How batching, can help your makeup business.
As the queen of (trying) to work smarter, not harder - I think I have my routine down to quite a fine art. And one thing I can’t live without? Batching! Batching, is when you mark out a slot in your calendar, to do a number of tasks “batched together”. For example, every Tuesday I spend a good amount of time batch creating content for my Instagram. I create pockets of time, to batch either content, or just general business tasks, because in the long run, this saves me an incredible amount of time. And today I’m going to share how it can help you as well.
1) Batching your content.
The biggest batch of all, but I can’t tell you how many hours batching my content saves me. I used to sit and create content as and when I felt like it. Which sometimes, meant a couple of weeks would go by and I wouldn’t create or post anything at all. I would make sure I had an alarm on my phone, reminding me it was 5pm, so I could manually go on Instagram and post something. This was incredibly invasive, sometimes not very efficient and generally, meant I was a slave to 5pm. Every. Single. Day. I would try and pre-plan and post when I was on a tube, or had some down time on set, but generally I was always in a state where I was worried about what and when I was posting.
Let’s fast forward to my routine now. Tuesday’s (unless I am on set) are generally my days where I dedicate it solely to Instagram. The first part of the morning, I create content on Canva. I don’t have a set amount of content that I create, but generally I come off by 1pm. I have my lunch, and then in the latter part of the day, I will then head to Planoly and write the captions. Doing this batch every single Tuesday, usually means I am a month or two (or sometimes three!) ahead in advance. My content is going out automatically at 5pm (no log in on my part required) and it means I am consistent on Instagram, my audience is always engaged and I am 100% stress free about posting. What if I miss a day? For example, tomorrow (a tuesday!) I am on set! It doesn’t matter. I repeat, it doesn’t matter if one week I don’t do this practise. I have been doing this for over a year now, my content bank is full, because every Tuesday I have batched. Some weeks I create 5 posts, other weeks I create 14. Because I have consistently batched content, it’s OK to miss a week, the business still runs. THIS is the position you want to be in and you can be in, if you dedicate yourself to batching your content in one go.
2) Batching your content CREATION.
I hear you, I know what you’re thinking from the previous post. But I’m a makeup artist, what if I have no new content to post! Then you can batch, your content creation. Set aside some days in your calendar to test or have a content day where you get a model or friend round and create content, reels and videos. Look at your portfolio and repurpose those amazing shots that have only been seen once. You don’t have to be a content creation machine, you just have to be smart about it.
3) Batch consistent tasks.
I want you to write a list of the tasks in both life and business you do religiously. For me, I am always doing emails, Etsy orders, and project builds or launches. These are consistent tasks in my business. So I have created time batches, in the morning, I do all my emails in bulk. I then don’t go on my emails again until around 4pm. This means, I am not distracted from other tasks during the day because I have batched my email office hours. For things like blogging and newsletters, I batch those at the beginning of every month, to ensure I am not doing them weekly or even daily. All those repetitive tasks you do? See if you can batch them together, once a week, or even if you can once a month. This will save you SO much time.
Batching might sound boring, but it’s a business life saver. I gain so much time BACK from batching, because I focus myself on those batching days therefore I have more time in my business to be creative and free, on my terms. Give it a go and let me know your thoughts!