⏱️ Time-Saving Strategies for your Brand on Social Media

In this episode I share my insightful strategies on how to make the most of your time when branding your business on social media.

With a focus on achieving clear goals, identifying high-impact activities, creating effective schedules, and leveraging content batching and automation, I run you through simple and practical tips for streamlining your social media branding efforts.

Whether you're looking to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, or generate leads, this episode offers valuable advice for maximising your impact while minimising time investment.

These short and sharp Fearless Brand Tip episodes are designed to give you quick and simple strategies and ideas to kick start your business brands instantly.

Want to create a stand out brand? Head to https://thefearlessdesigner.com.au/

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to the make it pop podcast. I'm your host, Morgan MacDonald. I'm a graphic designer and a brand strategist and I also am time poor in my business. So I wanted to come to you today with a really quick and strategic episode around how to save your time and manage it better when you're branding your business on social media. We all know that time is a precious commodity and if we could have more of it, we would probably ask for it. So I wanted to give you my ideas that I use with my clients and myself. And here comes my first one. It is to clearly define the goals of your branding when it comes to social media.

What are you there for? Is it to increase brand awareness? Is it to drive traffic? Is it to generate leads? There could be a number of things, but when we set these goals, it gives us something measurable to work to. So you know that if you are wanting to drive new leads to your website, you can create specific content to do that, rather than getting stuck in the real really confusing land of oh my gosh, what am I creating? I've got to post something. I've got to post five times this week. I don't know what to post. If we have our goals clearly defined as to which social media platform is doing what for us, that way it kind of gives us a really strategic line that we can hone in and create specific and engaging content for. For example, if you know that your brand online on Instagram is to build a community, that way you can go to down the line of creating reels and stories and feed posts that really generate community contribution. Or they talk about how you contribute to your community and really reinforce that goal that you've set for yourself. So the second idea that I have around time management, and I know this one for a fact because I have been doing it for a number of years, is to identify the high impact activities that your branding tasks are wanting to achieve.

So not all branding tasks such as creating content or creating videos are equal. Things need to be done before others. And sometimes we only have enough time to tick off the things that have to be done. Some of those high impact activities may be things like creating content for a launch that you're doing. It could be a product or a service launch. It could be if you're launching a new product and you want to drive sales. Those are high impact activities. They are the ones that are crucial that we are mentioning on our marketing social media channels so that they can bring in the sales or bring in the brand awareness to make those sales.

One thing I would really love to pop out there is that it's easy to say, oh yeah, that's a home pack thing. But even if you just take a big brain dump, list all of the activities that you feel comfortable doing on social media. It could be launching a new product or a service are important ones. But is it showing up? Is it doing what I do in the day? Is it sharing my testimonials of my clients and then align them with the goals that you've set in the previous step? That way you're focusing your time and energy in the highest impact and to tick off the goals of your business brand. Because that's why you're there. If you're using social media to market your business, it's got to be business. We've got our business hats on, so we're not there to scroll and share and like random things. We're there to create content that's going to impact our audience.

That brings me to my third idea. When do we have time for this stuff? When is this going to happen? Well, the only way that it does happen, especially if you are heavily booked in the actual runnings of your business like I am, is to create a schedule. When are you going to have time to create this content? If you're going to do it yourself, you need to allocate time in your week to marketing and branding. It could be creating an hour here, an hour there. It could be a good block where you know that in that 5 hours you're going to create your content and schedule it for the next five days, seven days, ten days, month. It could be that you are outsourcing it to your va or it could be that you're going to outsource it fully to a graphic designer. The common trap with the outsourcing option is that I come across a lot of people that feel like it's a handball, but you still need to be across what content they are creating for you and what goals they are going to achieve for your business. So my fourth idea around how to streamline and save you time on social media when it comes to branding your business is to batch your content.

Now this may sound like it could be a simple one that flows into the blocking out your time, but there are so many new pieces of software and apps available that allow you to create multiple items of content from one simple piece of content. For example, when I finish this podcast, I will then upload this audio to a app called Cast Magic and from there it will take all of the words and themes and ideas that I've spoken about and it'll break it into so much more content for me. Things like blog posts, real topics, so many things. Honestly, it blows my mind. And then you can actually ask for more automations if necessary. Now, I'm not affiliated with magic, but it has changed my life. It has given me possibly 50 pieces of additional content that I can create from simply creating one initially. So I would highly recommend looking to batch content in one go to save you time.

It could even be a case that when you're on Canva or using something if you're DIY-ing, if you feel comfortable to do that while you're creating a beautiful social media tile, you could create a web banner from that. You could create your Facebook tile from that. You could create a story video from that. It's about getting really smart and strategic, about using the time that we have a little bit more smartly and trying to put it out into the world a number of ways. Another idea that I would love for you to explore is to take a piece of your well performing content that you've created six months, twelve months, four years ago and put it in a different light. Use the same idea or concept and change the artwork, or even just repurpose it, repost it. If it has had good traction in the past, chances are the themes are aligned with your target audience and they will respond to it again. I have an insider tip that I always like to remind people about, and that's strategically sharing your story or who you are as the owner, especially if your name is your business name more regularly than you think.

So I know we kind of get into this, oh, I don't want to share about me. I don't want anyone to know about me and they already know who I am. But people love to connect with authentic people on social media. That's the purpose of it. Most of us aren't using it to be sold to, so we want to develop that deeper relationship and connection with the owner, operator, innovator, entrepreneur, whatever you want to call yourself, the more familiar that your audience can become with you, the more secure they will feel with buying from your launch, or buying your product or becoming part of your community. So my last little tip for saving you time on social media is to automate your social media. When I say that it can be a number of different things, it could be using a VA to automate your system. So you would create your goals as I earlier spoke about, you would give your VA the items that you wanted to create, it could be 30 days of Instagram feed.

Posts could be whatever. You would also give them your visual brand strategy or your brand guidelines so they know what they're creating, and then you could outsource that to them to automate the system of creating all of your content for the month. If you are wanting to do it in a more budget friendly way, you could use a scheduling system, for example. Oh, there's so many of them. You can even just use the meta scheduling if you're wanting to just do Facebook and Instagram. But I use one called plan and it allows me to batch create all of my content, put them all into my Instagram feed, even scheduling stories and reels. Write my captions, save them, pop in the dates and times that they will be posting, and then literally they just roll out as I need them to. It gives me a chance as a visual person to be able to look over the whole scheme of posts, to know that it's ticking my design box of being all cohesive and perfect looking.

But it also gives me a chance to make sure that I've evenly spaced out my posts so that they're achieving my high impact activities that I need to hit, like my launches and sales and all that kind of stuff. But it's also helping me really reinforce the goals that I've set for my social media. So if it is brand awareness, I can see that I have in the next 30 days, six posts that are going to promote my brand awareness. I know this is a lot to digest. I love to chat about how we can save more time on social media, but if you can go through and try any one of these things, I'm sure it's going to save you that valuable time on social media. So I really appreciate you joining me for this, and if you have any ideas or tips or things that have worked for you, please send me a DM on Instagram. Leave a comment I'd love to hear from you and I can't wait to share my next branding tip with you very, very soon.