EPISODE 11 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: CREATE AND SCHEDULE YOUR CONTENT IN LESS THAN 2 HOURS A MONTH

Ever wondered how businesses managed to get out beautiful content on their socials consistently? It's all about batching baby. Now don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting you press schedule all of your content. Things like Instagram stories and behind the scenes, real time happenings are uber important. But I do know that as soon as life and business starts getting a little cray cray, your social media is the first thing that falls away. Also, there are some other benefits to being organized and planning out your content schedule for the month ahead. Including, and my fave, number one, a beautiful Instagram grid. Planning ahead actually gives you the opportunity to create a great cohesive feed. It's always clear the accounts, that always posted on the fly with no thought to the overall aesthetics of the grid versus those planned feeds.

Number two, making sure you [inaudible 00:01:19] touch on all of your content pillars. Don't know what I'm talking about. I mean the general buckets or content topics you talk about on your socials, it can't be sell, sell, sell all the time. For example, our feed has the following content pillars, we've got marketing tips, inspiration, behind the scenes in the business, client work, and lifestyle content. So by having these five content pillars, we can make sure our audience isn't bored with the same old things being talked about over and over again.

Number three, planning ahead helps with consistency. So with the algorithms nowadays, consistency is key. Making sure you have regular high quality content schedules, is important in making sure that your content is seen. If you fall off the face of the earth and don't post for months, you're going to have to claw your way back into the decent level of organic views. A lot of your hard work will be down the drain. By batching your content creation and scheduling in advance, you can ensure your feeds don't get forgotten. Because think about it, if you stop posting, people aren't going to stop using social media. They're just going to start consuming and engaging with other businesses content, other than yours.

Number four, quality of content. I know what it's like, you get busy and all of a sudden there's my voice yelling into your ear, "Where are you? Why haven't you posted lately?" No? Just my clients then. So you take a snap of a gross looking sandwich, post it Instagram with a half assed caption. What is the point? Don't do your brand the disservice. Quality is key to cutting through the noise on socials. With pre planning you can actually put the time and consideration into what you're putting out there. Put thought into it, but not only the copy but the imagery as well. "Yeah, yeah, Sonya I hear you, but what's the actual process of doing this to save myself hours and produce high quality content?" I'm so glad you asked.

Step one, do a brain dump of everything coming up for the next month. So with this, I need you to sit down once a month and batch this process.

Step two, collect the content. Search for photos and videos, articles, blogs, reviews, et cetera. And save them to your computer. I want you to be doing all of these steps on your computer. It's much easier than faffing around on your phone.

Step three, upload the images into Canva and resize them to be the appropriate size for the platform that you're going to be posting on. This is really important because you want your imagery to take up as much real estate as possible on the feed, to get people to stop. Also, design any other collateral you need, export all of this as a JPEG and save it to your computer.

Step four, choose your scheduling tool. Personally, I love Buffer for LinkedIn and Facebook, and I love later.com for Instagram. So with these tools, you can set your social posting frequency and just drag and drop the content in.

Step five, upload each piece of content one by one and write your captions. Put some thought into this guys, then hit save and voila, there you go, your content is planned out for the month. So I know I've just breezed through this. I actually have a free course where I show you step by step exactly how to do this. There's videos, there's PDF, guys, I know what it's like, people will tell you how to do something but you actually need to be shown sometimes too, right? So this course is going to take you less than an hour to complete. It's going to save you so much time, and it's going to take you through all of the hacks and tools to get your social sorted once and for all. So you can focus on more important stuff like running your business. Head to kissmarketing.com.au/free, to get your hands on this. So many people have downloaded it already and we've had some great feedback. So I'm hoping this is something that can help you guys out as well.

Now just a quick note on this, what you really need to be doing, as well, in your day to day is making sure you are uploading the content with realtime happenings. So Instagram stories are super important for this. Or you might chalk up a Facebook post once a week as well, with some business wins or share some client wins, for example. So think outside the box with this, do add some content on the fly as well because it can become quite obvious when things are too sort of pre scheduled and structured. All right, feel free to DM me on Instagram, guys, if you've got any questions. Thanks again for listening. See you.