Social media marketing, blogging, email marketing…all excellent. All necessary. All can be a huge time suck.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with any or all of these I have a top tip for you today: batching.
But not just batching because if you throw repurposing into the mix then you will really be rocking.
What do I mean by batching and repurposing? Simple. Batching means doing things in, well, batches much as you do if you batch cook meals for the week. So you take say a week’s worth of emails or blog posts and create them all in one sitting. This has many advantages, not just saving you time but also improving focus and the overall congruity of your message.
Let me explain…
The best way to organise your social media posts, blog posts and emails is to ensure that they deliver the same kind of message about you, your business, your offers and your promotions. That means you thinking about that message and then reinforcing it with posts and emails that reinforce one another.
As an example, I often teach about product creation. Many of my promotions and social media posts are centred around that. I also try not to be hypey and have an absolute horror of those sales letters and posts featuring someone leaning on their Ferrari boasting about how they achieve a gazillion dollar income without emerging from under their luxury silk sheets.
So first of all I try to make my messages and posts congruent with those points. If I have something particular to teach or share, then I try to focus on that for one week or several as I do with my Weekend Takeaways. It makes sense, therefore, to create all my material in batches so that it shares ideas, tips and information that all matches up.
It helps to plan ahead and use a content calendar so you can see at a glance what you have decided as your themes/messages for a particular time period as well as the ones you have already used. If you don’t have one, I’ve created one in Excel that you can download at the end of this post.
Use the calendar to plan ahead and then simply assign yourself an hour or so at a time to create and set up (especially if you use automation such as an autoresponder) your content and messages for the week or even month ahead. I promise it will save you a ton of time and also vastly improve your results as you will be posting and emailing strategically rather than in a haphazard, ohmygodIjusthadanidea way.
But beyond planning and batching, I advocate repurposing. This means adding say another hour to repurpose that content so simply create once and then reuse. You could, for example, create your blog posts and then create videos for your YouTube channel using those blog posts, simply taking the main points and using them as narration or overlaying them on to slides.
You could then take those main points and reuse them in your Pinterest pins, Instagram posts and emails. Do you see where I am going with this? And don’t for one minute think you are cheating your audience. Not all your audience will follow you on all channels. More than that, it takes on average 7 repetitions of a particular message before it sinks in.
Some people are visual learners, others aural or kinesthetic. Deliver the same message in different ways and you not only broaden your reach, you serve your audience better because you give them stuff they can actually absorb in their preferred style.
Try it and let me know how you get on!
