Episode 186: 6 Ways To Create ALL The Graphics You Need for The Next 90 Days

6 Ways To Create ALL The Graphics You Need For The Next 90 Days If you're feeling overwhelmed with content creation for your pet business, just know that you're not alone! By planning your content ahead, you can actually save yourself tons of time, which means more time to spend on our beloved two-legged and four-legged clients! Today, we're going to discuss how you can be a content creation rockstar by planning your content three months ahead (yes, you read that right!), also known as batching. Batching is essentially taking time – with little to no distractions – to concentrate on completing “batches” of work in one sitting. It sounds scary, but you'll have to trust that this technique really works. We'll talk about all this in more in this week's episode of Bella In Your Business. Biggest Take Away You Don't Want To Miss Content creation for your pet business is all about planning and relevancy. While planning your content ahead is critical, we want to make sure that we are not planning content that isn't going to help grow our business. It's easy to get into the mindset of creating content akin to "Hire us for pet sitting" and "Hire us for dog walking," but these types of images are not going to create the effect that you want. It's important to get creative, be relevant to your audience, and share stories to really build that connection.   Show Highlights How to create content based off looking at your calendar [2:30] Creating content to do with promotions/launches [3:00] How to decide which social media platform to focus on [4:00] What is a brand guide and how do you create one? [5:00] What types of graphics should you consider creating? [6:00] Sick of doing your own graphics? Want us to do them for you? Space is limited. Links Easil: https://about.easil.com/#jump Wave.Video: /wave-video AgoraPulse: https://www.agorapulse.com/bella2free?fp_ref=bella77 Better Marketing With Bella: https://jumpconsulting.com/waitlist Pet Social: https://petsocial.graphics/ Get $30 off content creation for your pet business with code BV30 Let's Connect! Did you enjoy the show? We would love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review! Click this link – Bella In Your Business Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section Click on ‘Write a Review’' Are You New Here? Welcome, I am so glad you are here. If you are a dog walker, dog sitter, cat sitter, doggy daycare or kennel owner, then you found the right place. Jump Consulting is the one place on the internet to get all the resources you need for your pet care business. Can I give you some freebies to generate sales and increase revenues for your business? Grab your freebies below. Are you starting out? Been in business for less than two years? Get your startup resources here. Do you own an established pet care business and you want to take it to the next level.? Get Your builder resources here. Transcript: This is episode 186 of Bella in Your Business. Hi there, I'm Bella Vasta from Jump Consulting. You might know me from CBS, NBC, Fox, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, or maybe you've seen me speak on stage or read my book, The Four Dogs That Every Business Owner Needs. In any case, get ready because you're about to get your hashtag Bella Butt Kickin' in this next episode of Bella in Your Business. So what do you say? Let's get ready and jump. Hey there, Bella Vasta here, and today we're going to talk about six ways to plan and create your graphics for the next three months. How great would it be to just get all of your graphics done so that you don't ever have to sit there and try to figure that out? Now, I'm not necessarily talking about the engagement part or writing the copy for it or scheduling it. I'm just talking about creating the actual graphics. Because at the end of the day, we need to create graphics, right? We want to be seen on Facebook. If you're feeling overwhelmed with content creation and want to spend more time with clients and their beloved four-legged friends, planning and creating your graphics ahead of time can help. While jumping in and creating three months' worth of content may sound harrowing, it'll save you plenty of time in the end. Trust me. This practice is becoming increasingly more common in marketing and is known as batching. Batching is essentially taking time with little to no distractions to concentrate on completing batches of work in one sitting. You can actually do this with a whole lot of stuff. Of course, you could take breaks, but the key here is to complete a bunch of work ahead of time so that you don't have to consistently worry about it. You'll be able to focus more of your attention on bigger ideas. When it comes to planning and creating graphics for your pet business, a big problem for many is that it becomes a daily bug. To keep your business relevant, you want to be present across various social platforms. However, if you save this work until the last minute, like waking up and realizing you have to post something on social media, it becomes easy to simply reshare other people's content. While that's not a bad thing, you don't want to become so stressed that you're just copying work from others or become this content curator posting other people’s work all the time. For fresh and original content, it takes time to plan and to plan ahead. So let's talk about six different ways that you can do this. First, look at your calendar. When preparing graphics for the next three months, take time to look at all the upcoming dates on the calendar. Make note of the common holidays and lesser-known fun holidays—from National Walk Your Dog Month, like in January, to Pet Obesity Day on October 10th. There are plenty of days to create content around any holidays or upcoming events that have to do with dog walking or pet sitting. Consider whether people may be traveling a lot and will be looking for your services in greater demand. Number two, make note of your launches or promotions. Take a look at your upcoming launches and marketing promotions for the year. Consider creating special content around different points in the year. Perhaps it's back-to-school time and people will be looking for dog walkers and pet sitters while their children are at school—in other words, the playmate for the pets has gone away. Maybe it's summer and you know dog walking might drop, but pet sitting will spike. Create graphics that highlight these points to grab people's attention. By planning graphics ahead of time, you'll always be a step ahead of the game. Now, I want to make a note here and say this doesn't mean hire us to be your pet sitter or dog walker. What this means is talking about the benefits or maybe telling some stories of people that you've helped while they’ve been away and what that’s looked like. Paint the picture for that potential client looking through your social media because they found you via your website and are thinking about hiring you. Number three, decide on the platform. The market's saturated with various marketing design tools and websites. It's easy to get swept up designing random graphics on different platforms. One of my favorite tools is also one of my partners, Easel. It's an easy-to-use platform that allows content creators to make all sorts of fun marketing materials. Plus, you can easily store your favorite or your brand’s colors and fonts, making designing a breeze. If you enjoy making videos, I'd recommend using wave.video as well. The thing about using something like Easel is they have so many different awesome features. I know there are a couple other popular ones out there, but Easel seems to be very innovative. You can turn off things so that you can either do a lot with it or keep it really simple. There's even a service that's led by a major graphic designer and software founder that provides pet businesses with new graphics each month. Technically, you could go in there every three months and download 40 graphics for your business—not just download, but also add your logo, change your color to your colors, and then your fonts. It's pretty nifty. It's called PetSocial, and I'm hooking you up with $30 off a month if you use the code BV (like Bella Vasta) and the number 30—all one word. To find out more about this or see the types of graphics, just go to PetSocial.Graphics. The fourth one is create a brand guide. Having a brand guide or a brand Bible is essential for any business. This guide should include the lingo that your brand uses, the brand colors (like the numbers of the colors), your brand fonts, the templates of graphics, the emojis that you use, and more. A brand guide ensures that anyone who works in your company will have a great understanding of how your brand should look and sound. So maybe you're going to hire someone to help you with these graphics, but they need to have a guide to go by. They should be able to look at this guide and understand what types of graphics and copy are expected for your brand. Having cohesive messaging and style is key when marketing your unique services. It's the difference between knowing it’s Apple or Mercedes or Disney and not knowing what the brand is because the design is not consistent. Number five, the types of graphics. When planning ahead, you'll want to consider the types of graphics you're going to create. Different things you could consider: are you going to keep the graphics clean, crisp, and simplistic? Is your messaging going to be funny? Will it be educational? Do you want your graphics to convey unique tips for clients and/or users? Will you use GIFs or videos? There's so much to consider, especially with the plethora of tools available today. Do yourself a huge favor and figure out the type of graphics and how many you'll need to create of each in advance. Number six, schedule it.