Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit, just working in your business and start working on it, join us here, where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up my loves and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva and we are cooking here today on the podcast or cocktail mixing. Cocktails, anyone? I mean, it’s the holidays after all, we can do these things here on the show.
No, I’m actually going to be sharing with you my content batching formula or my content batching recipe. This should shave hours off your social media workload every single month and should make social media a whole lot easier and a whole lot more effective for you.
Social media content batching comes in many names, in many shapes, in many forms, but the overall idea is that weeks or months in advance of when you actually post, you sit down and get organized with all of your content.
Now we as a business content batch 90 days in advance. I sit down with my director of marketing, my social media manager every 90 days and we plan content for 90 days in advance. It takes us two hours every 90 days to choose all the podcasts, all the posts, all the topics.
It would be easy to say, well, “Britt can do that in two hours because she has a director of marketing and a social media manager.” No, that’s not true. They helped me with the actual execution, but the planning would take me two hours, whether it was just me—actually might be faster if it was just me, ‘cause I’m not bouncing ideas around, right? It would just be my concepts. So it shouldn’t take you more than two hours every single quarter to content batch and then all you have to do is create the execution around it.
You might say, “Well, the execution is where it takes a long time.” No, it really shouldn’t. If you get organized with your content, you should be maybe spending five hours a month on social media and probably about four minutes a day posting. I mean, it shouldn’t be heavy. It should be quick and easy.
So raise your hand if you feel like every time you need to write Instagram posts, you’ve got to carve off 30 minutes. ‘Cause it’s like find the photo, write the caption, figure out the hashtags, get the edit on the photo, right? Finally post it, wait and get some likes. It’s like a whole process. It takes at least 15 minutes if not 20 or 30, right?
That’s wrong and content batching gets you out of that system.
If you want to know my exact system, start to finish, you can head to brittseva.com/playbook and I literally show you my screen. I show you the backend of our system. I show you how we organize all of our content at brittseva.com/playbook. You can learn more about that, but I want to get you started with the content batching formula here today.
The content batching formula is multi-layered. It’s like a layer of lady fingers, layer of jam, custard made from scratch, raspberries, more ladyfingers, beef sauteed with peas and onions, a little more custard. Any Friends fans in the house? Am I the only one? No, I’m kidding.
So it is a layered formula. However, it’s layered with social media goals and objectives. So the two layers are likely layers that you are familiar with. Photos and videos is the first one layer. Captions is the second layer.
Can you guess what the third and fourth layers are? It’s not posting and it’s not engaging. The third layer is messaging and the fourth layer is goals and objectives.
Those last two layers are where most people fall flat. Because my guess is when you’re listening to the show, you’ve been focused on the photos, videos, and captions, and then engaging and posting and organizing. All those things are really great, but that doesn’t create content batching and it doesn’t create structure and it often doesn’t produce results.
So what we’re going to focus on here on the show today is actually going to be the messaging and our goals, which are the two layers of content batching I think most often get forgotten.
Let me ask you this: What is your goal with social media? Have you stopped to think about that very recently? What is the goal? Because the goal is not to post a lot of stuff and the goal is not to make your work look good. The goal is not to be consistent. None of those are the goals with social media ever. The goal was social media is more butts in the chair, more clients in the business, more money in your bank account, more scalability on your horizon.
That’s the goal with social media always, yet often we almost feel like social media is the ball and chain. Like it’s this burden we carry with the business and we don’t really want to have to do it because it’s heavy. It’s so heavy.
It shouldn’t be heavy. It should be your greatest joy and the number one driver of your success yet it feels like the ball and chain because we don’t have scalability around it.
I want you to remember from this day forward, your goal was social media is butts in your chair. So with every post you make, if the goal isn’t “this will grow my business,” you’re wasting your time.
Let me give you an example. If you post a photo of Jeanette, she came into your salon yesterday and you transformed her. She went from a blonde to a brunette and your caption is talking about the transformation, how long it took, how happy she is now, that is a very soft sell. That is going to be a very difficult way to grow business. I know that when we think about a surface level, like “What the heck, I’m sharing the story. I bet there’s a lot of people who want to go from blonde to brunette.” There’s a handful, but there’s not a ton. You’re sharing a story that some people will relate to. Most people won’t, and it’s not actually going to do anything to drive business. It might make Jeanette feel celebrated. She might feel cool being featured on your feed, but is she going to point her friends to look at the posts? Probably not, probably not.
