The Importance of Planoly
This week for our latest ‘Topic Of The Week,’ we want to highlight the importance of Planoly — an online visual planner for your Instagram feed. This app was “thoughtfully created from a designer’s and editor’s point of view,” as a tool to help with visual planning and digital marketing solutions.
Planoly was built from a brand’s perspective by an entrepreneur and creative named Brandy Pham. When her husband, Andy Hoang, saw the positive correlation between posting, her online sales revenue and the work that went into each post, he thought, “How can something so simple (such as posting on a social app) be so complicated?” After that thought, the duo crafted the platform that is used by thousands today. This platform is utilized by countless companies and brands such as Marianna Hewitt, Esteé Lauder, and Anthropologie… just to name a few! It is free for all who sign up and can be used online or through your mobile device as well.
When maneuvering the site, you are directed to either your personal feed and editing tools or the Planoly blog.
First, let’s tackle the blog!
On the blog you will see a navigation bar with assorted information that will change the way you use your Planoly account. There are tutorials, best practices, inspiration, interviews, news, downloadables, instructionals and StoriesEdits.
In tutorials, you will find articles that will help you walk through the app, take you back to the basics or instruct you on how to link your Instagram to your Planoly account — to name a few. You will find an assorted content selection in best practices, such as Instagram hacks, the art of email pitching from a brand partnership perspective, and deep dives into the latest Instagram update for stories. Social media best practices, storytelling in a digital age, and even small business workshop opportunities can be found in inspiration. For interviews, you’ll peruse through different exposés on influencers, CEOs and different creatives benefiting from Planoly.
A recent update has given Planoly’s users the power to ‘add-on’ shopping links. This would be used to drive traffic and sales from the Instagram platform. You, as the creator of your feed, can add stoppable galleries to your Instagram content, in addition to adding shop links to your profile and website. You are able to tag products or URL links to your content, as well as track engagement and performance
Alright alright, now that you’re a PRO with the navigations… now for the fun stuff. Let’s take a look at the actual visual planner!
“Got 99 problems but a grid ain’t one.”
So, you’ve figured out the tutorials, browsed the news and interviews and set the automation to your new uploaded feed in Planoly. But you’re still wondering,
“What’s the importance in all of this?”
Well Dolls, the most significant benefit is that time is money! We are constantly wishing for more hours in a day, especially when building out your dream brand or company. Curating the perfect feed to visually represent your brand is essential to expanding your audience on any social platform and that can take a bit of time out of your day. The simple fact is, it’s just not that simple anymore. Yes, posting to your feed is the first task, but then you need to engage with your audience and review your analytics in order to increase your organic reach and impressions. But don’t worry, this platform helps with all of that!
Planoly helps you manage your visual imagery between multiple accounts. This is especially important to those who are both influencers and brand creators! They even offer different techniques that will help you with creating mass campaigns, while properly editing the image so you don’t have to! Some of these techniques are the split campaigns and image splitter.
When planning out your feed it helps to consider the following:
Goals and intention of a post (or post series)
How you would like said post to connect with your community
Your marketing calendar and key moments (holidays, sales, etc.)
Most importantly – your mission
After doing that, go ahead and post your creative content then watch it thrive! Planoly has given its users the option to view the posts, likes, comments, average likes, average comments and follower gain/loss in any given time period, since creating the account. We love using this platform because we are able to connect with our following all-in-one platform! If we’re editing imagery for the week, we can hop on over to answer any new comments and it immediately goes through Instagram.
Not only is it convenient and saves us time in the long run, but it also makes scheduling so much easier! We typically start by adding all of our imagery to a draft feed, where we make tweaks and switch around image placements to ensure our brand is properly represented. We create content in nines, we will upload nine images so we can get a feel of what our feed will look like over a week long period and then some. We use the analytics to review when our followers are most active on Instagram to make sure we are optimizing our reach. Last but certainly not least, we create appealing captions that will capture our audience to spark a conversation.
We use this method to craft our feed, The Caroline Doll, and all our clients! So trust us when we say, we LOVE Planoly! When downloading this app, we weren’t quite sure how much it would effect our day to day schedules. Let’s just say, so long to sitting on the phone posting an image and then immediately deleting it to get a feel for what your aesthetic would look like. And we couldn’t be more thankful!
Do you use Planoly or any other visual planners? If so, what do you think?