Tools for Instagram Aesthetic Planning in 2018
Colleen Ordonio • February 28, 2018
If you have a consistent Instagram account, you’re way ahead of the game. Now, let’s talk about your aesthetic. When you look at your profile page, do all the images look like they come from the same website or marketing brochure? Or do they look random and mismatched? When someone comes across your Instagram profile, your collective feed is the first thing they see, and they’ll often browse it and make decisions about you before reading your profile. Even if you have a few really great shots, they may not be enough to entice users to learn more about you if there’s no harmony among all your pictures together.
So how can you optimize the impact of your Instagram campaign and create the perfect aesthetic to capture the attention of potential clients and customers? Read on for some simple tips that will make your profile page most pleasing to the eye.
Choosing Your Instagram Aesthetic
Many people think that an aesthetic is the same thing as a theme, but the two are very different. Your theme pertains to your business genre or category, such as food, travel, or wellness. Your aesthetic represents the collective personality, feeling, and tone of your feed, most often with a color scheme or mood. For example, will all your photos be bright and airy, or will they be dark and moody? The color scheme should complement the chosen mood, and vice versa. The key is to choose a clear aesthetic and stick to it.
Tip: Create a mood board, Pinterest board, or another form of visual brainstorm to help you generate ideas for your ideal look and feel.
Executing Your Instagram Aesthetic
One of the easiest ways to create a cohesive look and feel to your Instagram feed is to edit your photos with similar filters and colors. Below are a few great apps that can help harmonize your photos.
VSCO – This beautiful app has a plethora of filters and variables that you can use to customize the color, hue, saturation, and light in each photo. VSCO also has a huge community of users whose public profiles you can browse for inspiration.
Snapseed – You can easily save, share, and edit your favorite photos with Snapseed’s variety of editing tools and filters. The sliders and customizable focus features allow you to edit with precision, and the special effects and filter combinations can help give your Instagram feed a little something extra.
Instagram – While there are some great photo editing apps out there, the selection of filters on Instagram work great, too. The key to executing a beautiful Instagram aesthetic is consistently using the same filters and settings, no matter which app you use for your photo editing.
Planning Your Instagram Feed
After editing comes curation. In order to create an aesthetically pleasing visual feed that flows seamlessly and works cohesively, you must plan!
Instagram photos don’t just work alone but work best as a team.The two apps below can help you plan and curate your feed by mimicking your Instagram grid:
Preview
Say goodbye to posting and deleting photos because they didn’t align with your feed! With this free app, you can load your photos onto a grid that mimics the look of your Instagram feed. Once you’ve uploaded your current photos, it’ll be easier to add photos to the grid to see if they harmonize with your feed before you post.
Unum
Like the Preview App, Unum allows you to plan out the aesthetics of your feed without actually posting them to Instagram. With fun features like “Live Mode” that allow you to shift photos straight from your Instagram feed, this app is popular among all kinds of creators and Instagram junkies.
Nailing Your Look
Now that you’ve got these tools in your toolbox, it’s time to get out there and put them to good use! Nailing your aesthetic is crucial to the success of your Instagram marketing campaign. If you’re inspired by the ideas above but also daunted by the amount of time or effort it takes to create a killer Instagram feed, Reader Digital Agency is here to help. Contact us today, and we’ll help you plan, execute, and nail an Instagram marketing campaign that gets you noticed.
