When it comes to marketing, it’s always a good idea to think ahead of schedule. You need to keep an eye on the calendars and make sure that you’re always one step ahead of the trends for your content to truly make an impact.
But when it comes to time, it can suddenly feel like a lot of your planning days are steadily slipping away. With live engagements, unexpected viral campaigns, sudden updates to share and new news appearing every single day, your planned content can often take a backseat - leaving you struggling to keep up when the rush dies down.
Batch-making your content is a great system for your marketing team to adopt, helping your marketing materials stay consistent and creating a fresh backlog of assets to share when your socials get slow. Whether it’s bunch-creating an Instagram series to share from week to week or shooting a series of TikToks around the office in a day to be drip-fed out to your users over time, batch work is a really useful tool when it comes to good time management in marketing.
WHY YOU SHOULD BATCH-MAKE YOUR CONTENT
Creating your content in batches isn’t just about making a lot of things in a short space of time. It’s about creating useful and quality content that is consistent, innovative and resourceful for your marketers to push over a long campaign or period.
For some teams, it can be useful to set up project management boards like Monday.com or Trello to develop your content in bulk and share to-do lists with your colleagues to help everyone stay on track. For others, it can mean dedicating certain days of the week or month just to creating content for your socials.
Building up social asset templates, downloading and resizing images, drafting captions, sourcing hashtags, shooting content and writing copy can all be batched by your team, and should be kept neutral and universal i.e. to be shared at any point in the year. Batch content is a great place to share your products and services that are available all year round as well, in any season - essentially, the core selling points of your business.
Through batch-creation your content should be uniform and coherent, as it won’t fall victim to the employee sick days, holidays, loss of focus or job shifts that can occur over a longer period of time. Your content won’t suffer the inconsistencies of technical issues, software breakdowns or power cuts, as it will all have been created at the same time - something that should be evident in its quality.
WHEN YOU SHOULD BATCH-MAKE YOUR CONTENT
Before A Seasonal Holiday
One of the most important times to batch-make your content is around a month before a big seasonal holiday or break. This could be Halloween, Eid, Christmas or even the equinox of summer, spring, winter and autumn. Throughout these periods, live or reactive content is always going to be the most enjoyable to create and the most on-trend for social users, however, your more generic content is still going to serve an important role.
It’s pretty safe to say that the same themes and icons will pop on each significant holiday, such as ghosts, bats, and pumpkins for Halloween or robins, snow and reindeer for Christmas. No matter which holiday advert kick starts a new social trend or which political scandal might redefine the Metaverse, you can always rely on the old favourites to make an impact in the holiday season.
Utilise the core themes of the holidays to batch create some fun, exciting and coherent series, campaigns and posts for your brand and allow them to run in the background while you focus on the trending reactive stories.
Before A Significant Employee Vacation
In every marketing team, there’s always that one person who keeps the socials running. Whether it be the graphic designer who creates the best social assets, the coordinator who plans and schedules the posts or the copywriter who creates the most engaging captions, this is the employee you need to keep around when the big marketing opportunities arise.
So, if you know that this particular employee is planning to take an extended holiday such as a big Christmas break, a spot on the next series of Love Island or childcare leave, it’s important to start planning ahead. Batch-making content to support your socials is going to be a game changer for the days ahead in their absence. Allow them to spend their time focusing on planning, scheduling, producing and creating enough content to last the team until they return, and bulk generating enough engagement ideas to keep your profile busy in the meantime.
Before A Big Marketing Campaign
It’s always a good idea to start batch-making your content at least a couple of months before you launch a big marketing campaign for your business, as there will always be more tasks involved than you think.
You’ll need to take the time to draft up the ideas, sketch out the schedule, brief the designers, book in the content creators, and gain approval from your seniors before you can even start making the content itself. You need to ensure that your campaign won’t clash with a previously scheduled event or holiday, that it meets all of the quality checks, that it delivers the right message and that you have enough resources planned to actually bring it to life.
Batch-making your marketing content month in advance is a great system, as it allows you that extra time to process any feedback from higher-ups, make any changes and pitch your ideas all at once before the deadline approaches.
At The Start of The Calendar Year
Finally, one of the most important times to batch-create some content? January 1st.
At the start of the year, your team should be sitting down and looking at the marketing map ahead and planning out your goals, objectives and aims. Whether you want to grow your following, reach new audiences, plug a new product or gain more engagement, the start of the year is a good place to begin creating the iconic marketing content that will shape your next 12 months online.
Here you can check out any upcoming awareness days, charity campaigns, awards opportunities and networking events that could be relevant to your industry. You can brief your team on any new hires coming up or changes in the business that might affect their marketing plans. You can read up on the latest technology updates in the world of marketing that could help to change the way you promote your services and begin putting together a promotional scheme for your post-Christmas sales.
This is your opportunity to make some headway on your marketing campaigns for the next year in business, and batch-working is a good way to secure some guaranteed content, no matter what comes next.
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Do your teams batch-create their content? What are your thoughts on batch-making marketing materials?
If you’re looking for advice on how to boost your creative process or want to learn more about growing your business, make sure you keep your eyes peeled for the launch of the new LVE THT Academy! Check out the information on our socials to find out more.
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