How to create a month’s worth of content in one day
Summary/Overview
As a business owner, you have to wear many hats, and marketing — especially on social media — can feel the most time-consuming. To succeed in social channels, you have to be an editor, writer, photographer, designer and publisher all at once. And you have to do it every day, because success depends on consistency. If it seems daunting, don’t worry. We sat down with digital marketing expert Lucas O’Keefe, who shared how to get it all done without spending all day every day doing it. In fact, with a little planning and prep, you can get a month's worth of content created in just one day.
With Adobe Express you can quickly and easily make and share standout content to build your brand and audience on social media and beyond with beautiful unique templates you can make your own. Start for free on mobile and web.
Plan
Use the Adobe Express Content Scheduler to create your posting calendar, where you’ll start with a topic for each day. Use a weekly template as your guide. Each day — maybe even the same day of each week, you’ll choose a topic from one of the following categories:
- Tips and Lessons (How can you help your audience?)
- Behind the Scenes (How you work or where you work or who works with you)
- Industry resources (What can your share about your niche or industry that your audience might not see on their own?)
- Pain points (How can you spotlight a relatable struggle your audience shares?)
- Customer Testimonials (Positive endorsements that show customers overcoming their challenges)
- FAQs (What can you answer about your product, services, or industry that customers often want to know?)
- Motivation (Encourage your audience with something aspirational, optimistic, offering the keys to success)
- Fun posts (Memes, city love for your hometown, staff silliness, and when in doubt — pets)
To plan a month of content, you need 3-4 of each category depending on the month. Maybe you do Motivation Monday or Friday Fun, but with an architecture like this, your weeks build themselves. To make the most of your workflow, do all the days for each topic at the same time — all the FAQs at once, all the pain points at once, etc.
Lucas points out that a plan in place gives you more flexibility in what you post, not less, “Things change quickly in the world of social media and setting aside an hour or two on my Saturdays allows me to get everything prepared for the week while still having the freedom to push, pull, or move around ideas from my monthly plan as needed.”
Prepare
Gather everything you need for your plan. If you’re going to film four days of relatable pain point reels, put four outfits together. Gather your four industry articles; find all your memes. Gather your stock photos from Adobe’s diverse, royalty-free Adobe Stock photo collection sourced from thousands of artists around the world. This is also making the most of your workflow: If you do your thinking up front, and your finding up front, producing your content becomes much more efficient.
Produce
There are three ways to maximize production day. First, think in batches — either for theme or format. You’ll produce all your videos at once, all your gallery posts at once, and even all channel versions of the same post at once. How you batch your production is up to you but be sure to batch in a way that minimizes gear setup and teardown and moving between tools.
Lucas O’Keefe breaks it into phases: “I write the scripts for all 5-7 posts in one sitting, then I record/design them all in one sitting, and finally I write my captions for all of them and schedule the whole week of content once it's all been created. This allows me to really commit to each phase without interrupting my flow and to take breaks in between phases.”
For creating across channels, Lucas relies on Multiple Pages and Resize features in Adobe Express, “In particular, I’m able to have different page sizes and dimensions within the same project — a tool unique to Adobe Express that lets me see how a post might look different for Instagram vs. LinkedIn vs. Pinterest.”
Second, Lucas says leverage Adobe Express libraries and presets. “There are so many different formats that content creators may be expected to use these days: Instagram posts, YouTube thumbnails, Stories, Reels covers, and even less common things like email newsletter headers, but it's so easy to apply my brand across all of these different formats in Express using my saved brand presets.
Last, look to the pros by tapping into the built-in inspiration in Adobe Express: The Template Gallery. Here, you’ll find high-quality templates and design elements curated from Adobe’s community of professional designers. Easily make social media posts & stories, logos, banners (and more!) with your brand’s logo, look, and feel you already have stored in your Library.
No matter your social savvy, you can quickly and easily make and share standout content to build your brand and audience on social media. And you can do it on the go with the powerful Adobe Express App.