sizing and format guesswork.

3. Unfold 

Unfold is one of the best tools for creating enticing Instagram Stories. With this app, you can easily craft collages by merging photos and videos. Tired of using the same fonts on Instagram? Unfold also offers a wide variety of unique fonts to make your Stories pop. Moreover, the app provides a feature that combines static images with videos in a single frame, giving your Stories a fresh and engaging twist.                                  

4. InVideo

Video editing not your strongest suit? Enter InVideo. It offers a plethora of templates for swift Story creation. Drop in your footage, adjust the wording, and you’re set. It’s more than just templates, though. You can also use the app to add crisp effects, incorporate diverse music tracks, and even create Stories from scratch in a vertical aspect ratio.

5. Canva

Canva is a tool designed specifically for crafting standout Instagram content. Whether you’re updating your feed or sharing a new Story, this app streamlines the process. Adding text to images? A breeze. Need a compelling layout? Canva has a multitude of options to choose from. Beyond that, the tool offers a vast range of pre-made templates to amplify your posts and grow your Instagram account. 

6. VSCO 

VSCO is a handy tool for optimizing social media images. With it, you can fine-tune the brightness, contrast, and color balance of your Instagram photos. The app also offers a wide range of filters to further enhance and personalize your shots. Moreover, users get the option to link VSCO to Instagram for sharing edited content seamlessly.

7. Snappa 

Snappa simplifies the creation of captivating Instagram posts. This design tool already sets the perfect dimensions for each social media platform, so you don’t have to. Pick one of its versatile templates, then explore their extensive library of more than five million stock photos. Adding text, effects, and graphics is a breeze with the drag-and-drop editor. Need a cleaner image? Snappa offers a one-click background removal, making your visuals even more engaging. 

8. Afterlight

This is another photo-editing tool that provides different options for tweaking your Instagram images. You can choose from a default set of pre-made textures and filters, or create and save your own filters for use. Afterlight lets you work with various image formats, plus offers typography tools to help enhance your photos.

9. Display Purposes

Display Purposes is one of the best free Instagram tools for generating hashtag ideas. Enter a keyword or an existing hashtag and it suggests more relevant hashtags for your Instagram post. You can easily adjust how many hashtags you’d like to use. And if you enjoy having more control, you can manually select from a list that highlights the importance and popularity of each hashtag.

10. Branded Content

Brand Content is Meta’s tool for connecting brands with creators. Offered by Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, it acts as a marketplace for direct collaborations. Brands can search for influencers using specific criteria like audience size and engagement. Conversely, creators showcase their profiles and partnerships to entice brands.

11. Pictory 

Want to create professional social videos effortlessly? Try Pictory. This AI-driven Instagram marketing tool lets you convert text into high-quality videos in a snap. Just enter your text, and Pictory crafts the perfect video. You can also use it to extract the best bits from your existing videos—perfect for making shareable clips for Instagram and beyond.

12. Kicksta 

Kicksta is one of the best Instagram marketing tools for achieving organic Instagram growth. Its AI technology zeroes in on genuine users matching your target criteria. Though it doesn’t promise followers will always like your content, it guarantees up to 2,000 followers monthly on its top plan. Users typically witness growth within days, especially with quality content. Kicksta’s method? Engage and interact with accounts aligned with your audience. 

13. Later

Later is a robust tool for organizing and scheduling Instagram posts. It comes with a handy content calendar that lets you plan out your campaigns. You also get a live preview of your Instagram feed, making it easy to visualize exactly how your strategy will unfold. As one of the best Instagram scheduling tools, Later offers a diverse range of features that shave time off content planning.

14. Tailwind

Wondering how to keep your Instagram content fresh and engaging? Tailwind has you covered. The platform offers a stream of post ideas tailored to your brand. You also get suggestions on the best post times, and friendly reminders from Tailwind keep your content strategy on track.

15. Sked Social 

If you’re looking for a convenient way to schedule Instagram posts, Sked is the perfect fit for you. This tool lets you schedule content from both mobile and the web. Plus, it offers powerful image-editing features that take your visuals to the next level. You can also upload and schedule posts in batches to streamline your social media management. 

16. Hootsuite

Instagram doesn’t provide any way to schedule Stories, so you need to rely on other tools to manage your content effectively. Hootsuite steps in to fill this gap, allowing you to queue up your Stories alongside regular posts. This not only streamlines your workflow but also ensures you never miss a beat in engaging your audience. The tool’s analytics also guide your strategy, highlighting what resonates with your followers to help you optimize future content.

 17. Iconosquare

Iconosquare delivers precise Instagram analytics for serious content performance analysis. This platform allows you to track engagement data—such as followers and likes—and reveals detailed stats on your audience’s demographics and influence. Recognizing your most influential followers opens up opportunities for targeted influencer marketing. 

