Make Your Summit-Hosting Experience Easier with Content Batching with Amanda Warfield
Here at Summit in a Box, we're all about doing things in the most streamlined and efficient way possible. Hosting a summit is a big project to take on alongside everything else you have going on in your business, which is why we provide all the templates, trainings, and tutorials you need to make it easy.
But even with all those resources, how you manage your time and fit in your summit around other business priorities plays a big role in your summit success. That's one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of content batching.
Content batching can free up a ton of time and mental space by grouping similar tasks together. It's great for both working on summit related content, and helping you stay on top of your content marketing while taking on a big project like a summit.
Today, we have content marketing strategist Amanda Warfield with us to share...
- what content batching is
- how it gives you the space to prepare for a summit without ghosting your audience
- how you can use it to feature your speakers
- and how to get started with batching your own content.
I'll let Amanda take it from here!
Marketing Can Be a Lot
My whole focus as a content marketing strategist is simplicity. Marketing can be a lot, and there are so many different avenues that we can take with marketing, especially for online business owners.
My whole mission is to help you simplify your content marketing in order for it to not take over your business so that you have time to actually move the needle in your business, serve your clients and make time for bigger projects like hosting a summit.
2 Businesses + 1 Summit = Content Batching
In addition to my content marketing business, I also have a Disney travel agency that I launched last year, just a few months before deciding to host a summit. I expected my travel business to be a slow-growth project that would take a while to get off the ground, but that’s not what happened at all!
By the time the summit came around, I was slammed with clients in both businesses, and there is no way I would have survived without content batching. I don’t have a virtual assistant either, so I did every task for the summit by myself.
I’m currently planning the 2nd round of my summit, and things are going smoothly. I know what to expect and logistically, I’m able to handle the summit and two businesses purely because I batch my content.
What is Content Batching?
Content batching is when you set aside time to create a months’ worth of content at one time. One reason I find content batching so helpful is that it takes the time that you're spending on marketing every day off of your plate and frees up your time for other things. Also, it greatly reduces the mental overwhelm that comes with content marketing. This is something that many people don't think about, but content creation takes up a lot of mental space!
When you are constantly in creation mode, you are taking so much of your mental capacity and just throwing it out the window. Content creation requires making lots and lots of little decisions, which can quickly lead to decision fatigue. By using content batching to channel all of those decisions into one week, you're freeing up not only time, but mental space to focus on other things the other three weeks of the month.
Think of it like Meal Planning
Content marketing is an important part of your business, but it's not your whole business. If you think about content batching like meal planning, you can decide what to have for each meal on the fly each day, but that get's exhausting. Or, you could plan a week or months’ worth of meals ahead of time so you don’t have to think about it each day. It frees up a ton of mental space and gives you back time in the day to put towards other things that need your attention.
The same is true with content batching. It frees up time to focus on other priorities in your business, like hosting a summit.
Using Content Batching to Make Room for A Summit
Because content batching is a regular part of my business routine, I knew I could host a summit without ghosting my audience or getting distracted by a constant stream of content marketing tasks. With content marketing constrained to only one week out of the month, I had the mental and physical space in my days to work on whatever I needed to work on. In this case, it was the summit. It allowed me to get the deep work in and move forward quickly.
When planning for my summit, I applied the same content batching principles to batch summit related tasks. I could dedicate a whole day to summit work and I was able to get so much more done than I would have by trying to fit it in around other tasks throughout the day. And because I was able to get so much more done, I was able to not only promote my summit but promote my speakers as well.
Promoting Speakers with Content
Because I planned and created my content in advance, not only was I able to stay on top of it, but I used my content to start promoting my summit and warming up my audience to the idea way in advance. One of the simplest things I did was put up one post on my Instagram feed for every single speaker. Speakers also got their own day on my Instagram Stories because I wasn’t having to create a post each day or write emails each day. I recognize, just as I’ve spoken in other summits, that speakers do so much to make a summit a success. I value my speakers for so much more than just bringing their audience to the summit, so it felt great to be able to feature them even more.
How YOU Can Get Started
The very first step is to get started with content batching is to set aside time in your calendar for it. It may sound simple, but this is the biggest issue my students have.
Go to your calendar and mark off one week every month for the rest of the year!
If you don't mark off time and commit to it, what ends up happening is you will always find other projects that need your attention and those will creep into your content creation time. You have to set aside the time, and not allow for any other projects or commitments during that week.
Most business owners go one of two ways with content creation. You either let it take up all of your time or you let it take up none of your time. Either way, you end up stuck with your business not moving forward because you're either not marketing at all, or all you're doing is marketing. So set aside that time on your calendar to batch your content and don't let anything else encroach on that.
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