"Batching" - Creating content and conversations ahead of time

Just as with the rising of the sun, it seems that every day starts with a new media campaign, social media tool and/or type of marketing methodology.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s a product of the ever-changing and growing digital world in which we live. But, it can be confusing - so how best to wrangle the growing monster? To put it simply, by batching.

In Dave Kerpen’s, ‘Likeable Social Media’ - recently updated with advice for Pinterest - he explains that social media is a conversation. He claims, quite rightly, that many a company falls victim to spending, “most of its marketing dollars talking and a little on listening.”

Done right, a content marketing campaign will provide you regular content to boost organic visibility, capture targeted lead information, analyse that data in unique ways to improve ROI, while entertaining and informing your audience. Read '3 tips every content marketing agency should follow' to learn more.

Although the idea of thinking from the consumer’s point of view isn’t exactly ground-breaking information, it’s one that consistently comes up, particularly with regards to marketing strategy, or getting your message across.

Dave suggests that the best thing to do, is take to Twitter or Facebook and literally ask consumers and customers, which products or services they prefer.

He also suggests a company could drum up a lively conversation about something seemingly unrelated to their product or service: something Dave calls ‘table talk’.

Incidentally, ‘table talk’ can be a great way of identifying shoulder niches of content or information that a target audience can realistically relate to a company’s product or service.

Once directly placed in the shoes of the consumer, you have an idea of what their desirable product or service is and so following you can begin to properly anticipate what their needs are.

Say that you’re a music distribution label, in other words a fully digital company, looking to increase your reach of audience, you might take to Facebook to instigate a chat about Apple Music.

This is likely to become subject to lively debate and from there you decide to write a series of blogs, outlining the benefits to your users between Spotify and Apple Music, coupled with the recent news of the BBC’s annual cost cut backs.

You’ll then support the whole thing through your social media channels, working in how you and your product care the most for your consumer.

All of this sounds like a serious amount of work and might make anyone weary, however this doesn’t have to be the case with the help of ‘batching’.

Laura Roeder, founder of LKR Social Media and MeetEdgar.com is an advocate and a convincing blogger when it comes to the idea of batching.

At its most basic, her message is that you can accomplish multiple small tasks at once. For example, she suggests you use Gmail labels to label batches of emails, to then go through and clear out the chaff in one sitting.

Taking batches of time to do small tasks, frees up your time for the important non-delivery elements such as strategy and winning business.

Going back to the idea of writing for a music distribution service, their aim is to provide the best distribution service to musicians, who have a vested interest in what Spotify and Apple Music are doing.

By ‘batching’ a blog series, i.e. writing all the blogs in one batch, and scheduling them so they trickle out one by one is a more effective use of time than writing a blog a day. It also give you foresight of the direction in which the conversation is likely to move.

As founder of MeetEdgar.com, Laura Roeder has done the same thing with social media updates.

Often social media can be all encompassing as it’s live and bases itself on reaction as much as action.

If we go back to earlier, when we mentioned anticipating consumer’s needs; once you have a foothold on what their needs are, you can batch together ideas of what they will find interesting on your social media channels.

Where MeetEdgar is different from things like Buffer and Tweetdeck, is that updates are sorted into categories and are published on a schedule you can choose. Effectively, batching content together.

The bonuses of social media batching like this, are three-fold: primarily as we said, you’re going to have more free time, to be able to react to live interactions with your consumers to your updates.

Secondly, by having a batched library of updates that you can shuffle, rearrange, replace and delete means that your followers are more likely to see them, rather than just hoping they’ll catch sight of a one-off post.

And finally, much like a lovingly homemade batch of stew casserole, the more you practise your batching of social media and blogging, the easier and better they become.

Done right, a content marketing campaign will provide you regular content to boost organic visibility, capture targeted lead information, analyse that data in unique ways to improve ROI, while entertaining and informing your audience. Read '3 tips every content marketing agency should follow' to learn more.