18. Keyhole

Keyhole is another Instagram analytics tool with a focus on reporting. You can use it to gain insight into critical metrics such as engagement rates and follower growth. Competitive benchmarking gives the ability to compare your progress with that of your rivals. You can also use Keyhole to view data from other social media platforms.

19. Phlanx

Ever wondered how effective your influencer partnerships are or how your Instagram competitors perform? Phlanx makes it simple. With its engagement calculator, you can uncover critical insights such as follower engagement rates and average interactions on posts. It’s the go-to tool for a quick, transparent view of any Instagram account’s influence.

20. Cyfe

Cyfe offers a seamless dashboard experience for business intelligence, bringing all your Instagram data into one real-time view. You start with a versatile dashboard that grows with your needs, integrating more than 100 services like Google and Salesforce. Pre-built widgets make configuration a breeze, letting you focus on insights, not setup.

20. Hootsuite Social Advertising

Hootsuite Social Advertising is the ideal tool for kickstarting your Instagram ad campaigns. It works by transforming your top posts into paid ads and leveraging advanced algorithms for precise audience targeting. You can also set custom triggers to automatically boost best-performing posts, plus tap into analytics to analyze and refine your strategies.

21. Adroll

Adroll is another effective Instagram tool for managing your ad campaigns. With AdRoll, you can effortlessly integrate your Instagram ads with your wider web campaigns for seamless execution and unified analysis. Create and edit campaigns, allocate budgets, and analyze performance—all from a single dashboard.

22. AdEspresso

Looking to streamline your Instagram ad campaigns? AdEspresso offers a powerful, integrated platform that simplifies campaign management and optimization. With features like Automatic Optimization, it adjusts your ads’ performance while you rest. You also get the ability to make quick edits and employ rule-based budget adjustments to enhance returns.

23. Revealbot

Revealbot streamlines Instagram ad management by automating the tedious aspects—ad creation, optimization, and scheduling. Its sophisticated targeting hones in on your ideal audience, while performance monitoring tools ensure you’re always informed about how your ads are doing. With Revealbot, you’re empowered to focus on strategy, leaving the routine tasks to automation.

Instagram ecommerce apps

24. Covet Instagam Feed & Reviews (Shopify) 

Need a genuine buzz around your brand? Turn to Covet. This tool helps you build a shoppable Instagram feed full of real customer photos and reviews. Use it to manage your Instagram hashtags and motivate customers to post their own experiences. Covet makes it easy to gather user-generated content, all while fostering a community through fun photo contests and interactive campaigns. 

25. Video Ad Machine (Shopify)

Video Ad Machine streamlines video ad creation for Instagram. You can use its animations and editing tools to quickly produce content that engages and grows your audience. The platform connects directly with your Instagram account, making it easy to upload and distribute your videos.

Conclusion

This concludes our list of the best Instagram tools for businesses. While many options exist, it’s critical to select those that simplify tasks and optimize your spending. Plus, consider your needs when picking a tool—if you’re editing videos often, choose a user-friendly editor to streamline your process. Remember: The right tools should enhance your Instagram presence, not diminish it.

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What is a content strategy?

A content strategy is a plan of action purposely designed to guide content marketing activities and ensure they deliver against a specific business objective.

This includes content planning, production, publishing, promoting, tracking, and SEO optimization. It also includes every type of content you produce, such as videos, blog posts, podcasts, and social media posts.

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Different types of content serve different purposes. For example, you might create a blog post to rank on Google for certain keywords so that you can hook in new leads. Or you might create a case study video to show your products in action to educate leads about your products.

Bottom line, a powerful content strategy framework will enable you to maximize the return on the time and money you invest in content marketing.

How to create a successful content marketing strategy

1. Define your goal

Every single piece of content you create should have a clearly defined purpose, such as:

• Earning backlinks from other websites and social accounts to drive traffic to your website
• Ranking high in the search results on sites like Google and YouTube
• Educating and nurturing your customers, leads, and existing social audience
• Moving readers or viewers further along the sales funnel by taking an action (e.g., signing up to your mailing list)

So before you begin, make sure to set clear goals for your content marketing efforts.

These goals should be SMART:

• Specific: There should be no room for interpretation.
• Measurable: Your goals should be quantifiable.
• Attainable: Be ambitious, but also be realistic.
• Relevant: Your goals should lead to the final outcome you want.
• Time-bound: There should be a clear start and end date.

Here’s an example of a content marketing SMART goal:

Specific: We aim to boost blog traffic by increasing our publishing frequency from two to five times a week.

Measurable: The goal is to boost traffic by 12%.

Attainable: We grew our blog traffic by 6% last month when we increased our publishing frequency from one to two times a week.

Relevant: Increasing content production will boost brand awareness and generate more leads from SEO and social sharing.

Time-bound: We will do this by the end of this month.

