Three Methods for Batching Your Marketing Content
When we say “batch your marketing content” it means to create multiple pieces of like content. When you make a batch of cookies, you don’t make the batter to make one cookie. You make a whole bunch of cookies. As with your social media content, you can make a whole bunch of social media posts at one time, write a few blog posts in one sitting, or create a few months’ worth of email marketing content in a few hours.
Today I wanted to share some examples of how we do this in my our business, and how we’ve coached up other business owners so they're spending the RIGHT amount of time on their marketing content.
After working with us, they have a plan for what they’ll get done in the time allotted (usually 2 hours per week), so there is no guessing or having to choose what to do. If you’re one who sometimes sits down at your computer with a list of things to do and you tend to push the marketing to-dos to the very last thing, then you may find that your marketing is a drag or it’s not something you look forward to doing. Read on to get some tips to make this a more enjoyable task and I’ll share some ways that you can put some boundaries up to protect the time you spend on your marketing and make it a more routine task. I’m going to share three systems for batching your content based on personality type and lifestyle.
Here's one option for those who don’t have much time to allot to their marketing content. This is the option that I recommend for small business owners who feel overwhelmed by marketing or are just starting out. Time block your calendar for two hour chunks once per week.
Break out your calendar and block off a recurring appointment with yourself each week for two hours. This will be a ‘standing meeting’ with yourself each week and it will be two hours long.
In your first two hour chunk of time you’re going to create your owned media. Remember your owned media is your own thought leadership, your education, your training, what you know that your ideal clients want to know from you. This blog post is one form of my owned media. Blog posts, podcast episodes, videos, webinars, eBooks, these are all examples of owned media. You can listen to the episode titled "A Framework to Choosing the Right Types of Marketing Tactics for Your Business" if you’d like some help figuring out what type of owned marketing material would be beneficial to your business and your audience, as well as appeal to YOU! For this example, I’m going to use a blog post so you may only get through the creation of one blog post and that’s great! In the next section I’m going to share an alternative that allows you to batch a whole bunch of posts at once. But the idea here is that you complete at least one blog post through its entirety. By the end of this two-hour chunk, the post is written, it’s edited, it has all its supporting material linked, you’ve added the graphics you feel help tell the story better, etc.
The following week, during your two-hour chunk you’ll create your social media posts for the month. Let’s say that you want to post to your social media platforms three times per week, which is great. You’ll need to create approximately 12 social media posts in this two-hour chunk of time which is totally doable. If you want to create 30 social media posts that’s totally doable too and it’s all about using your time wisely. So, I’ll use Instagram in this example because that’s the platform that I’m on mostly and because you must have a graphic for each post which means that it requires more content creation. You don’t have to have an image with every LI, FB, or TW post for example, which cuts down on the content creation time. So, one way to do this is to start by making a list of posts, then for each topic, write the caption. You can cut and paste from your blog post that you just published the following week. I bet you could pull a minimum of four social media captions from that blog post. You can pull verbiage from your website. You can use testimonials. This would leave you with a small number of brand-new captions that you would need to create at this time.
Once you have your captions written, create the graphics that support the point you want to get across. Once your graphics are completed you can then go into Facebooks' creator studio, or a tool, such as Buffer, which is what I recommend, and schedule these posts. In buffer you can simply paste your caption, add appropriate hashtags to it, then upload the corresponding graphic. Then you schedule it to post on the day you want it to go live.
You can use your captions and graphics from social media, content from your blog, questions or other types of market research that have come up for you recently. I do recommend spending some time outside of this two-hour chunk and prior to it planning out what you want your newsletters to say. Just like you pre-planned your social media topics, your email newsletters should also have a consistent feel to them and shouldn’t have just an off the cuff, "this is what I feel like writing about today" feel to it. Likewise, you can plan out a standard email newsletter template that you can simply populate with new content each time you write one. I recommend Flodesk and I have a coupon code for 50% off. Flodesk makes email marketing very simple and is user-friendly. If you want more help with email marketing, read "The Case for Prioritizing Email Marketing in Your Marketing Strategy."
In your fourth two-hour chunk I recommend that you have a look at your data. I’d like you to spend these two hours looking at the specific metrics that tell us how our content performed. Listen to the episode "Marketing Metrics That Matter" for more details on what to track. But doing so will help you make better decisions on what type of content mattered most to your audience.
To sum it up, it’s not hard to create marketing content if you have clear expectations and an appropriate amount of time set aside for the tasks you need to complete. It can be something you look forward to, something you enjoy and creating material when you’re in that state of mind always turns out ten times better than when you’re creating from a place of obligation. I hope you found this helpful! And if you’d like some coaching on this, I’d love to offer you a free consultation. You can book it directly with me by or by booking yourself a spot on my calendar.
Thanks for being here,
Kelly Smith