In our minds, we’re going to be like, “Oh, so I should tell her to point her friends to the post.” No, you shouldn’t have to tell her to do anything. She should want to do it because of your messaging. Yeah. The way you’ve positioned yourself on social.
That’s where we get it wrong is we fill our feed with information, information, information. It’s almost like a blog of the day-to-day salon life, and that is not how social media should be. If we want to use social media to grow our business and get more butts in the chair, we need to be educating, serving up information, inspiring guests, creating FOMO, making local clients in our area say, “What the heck, how am I not a part of that salon company? And how do I get myself to be a part of that culture?” They should be just dying to be a part of what you’re serving up. That energy should be tangible. And if we’re not creating that on social, we’re missing the mark.
Let’s go to the third layer of our content batching formula and let’s take a look at messaging. I want to ask you this: What do you want to be known for as a salon, as a stylist, as an owner, as an educator? What do you want to be known for?
If somebody says, “Listen, I’m looking for X result.” What do you want someone to say about you? You want it to be like, “Oh my gosh, you got to go see Britt. She is the exact person to help you solve that problem,” right?
If somebody were to be like, “You know what? I want extensions.” “Oh my gosh, you got to go see Nancy. She’s the only person in this town who can do it.” That’s the kind of affinity you want people to have to your business, right?
Are you curating that right now? Or is it just Nancy does good hair. Nancy is consistent. Nancy is solid. Nancy can formulate. Nancy can do extensions. Nancy can cut hair. There’s a lot of people who can do a lot of things, but if you want to be the best at something, you want to be known for something. That’s how we grow a business quickly.
You can’t be known for just great hair. That’s not going to cut it. Lots of years of experience, not going to cut it. You need to be special and have a specialty.
My first question that you need to answer is what do you want to be known for as an educator, a salon owner, as a stylist, what do you want to be known for? You’re the go-to for what? You must have a specialty. And that doesn’t mean, “Oh, I can only do men’s cuts then for the rest of my life.” No, but you need to have a specialty in something and then all of our social media efforts and all of our content batching are going to go towards serving that objective.
Okay, next question. What about you is relatable, special, or different? What do you have to offer that the guy down the street doesn’t have? Ask yourself that. What do you have to offer that nobody else in town can compete with? If nothing, we need to create something.
If something, my question to you is does that show up loud and proud on your social media? Is that clear in your messaging that you do more than just good hair? Maybe it’s your salon atmosphere. Maybe you’re a curl expert. Maybe you offer a different extension method than somebody else. Maybe you offer the same method, but your technique around it is different.
Maybe you do cuts colors, root touch-ups. You’re like “Britt, I don’t do any of those. Like niche specialties like extensions or brides or short women’s cuts or whatever. I just do great touch-ups, natural color really, really well.” Awesome.
So if I went to your social media, would the messaging say, “does natural hair color better than anybody else”? And I don’t mean in your bio and I don’t mean in your cover photo. I mean in your captions, in the photos you choose, and in the messaging you deliver, does every single post you make say this stylist does natural hair color better than anybody else?
Because if not, we’re missing the mark and can you see how now we’re creating a filter through which every piece of social media content gets run. Because once we have that messaging filter, then the batching becomes real easy.
Pre-planning 90 days worth of posts becomes simple because we know what the goal is and we know what our messages, and so long as we keep those two layers in mind, the captions and the photos and videos actually become very, very easy.
Next question. What should a guest expect when they book with you? What is your salon atmosphere? What is the guest experience like? What will they be taught?
If you’re an educator, what do you teach and what does working with you look like from start to finish? Does it start with a one-on-one call? Does it start with a freebie? Where does it start?
And then where are we going? What does the journey look like? Are you a salon that is modern? Are you eco-friendly? Do you only use vegan color and products, right?
It’s just a lot more classic. Is it more high energy? Is it edgier? Does that radiate through everything that you do? So whenever I say salon experience, everybody’s like, “Oh my gosh, perfect. So I’m going to do a post about salon experience.”
One post? One post. You’re going to do one post about salon experience. You should be talking about salon experience, maybe every fourth post. So I’m talking three, four or five times a month.