SMART goal: By the end of this month, we will increase blog traffic by 12% by increasing our publishing frequency from two to five posts a week.

To create a content marketing strategy SMART goal, consider questions like:

• How does this contribute to our overall marketing goals?
• Is this the most effective way to achieve our desired end result?
• Do we have the necessary resources to make this goal a reality?

Once you’ve set your content strategy goals, it’s time to move on to step two.

2. Define your target audience

What is a target audience exactly?

In short, a target audience is a group of people who are likely to respond positively to your content—which is why every single piece of content you create should have a target audience.

The power of a defined target audience is best explained by Elizabeth Gardner, founder of Garnish Media:

“It’s hard to target a message to a generic 35-year-old middle-class working mother of two. It’s much easier to target a message to Jennifer, who has two children under four, works as a paralegal and is always looking for quick but healthy dinners, and ways to spend more time with her kids and less time on housework.”

By defining your target audience, you can better understand how to create content that appeals to their interests, needs, and emotions. In turn, this will lead to a stronger brand and higher conversion rates.

So how do you do it?

First, you’ll want to create a buyer persona. Let’s look at an example.

The Buyer Persona Institute provides a detailed example of a buyer persona. This includes all of the basic demographic information and psychographic information such as their priorities, potential objections, criteria for making decisions, and what they consider valuable.

OK, but where do you get this information?

Well, if you already have an existing customer base, take a deeper look and try to draw out commonalities. And if you don’t, start by investigating your closest competitor’s customer base.

Ask questions like:

• Where do they live?
• How old are they?
• What gender are they?
• What are their interests?
• Who do they follow online?
• What is their level of education?
• What kind of jobs do they have?
• How much money do they make?
• What motivates them to purchase something?
• What concerns them most when making a purchase?

Once you’ve defined your target market, you can begin to identify effective content topics.

3. Develop effective content topics

Your target audience should define everything about the content you create.

Simply put, if you want to generate leads from search engines or boost your social media engagements, you need to create content your target audience will love.

How?

Find out what your target audience is currently searching for and interacting with. There are plenty of ways to do this, but one of the most effective is to use SEO tools to see what people are searching for on search engines.

There are tons of tools out there, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush. There are even plenty of browser extensions like Keywords Everywhere.

Conducting keyword research to identify content opportunities

You probably already have some knowledge of your target audience. So begin by making a list of some relevant and important topics.

Then, it’s time to see how many people are searching these terms.

In this example, we’ll use the browser extension Keywords Everywhere—this tool is simple, quick, and easy to use.

Once you’ve installed the extension, you’ll see keyword information whenever you use a search engine like Google, YouTube, eBay, Etsy, Bing, or Amazon.

Specifically, Keywords Everywhere will show you following for each keyword:

• Volume: How many searches a keyword receives per month.
• Cost-per-click: The average cost-per-click of the keyword when engaging in pay-per-click advertising.
• Competition: How competitive the keyword is.

When starting out, try to find keywords that have a monthly search volume in the thousands or tens of thousands.

This way, the volume is large enough to draw in substantial amounts of traffic but not so large that your content will be lost in the noise.

With these tips, you should have some solid keywords that you know your target audience is actively searching for.

Turning your keywords into content topics

For example, if one of your keywords is “snowboard helmet,” you could brainstorm the following topic ideas:

• The Top 10 Snowboard Helmets in 2024
• How to Choose the Best Snowboard Helmet for Your Needs
• 7 Reasons to Always Wear a Snowboard Helmet

Just remember the golden rule of content creation: It’s never about you, it’s about your readers.

So aim to be helpful and engaging.

If you’re struggling to come up with great content ideas, then consider checking out BuzzSumo.

BuzzSumo is particularly powerful because it allows you to see the top performing content for certain keywords:

Once you’ve got some great topic ideas, it’s time to choose your content’s format.

4. Identify the most effective content format

Today, there are tons of different content formats available. Here are some of the most popular types used by content marketers:

• Blog posts
• Emails
• Videos
• Photos
• Graphics and infographics
• Webinars
• Social media posts
• Podcasts

Now, each of these formats also has plenty of options.

Take video marketing—you could create vlogs, reviews, how-tos, behind the scenes, interviews, skits, or Q&As.

You also need to decide on the length of your content and which platform you plan to publish it on according to where you hope to engage your audience most.

For example, if you plan to create a video, will you publish it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram Stories, or your own website?

It’s vital to answer these questions ahead of time as they will define the type of content you need to create.

For instance, a Facebook Story needs to be filmed in portrait, but a YouTube video will perform best when filmed in landscape.

But here’s the thing: You can’t do them all and you shouldn’t do them all.

Unless you have a massive team and an endless budget, trying to produce content in many different formats will overstretch your resources.

For small businesses, it’s best to just have one or two content formats that you can really throw yourself into.

