Building A Brand Means Staying Consistent

It’s one thing to build a brand strategy, it’s another thing to implement it and maintain it consistently.  Crafting original content to promote your business, offers, and core messaging will help set you up as a go-to expert and make you more visible for exactly what you want to be known for.

For entrepreneurs, who often wear so many different hats in their business, content creation can seem overwhelming and tedious.  You know you’ve got to continue to market your business, share original ideas, talk about what you do, give tips, how-to’s, and behind the scenes looks at your business, but sometimes you find yourself scrolling Instagram on a Thursday saying - Oh man, I haven’t posted on social media yet this week, I better post something!

The last minute “I-gotta-post-something” posts aren’t always the most strategic content pieces for your business.  Not saying they can’t be good, they can.  However, a great way to stay ON BRAND, strategically sharing your well-defined branded content pillars, and helping lead your audience to understand why you’re their best solution is: batching your content creation.

Why Batching Your Content Creation Is A Great Strategy

In a one-off post, you’re reaching for the first idea that enters your mind.  When you continue to share content that way over a period of time, your content may not do the heavy lifting you’re hoping it’ll do.

When you plan time in your calendar to sit down and batch your content creation in continuous chunks of time (at least a week or more before you’re going to post it), you have time to be more strategic.  

In this scenario, you can: 

• Remind yourself of your content pillars (i.e. what you want to be consistently sharing to become known for your expertise and what you offer)

• Reference recent content to assess what resonated and inspired engagement

• Plan your content to align with your promotional calendar 

• Keep the end in mind - or, plan your content to lead your audience exactly where you want them to go, adding value that will eventually lead to a sale

• Plan for omnipresence and loop your content cross-platform (think Instagram to blog to newsletter to FB Group, etc) to create multiple touch-points that allow your audience to establish know, like, trust

Batching allows you to take a big picture approach to be more purposeful with your content planning, creating and sharing so you can build a brand that’s recognizable and truly creates an experience for your audience that helps them know your offers are the solutions they’ve been craving.

How To Do It: Create Your Content-Batching Process

Feel free to take this process as inspiration and make tweaks to it to make it your own.  The whole point of batching your content creation is to make the process easier, more efficient, more strategic, and more effective.

SET YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS

1 - Take your 3-5 content pillars and brainstorm every topic you can think of to share based on your expertise and keep these ideas handy in a Content Pillar Parking Lot.

2 - If you’ve gathered psychographic information on your audience and clients, use this to create another list you can easily reference of your ideal clients’ Dream Outcomes and Biggest Problems.  

3 - It’s also great to regularly do a bit of market research on Google, AnswerThePublic.com, and Pinterest to see what people are searching for most when it comes to your area of expertise.  Note down any juicy content ideas for you to pull from when it comes time to start planning and creating.

4 - Ensure you’ve created your Marketing Guidelines - - - know what marketing platforms you’re planning to use to reach your target audience (Instagram, LinkedIn, Email Newsletter, Blog, Podcast, etc) and how often you’re committed to sharing content (1x / week, every other day, daily, etc).

NOTE: I recommend going even deeper and strategizing the type of content you’ll share on what day so if you decide to, for instance, make every Monday’s post on Instagram a “motivational post,” then if you’re batching content for one month, you know you need 4x motivational posts; for 3 months, you know you’ll need 12x motivational posts.  You get the idea.

START BATCHING YOUR WORK

First things first - if you don’t plan batch-work time in your calendar, it’ll never get done and you’ll go back to creating and posting content on a whim instead of having a strategic approach.  

Batching your content creation doesn’t mean you sit down in one session and get all your content planned, written, designed and scheduled in one fell swoop.  If you’re just doing 1-2 weeks at a time, you could batch all of that, but if you want to plan for a month or a full quarter at a time, you’re going to schedule several batch-work sessions on your calendar:

1 - Strategy & Planning

2 - Creating - actually writing the blogs, newsletters, posts, captions, etc.

3 - Designing (Time saver tip: create templates for the different kinds of marketing materials you regularly create and save them in Canva)

4 - Scheduling

When I sit down to batch my content creation, I love starting with my audience’s burning questions and biggest problems. I come up with a variety of solutions for each problem, and always ask what the purpose of the post is and if it can easily include a Call To Action that will lead to my other resources and offerings.

Once you start doing this, your process will evolve and you’ll come up with your way of batching your content creation.  By doing this, you have the time and space to really consider the experience you want to give your audience that will lead to mutual success - - - sales for you, and problems solved for them!

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