We’re talking salon experience because in our minds we’re like, “Well, I talked about salon experience months ago.” Do you think somebody who finds your social media for the first time is going to scroll back two months, find that caption about salon experience, and read it? They are not. I’m here to tell you they are not, not, not.
So we need to think about what is the message I want to deliver with every post I make about atmosphere, experience, the way our salon is, the way I am as a service provider, the kind of hair I do, and how I want to be perceived.
Whoa. Can you see how, when we get really clear on those things, then content batching is possible? Because often when we sit down to do social media—let’s say you do 20 posts a month. You likely feel like you’re making 20 messages every single month. Does it feel like that? Like every time you have to sit down and write a caption and make a post, it’s a new story?
It shouldn’t feel like that. It should feel like a new paragraph in the same chapter of just one storybook and it becomes really easy to write one paragraph that flows after the previous paragraph that goes into the next chapter. Much easier than writing a different story every single time, right? That messaging piece is huge when we’re content batching.
So now we can start to create our content. Now that we have our goals and our messaging is more dialed in, we can start to create what I call focus points. Depending on who you follow as an educator, there’s all kinds of different terms for these: categories and segments and whatever.
For me, in our industry, calling them focus points seems to be the most tangible. For some reason, when educators say categories, it’s always like, “Can one of my categories be cats?” Like, “Well, what are my categories? Because we are a service based business and we highly specialize in very specific things.”
I like to call those categories, if you will, focus points because I think it changes the context by which we choose them.
Based on what the questions I asked before—what is your specialty? What is your energy? What do you want to be known for?—I want you to think about what kind of captions and photos you could be sharing on your feed that get this message across.
Here’s a hint: not all photos should be hair photos. 2016 called, they want their social media feeds back where it was just hair, hair, hair, white background, white background, white background, hair, hair, hair. Let’s leave that in like 2017 and jump forward and create a more modern, tangible, emotion-filled feed.
You know what’s going to be trending in 2021 and beyond? Authenticity and vulnerability. Trending.
Knowing that we’re not just going to post photos of hair, we want to start really thinking about what our focus points are and what other types of content we can gather around those focus points.
I want you to think of five things you want to come through loud and clear when I look at your page. So sometimes I’ll be on a coaching call with somebody and they’ll say, “Well, I’m an extension specialist,” and I’ll go to their page and like, yes, sometimes they do extensions. But based on just the visual, I wouldn’t say extension specialist.
Just because you write extension specialist in your bio or just because it says extension specialist on your website, if that messaging—remember that’s one of our layers of content batching—isn’t congruent, meaning it doesn’t radiate the you’re an extension specialist through your feed, through your Google My Business reviews, through your website, yes, but through your messaging, communication, everything, it’s not going to hit. So it needs to be super consistent.
I want you to think of five things you want to radiate through loud and clear on your feed. So here’s an example. Maybe you’re a thinning hair specialist. Like I asked at the top of this episode, be special, have a specialty. You’re like, “Okay, my specialty is working with thin hair, men and women, thin hair.”
Okay, great. Love it. So what are the services you mostly do? Root touch-ups and highlights. Awesome. And that’s in addition to maybe some specialty thinning hair treatments and services, right? So you can specialize and still do average color and cuts, it’s fine, but your specialty would be one of the focus points, then maybe root touch-ups and highlights would be another one.
Then maybe your salon is eco-friendly. That would be a really good focus point. Maybe your guest experience is second to none and you know that, but that’s a focus point. And then we can show through our messaging that it is second to none. We can prove it.
Maybe another focus point is that you live in Lake Tahoe and your salon is located there. So a lot of you know this, I’m a California girl, but my heart belongs in Lake Tahoe and specifically on the Nevada north shore. Lake Tahoe is something I always like to use as an example because it has a very defined culture. Orange County has a very defined culture. The town that I live in and grew up in, very defined culture.
Does your community have a defined culture and is that something you could incorporate into your social media feed? Do you do that already?
Because there’s some people, like at least in the community I live in, there’s a very strong locals-only vibe. Not that we are exclusive to those who aren’t from around here, but there’s lmost like inside jokes of living here and it would appeal to me if a small business was incorporating those things into their grid and into their feed.