5. Determine your posting frequency

Consistency is key.

Without a consistent content strategy schedule, you won’t build the necessary momentum to attract organic traffic.

Now, the type of content you create will largely inform how often you should share it. For example, it’s likely you’ll post more social media updates than long-form blog posts.

There are two main things to keep in mind: Your limited resources and your audience’s appetite.

Creating long-form blog posts or videos takes a lot of time—or money, if you decide to hire a writer or video producer. This will restrict how often you’re able to create quality content.

In short, the longer the content, the less often you post.

You also want to provide the right amount of content for your target audience.

Too little and you won’t effectively nurture deep customer relationships. Too much and you’ll overwhelm them send them looking for the Unsubscribe button

Curata’s content marketing pyramid provides a helpful way to see how often you should post different types of content. And if you’re still unsure where to start, check out competitors that use content marketing successfully.

You also need to decide when to share your content.

To do this, think about when it’s most convenient for your target audience to consume your content. Plus, check your social media analytics to work out when your audience is most engaged online.

Once you’ve decided on a posting frequency, create a content calendar.

You can use a simple spreadsheet to keep track of your content or use a tool like CoSchedule, Asana, or Trello.

Start by making simple columns to track where each piece of content is in your overall content strategy.

6. Plan your content promotion activities

Every great content strategy includes content promotion.

Marketer and entrepreneur Derek Halpern recommends spending 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time marketing it.

“If you spend time writing a piece of content, and that content only gets 1,000 readers, chances are there are one million other people in the world who can benefit from what you wrote,” writes Halpern. “Why then, would you spend more time creating content when you already have something that your ideal customers can benefit from?”

So how do you go about marketing your content?

Here are a few ways you can promote content you’ve already published:

• Promote your content to your existing mailing list to deepen customer relationships.
• Share your posts on your social media platforms.
• Repurpose parts of your content into different formats (e.g., take short clips from your long videos to create Facebook and Instagram Story videos).
• Pay to promote high-performing posts on social media.

You can also use social media tools like Buffer or HootSuite to schedule your social media posts in advance.

To supercharge your content marketing promotion activities, it’s best to build them into the content itself, such as:

• Creating new research in your niche that other people will link to
• Including material and sources from prominent brands in your niche, then email them in the hope that they read, share, and link to your content
• Asking influencers for a quote to include in your content and then asking them to share the finished piece

Remember to circle back every now and then to promote previous content that still performs well.

7. Continually improve and optimize your content and strategy

This is when the magic happens.

By doing a content audit, you can extract valuable takeaways that you can use to improve your content strategy in the future.

Ideally, you should have a simple spreadsheet that allows you to clearly measure your content’s performance.

Here’s an example from the Content Marketing Institute:

A simple spreadsheet like this will allow you to track your key performance indicators over time.

The data that you track will depend on your goals and the format of your content. For example, you might track:

• Video metrics (e.g., views, subscribers, watch time, etc.)
• Website data (e.g., pageviews, clicks, signups, bounces, etc.)
• Social interactions (e.g., comments, shares, likes, etc.)

You could even use URL shorteners to track clicks from individual videos and social media posts to your website.

8. Update and expand on previous content

An important part of search engine optimization is refreshing previous content. Thankfully, these changes don’t need to be massive.

For example, it’s inevitable that parts of your blog posts will become outdated. When this happens, you should remove those parts, add new relevant information, and optimize the keywords.

This simple practice can be extremely effective since newer content is more likely to be relevant to searchers. That’s why search engines like Google prioritize up-to-date content.

Of course, you can’t update or change parts of videos on YouTube or podcasts on Apple. However, you can revisit the topic.

If you have a high-performing piece of content that your audience loves, why not create more content on the same topic?

All in all, it comes down to one simple phrase: Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Content strategy summary

A content strategy is your roadmap to content marketing success.

Without one, you won’t be able to create effective content or enable your performance to consistently improve into the future.

In summary, when creating a content strategy make sure to:

• Define your goal: Create SMART goals to ensure you effectively utilize your resources.
• Define your target audience: Make sure you know exactly who you’re creating content for.

• Develop effective content topics: Identify the topics that your target audience will love.

• Identify the most effective content format: Create content in the formats that your audience prefers.

• Determine your posting frequency: Post enough to engage your audience and not so much that they feel overwhelmed.

• Create a content marketing calendar: Be consistent in your content marketing strategy to build momentum.

• Plan your content marketing strategy promotion: Spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time promoting it.

• Track and improve your content marketing efforts: Have a documented strategy to draw out insights that you can use to learn and improve your content efforts.
• Update and expand on previous content: Refresh old content to improve SEO and expand on high-performing topics.

Don’t start producing content without a proper strategy. Have a plan and an end goal in place to get the most out of your content efforts.

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