Content batching starts with strategy

Content batching is all over social media these days, I’m sure you’ve seen many posts or reels briefly explaining how you load months worth of content into a scheduler, ready to drip into your feed automatically while you sit back and relax or focus on other, more interesting parts of your business.

But there’s more to it than it seems. Before you start actually scheduling out your posts, you have to come up with your content strategy.

Let’s get a few things straight, content batching is not just about scheduling out to post every day for a month, hopping on all the trends to create as much content as possible, and planning the look of your feed to make it more aesthetic.

These can be factors of your content batching process if you want to follow trends or make your feed aesthetic. But that’s not all there is to it.

Content batching is primarily about creating a strategy for your social media marketing based on your brand guidelines. It’s thinking about what serves your audience and using that to prepare a plan for your social media and then scheduling posts to save time and energy down the road.

First, a few definitions:

Your content strategy is a plan for what type of content you'll be providing through your social media, how often you will post, and in what order. It includes tracking your progress and revising your plan as needed based on what’s doing well and what isn’t.

Your content pillars are topics or categories about your niche that you discuss on your social media.

Determine your goals

What are your goals for your social media?

Do you want to…

grow your following?
connect with your audience?
start conversations, get to know your audience?
sell more of your product or service?
advertise something?
drive traffic to your blog or podcast?

You could have more than one goal and these could change every month. Try to clarify 1-3 of your most important goals that you want to focus on for the amount of time you’re planning your posts out for (the next week or month)

Come up with your content pillars

Content pillars, otherwise known as “content buckets,” are categories within your niche. You can have as few as 2-3 or as many as 7-9.

You might describe your niche as travel blogging, but that doesn’t help you know what to post every month. So you should narrow your content pillars to topics like:

travel tips
aesthetic travel photos
where I’m traveling
travel deals

Defining these topics will help you determine what kind of posts you want to create every day, week, or month.

Case Study: Me!

For example, my brand is social media coaching for people establishing and expanding their online presence and reach, with a heart for those struggling with mental health.

Let’s say my goals are to grow my following, connect with my audience, and sell my services.

Based on my brand and goals, I determine my content pillars.

I have decided that every month I will:

introduce myself to new visitors and followers
give tips and tricks about my theme of the month, which is one of the topics I speak on (design, photography, branding, marketing, and blogging).
share inspirational quotes or speak otherwise on mental health.
advertise my products and services.

Those content pillars already give me at least four posts to create, if I make one post about each topic.

It gets better. I can easily create multiple posts advertising my products and services, as I have multiple different things that I offer. I can also create multiple posts of tips and tricks.

On top of that, I've decided I will make a post regarding any national holidays, and a few personal photos (like behind the scenes).

This gives me far more than 4 posts for a month.

It’s getting a little complicated, are you keeping up?

Can you see how within each “pillar” I have multiple topics?

Sit down and actually write out all your content pillars. Then break them down as far as you can, just like I have in the graphic. Take all these topics and think of the different post ideas you can make on each topic.

If my content pillar is tips and tricks and I’ve broken that down to the topic of content batching, from there I can think of multiple ideas like:

what is content batching
how to: content batching
statistics about content batching
myths about content batching

Your pillars and topics can be broken down even further into the styles, media, or design of content you can make on each topic. Using Instagram as an example, consider the different types of content the platform encourages users to try:

Carousel posts
Infographics
Reels
Stories
Quotes
Memes
Personal photos

Mix and match topics and ideas with types of posts, you’ll find you could make multiple forms of content from one topic.

Using the content pillars method, you should be able to come up with enough content for up to a month. This is how your favorite content creator can easily schedule out months' worth of content. This is the most important part!

This can be recreated or revised every month as you come up with fresh ideas.

How do you come up with fresh ideas? Glad you asked!

Research

Start with yourself

One of the first ways to batch your activities is by doing some research. Start with yourself.

What have you already written about and what is it that your audience wants from you?

Look at previous posts: which ones did well and which ones didn’t? Which posts got a lot of likes, which ones got a lot of comments? This will give you an idea of what already-published content your audience likes.

Get inspiration

Next, what are your competitors doing? Don’t copy anyone, but look for inspiration from what is doing well in the community.

For example, as a Social Media Coach, I could look at social media managers and graphic designers on Instagram and see what they are posting.

Scroll through your explore page and save ANYTHING that catches your eye.

Really examine the posts that caught your eye. What was it about the post that stood out to you? The topic or the design? The colors or the fonts? How simple the post was or how dynamic and distracting it was?

For example, posts like this do very well these days

I like the concept “Stop doing…” it’s very catchy and engaging, I like the big bold font and the arrow.

Copying it would look like this. I’ve changed the colors to suit my branding and it definitely looks very different with different colors, but it’s still someone else’s design and someone else’s concept.

On the other hand, by taking inspiration from this post, I am able to create my own unique design like this.

This is similar. It says “stop doing…” and it’s got a funky arrow and little numbers in the corner, but I made it my own. It’s my own concept and my own design.

This is how you can take inspiration without copying.

Research your topics

Think about your topics. Let’s use photography for example. Let’s say that’s one of your pillars. You can break that down into topics like portrait photography, studio photography, and self-portrait photography. But when you think about photographers (your target audience), they are often interested in photo editing and videos as well. They are also commonly fans of nature. These are all things you could speak on if you’re interested.

In conclusion

It’s a complicated process, and one that might take time to figure out and perfect. It is also a constantly changing process.

If you’re ready to take the plunge into content batching, remember: planning is the most important part. Without a strong strategy, there won’t be any results from your efforts. I’ve laid out the process here so you can get started, but feel free to adjust it in any way that works for you and your business goals. Just remember, the more work you put into your content scheduling, the better are your chances of seeing growth!

After you create your content strategy, you can start the actual process of content batching.

Content is King, But Strategy is Queen: How to Create a Winning Content Strategy in Any Industry