Do those things exist in your area and can you be incorporating them? I see a lot of salons apply this at a very surface level. Like they’ll just showcase, but like maybe there’s a big clock tower in your community and you’ll be like, “Oh, the clock tower. We all love it.” That is not what I am talking about. That’s obscure. It’s not in line with your messaging. It’s not in line with your goals. Do you think posting a photo of the clock tower is going to drive business to your chair? Let me give you the answer. It’s a hard no.
That’s not how we use that as a focus point. But in creating these focus points, it’s going to help us to refine our videos, our photos, and then to create the messaging.
Again, if you head to brittseva.com/playbook, I go deep into how to use these focus points to actually curate your content and make your plan in full. But I want you to start for now creating those focus points, which is going to then become the feed that fills your grid. The feed that pops up on Facebook, the photos that you include on Yelp, on Google My Business, on Instagram, on Facebook, on whatever, on Snapchat and whatever you’re using to build and grow your business. This is the kind of feed that you’re going to create, right?
The next step is to start actually getting the content. This should be a long list and you can go ahead and brainstorm this out.
Based on the messaging we want to deliver and our focus points, what photos do you need? So you might say, “Okay, I’m going to need photos of before and after, of how I’ve cut and styled clients with thinning hair to maximize the volume. I want to get before and afters of thinning hair, clients who have used the product I recommended. I need photos of just happy clients, like maybe it’s not all about thinning hair. I also want to focus on my color and highlighting specialty. So happy clients. I definitely need photos of my salon space that should make all of your lists, photos of elements that showcase that we are eco-friendly.”
Maybe that’s retail, maybe that’s plants, maybe that’s essential oils, crystals, right? Like not everybody’s eco-friendly, but what fits in line with eco-friendly for you and what makes sense for you, right?
Photos of you should definitely be a part of the game plan and photos of you and your guests. I don’t know why more stylists don’t do this. It actually like blows my mind. Like we post photos of ourselves, photos of our guests, but never together. Like how rad would it be if you looked at a social media feed and every third photo was a stylist laughing with their client, like constantly how much emotion would be captured in that? Man, it would be powerful and I don’t mean once in a while, like once in a blue moon, but like all the time. Then the caption associated would be a testimonial.
Like, steal that idea. It’s a brilliant one and I don’t know why more people don’t do it. It’s so crazy to me.
But when we think about vulnerability and accessibility and all these kinds of things, that’s what we should be posting, right? So what are the things you want to showcase more of and then photos of your community or how you are involved in your community, things like that, right? Those are kind of the photos or videos we would start to get organized and then we make our caption list, right?
Based on our messaging and our categories and our focus points, what are some of the captions that you need to share in order to get that message across through and through, right? Make a list of caption categories and start to brainstorm all the captions you can write about those categories.
So this was a quick, what, 20 minute, 25 minute overview of how we content batch. Once you’ve got a clear view of your goals and your messaging, then you can start to work on the first two layers, which is actually getting the photo and video content and batching out the captions. Once you have all of those pieces, you could almost imagine this being a big project sprawled out over the living room floor. That’s what content batching often feels like.
Once you have all those moving pieces, then you can get organized. You shouldn’t go anywhere near a social media scheduler until you have done this exercise and a few more things in between. You’re not even ready. Like if you’re in the mode where you take a couple photos of your guests, upload them to your social media schedule, and they kind of sit there in the bank, then from time to time you go on and schedule them into the grid.
But often it’s happening week by week, kind of as you go, and then you’re writing captions in the captioner or in the scheduler. That’s not content batching.
That’s called being in the frying pan and it’s exhausting. That’s not a fun place to be at all. It’s stressful.
When we have these things in place and we can take a step back and now say, “Okay, based on my goals for the quarter, based on my message for the quarter, based on what I know I need to express in order to get my social media to drive business to my chair, these are the 60 posts I’m going to share over the next 90 days.” It starts to become very, very clear because if you follow the instructions I just shared, by the end of the exercise, you should have a mega list of all the photos you need, all the captions you want to write. Now you can start creating a plan around getting that content and scheduling it into your planner.
Again, if you need a little more hand holding, you can head to brittseva.com/playbook. I will show you in grand detail the exact system that we use to get our social media house in order.
You guys, so much love, happy, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
