Content Batching 101

Content batching

is a productivity technique where you create all of your captions or visual content during a set period of time. For example, instead of spending an hour planning, creating, and publishing one Instagram post, you'll spend that hour writing or “batching” an entire week of captions. - Later

Meet you new marketing BFF: content batching.

Content batching is the act of sitting down and creating multiple pieces of content at one time instead of starting everything from scratch right before you have to post; we’ve been there and it sucks. We love it because it can help you save massive amounts of time (bye, doom-scrolling!), but it also helps businesses of all sizes optimize their content marketing across channels. It’s such an effective content marketing strategy that we don’t know why you wouldn’t use it.

Content batching doesn’t just help you save time.

Our clients regularly tell us how much they hate pulling out their phones and trying to come up with something to post. We do too! It’s exhausting, stressful, and a huge time suck. Content batching identifies specific times in your schedule that you’re making content, so when that you can squash that little stress monster in your head telling you that you need to post.

Getting your time back is great and, let’s be honest, no business owner has enough of it. But content batching also helps nudge your marketing strategy to a higher level by forcing you to consider multiple pieces of content at one time. By creating multiple pieces of content at once you can create a most consistent theme, message, and story. When you have everything in front of you at once it’s easier to notice how everything flows and looks together, if your messaging is consistent, and tweaks you can make to improve your overall content strategy.

Content batching also brings your focus inward to the needs and goals of your business rather than getting distracted by what other businesses are posting. It’s easy to play the comparison game on social media, see a post, and immediately want to redo your entire social strategy. We’ve all been there. That’s why content batching is so glorious; the focus is all on you, your goals, your visual branding, and your strategy. Content batching forces you to get laser focused on what’s best for your business.

Content batching empowers you to harness the times you’re feeling creative. Have you ever been writing a blog post and then, as you were writing, you got a great idea for another blog post?? That’s your creativity flowing! Rather than tucking that idea away for a rainy day, content batching allows you to keep that creative train rollin’. That way you aren’t forcing yourself to come up with exciting copy about your upcoming product launch in the midst of a creative plateau.

Here’s how to get started.

Before you start, identify your most urgent content needs and goals. For instance, 10 emails for an upcoming sale or promotion. Create your content in order of importance so that you can get the most stressful items out of the way first. Then think about what piece of content would naturally fit in next, the message that you need to share, etc., Some people like to do their content batching in chunks (ex: 20 minutes at a time), and some prefer to do content batching for an entire time period/category (ex: every Instagram post for the month of January). Content batching is best done distraction free, so turn off your notifications, put your phone in a different room, pop on your favorite tunes and start chipping away. Once you’ve finished your batch and triple-checked everything, start scheduling your content out either manually or through an application like Planoly. To stay consistent, try to do your content batching around the same time every week.

Once you start getting in the flow with content batching, check in with how you and your business are doing. What do your analytics look like? Are you getting more email opens or social shares than usual? What’s working? How is your stress level? Periodically study how you content batch to learn how you can optimize it even more. You’ve got this!