We are all about simplifying your business hence our name, Simplified Marketing Services. 

Content creation takes a lot of work. You have to think about what to create, then create the graphic, write the copy, do hashtag research, then schedule. Then there are videos and reels. Also, what platforms are you concentrating on: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc.  Let’s just say it’s easy to get burnt out. However, social media is an amazing way to market your business and we don’t want to make this stressful. 

Remember the PBS channel? Are we dating ourselves here?:) Think of the acronym PBS when simplifying your social media content. 

3 Ways to Simplify Your Social Media Content

We’ve been doing social media content for quite some time therefore we have a system that we use to ensure we are putting out quality content and quality content on behalf of our clients. 

We focus on 3 things when it comes to simplifying your content:

• Plan Your Content
• Batch Your Content
• Schedule Your Content

Let’s take a deeper dive into PBS. 

Plan Your Content

Create a plan for your social media strategy. 

Get a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, or whatever floats your boat, a pen, and paper, and ask yourself these questions. 

• Why are you on social media?
• What platforms do you want your business to focus on?
• How often do you not want to post but have time to post? 3 times a week, 5 times a week.?
• When are you going to post? Monday, Wednesday, Friday? Monday-Friday?
• What kind of content do you want to put out? Educational, inspiring, fun? What type of content? Static posts, reels, videos?
• What is the end game? What do you want people to do? End up on your website? Sending you DM’s? Leaving comments? What are you looking for? Increase followers, brand awareness, and/or sales?

The end goal when creating a social media strategy is to connect with your audience and build that brand awareness.

Batch Your Content

Now that you have your plan you can start creating your content. A great way to start is by creating a content calendar for the following month. We like to look at our calendar to see what we have going on, are there any holidays, if we have launches, vacations, or anything else going on. 

Next, pick a day you will create social media content. For us it’s Mondays and we dedicate two hours. No distractions. We like to batch weekly but some people like to batch monthly. We do it weekly because we have a day dedicated to marketing and well because social media is always changing. We want to make sure we are staying current. Plus there’s so much we do for marketing that is more than just social media so it takes time.

Each Monday we create social media posts for the following week. We write our newsletters. We create pins. The majority of this is repurposed from our monthly blog. You can find more about content repurposing here. 

Schedule Your Content

You have a plan and have batched our content now it’s time to schedule your content. No one has time to manually post and since we are in content creation mode it’s a great time to start scheduling your content. This way it’s done. 

What do you use to schedule your content? You need to do your research. What works best for one person may not work best for another. You have to look at your business model, price 💰, and what each tier they have includes.

Here at Simplified Marketing Services we personally use Sendible because we are an agency so I looked for a scheduler that was cost-effective and had all the things that we needed.

Some popular schedulers are: 

• Sendible
• Later
• Hootsuite
• Metricool
• MeetEdgar
• Planoly
• Buffer
• SmarterQueue
• SocialPilot
• SocalBee
• AgoraPulse
• Meta

There are so many schedulers. So sit down and take time to compare and contrast because what’s best for one business may not be best for you.

Big tip: if you are going to schedule your content, DO NOT FORGET to go back and engage with your audience. 

THEME DAYS

You can have a marketing day where you spend the day creating content, or you can have theme weeks where you break down your content, so it’s not too overwhelming. 

For example: if you were to have a marketing day, block off however long it takes you: 2-4 hours and get into content creation mode. Plan, batch, and schedule. 

Or you can have a dedicated day each week where you dedicate to one marketing piece and block off 1-2 hours, so it’s not so overwhelming. For example, every Monday you will block off 1-2 hours to dedicate to marketing.

Week 1: plan content

Week 2: batch content

Week 3: schedule content

Week 4: marketing break or work on emails. 

We hope these tips for simplifying your social media content help alleviate some stress and keep you in control of your marketing.

If you are looking for resources to help you on your journey, you can grab them here.