Author: Franz Malten Buemann

2021 has a special significance for email – it’s been 50 years since email began! Who would have thought that it would revolutionize the world and business, as it has? In honor of this momentous birthday, let’s learn how to strategically use email to take your business to the next level. But first, some fun…
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There’s no denying that content creation is time-consuming. You have to think of what to post, create a graphic, write a caption, choose hashtags, post the content, and engage with your audience in the comments—and then do it all again, and again, and again.
While the challenges of social media content creation may feel daunting, showing up consistently has big benefits for your business. By posting valuable content consistently, you can:

Grow your audience
Increase brand awareness
Build authority in your industry
Improve engagement

If you are looking to achieve any of the benefits listed above, it is worth figuring out a sustainable strategy for saving time planning and creating social media content. The key to achieving this is twofold—planning in advance and batch working content creation.
@stilclassicsMultitasking—A Cautionary Tale
Let’s take a moment to talk about something we all do—multitasking. Multitasking often feels productive because you are doing “all the things”, but in reality, multitasking is one of the least productive things you can do.
It has been estimated that only 2% of the population is actually proficient at multitasking. When you switch from task to task, it actually takes 50% longer to accomplish a task. (John Medina, Brain Rules).
“Only 2% of the population is actually proficient at multitasking.”
So what are the 98% of us that are not proficient multitaskers supposed to do? The answer—when it comes to social media content creation—is creating a system and batch working. Below is a process that you can repeat each month to save time planning and creating your social media content.
Content Planning Process
Each month, set aside time to map out your social media content for the following month. By outlining the content topics you want to cover for the entire month, you can look at your content from a higher level and be more strategic about your content plan. Plan on spending 1-2 hours each month mapping out your content for the following month.
Plan on spending 1-2 hours each month mapping out your content
Things to include in your content plan:

Number of posts. How often do you post (or want to post) each week? Keep in mind that quality and consistency are more important than the number of posts. Stick to a schedule and frequency you can sustain long-term.

Goals. What are your overall business goals for the month? How can your content support those goals?

Any important dates. Do you have a new product or service launching, or an event? Plug those into your plan first, so you can fill in supporting content around them.

Social media holidays you want to “celebrate”. Are there relevant social media holidays you want to celebrate on your social platforms? This list has a good roundup of these types of holidays, or you can always research those that are specific to your industry.

With this content roadmap, you can confidently go into the month knowing what content needs to be created each week (more on that later).
What Types of Social Media Content Should You Create?
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to social media content is knowing what to post. When creating content for social media, it is important to share a variety of types of content. Your content should educate, entertain, or sell.
Below are a few examples of businesses balancing content that educates, entertains, and sells.
Bulletproof (@bulletproof)
Bulletproof balances entertainment, education, and sales very well in their content. They highlight their products, share recipes and answer FAQS, and create funny, relatable GIFs.
Screenshot of Bulletproof’s Instagram profile.Shopify (@shopify)
Shopify shares inspiring personal stories of their customers, encourages conversation and engagement by asking questions, and sharing video content with “how” and “why” motivating life hacks.
Screenshot of Shopify’s Instagram profile.Flodesk (@flodesk)
Flodsesk highlights new features, shares tips and best practices for email marketing, and encourages engagement from their audience by asking “this or that” and “would you rather?” questions.
Screenshot of Flodesk’s Instagram profile.Another advantage of planning your content for the entire month is that you can better distribute and plan the types of content you will be sharing. Rather than scrambling to come up with something to post and potentially posting too many sales-focused posts or too many funny memes, planning in advance allows you to be more intentional and strategic with what you post. That ensures you are hitting all the marks building the know, like, and trust factor with your audience, serving them, and ultimately converting them.
Let’s say you want to share four posts per week. To balance your content types, you could share two educational posts, one sales-focused post, and one entertaining post each week. As you plan your month of content, you can start to plug in your content ideas according to that cadence and flow.
Bonus tip: This step of the process does not need to be high-tech. Simply use a monthly calendar (you can print one at Print-a-Calendar.com if you don’t have one) and grab some sticky notes and a pen and start jotting down your content topics. This process allows you to move things around as needed to better balance and distribute your content. Alternatively, you can plan in digital form on a Google calendar or in software like Asana, Trello, or Cickup. Choose the tool that works best for you so that you are more likely to use it.
When planning content, it is important to remember that content doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Really anything can be content if it is valuable to your ideal audience. Share your knowledge, take your audience behind the scenes, introduce your team, share customer testimonials or reviews, answer frequently asked questions. Know that you have insight that your audience craves—they told you that when they chose to follow you.
Streamline Content Creation With Batchworking
Let’s circle back to batch working and how to apply the tactic to content planning.
What Is Batch working?
Batch working is a highly focused, topic-specific form of working. When batch working, you divide your work into different hours/days and focus on only one thing at a time. Batch working can be applied to all areas of your life and work, but here we will focus on how to utilize it for content creation.
The idea is that by focusing on one task at a time, you can get into a flow state which is when your productivity and creativity truly flourish. The end result is better quality content in less time. A win-win!
Step 1: Plan a Month of Content
As outlined above, the first step in planning and creating social media content is to map out the entire month on content.
Assuming you have your monthly content plan and roadmap ready to go, each week you should follow the steps below to streamline the content creation piece of the puzzle.
Photo by @stilclassics.Step 2: Create All Visual Content
With your content roadmap, decide what visuals need to be created for the week. Write a list of everything you need from stock photos, custom graphics, videos, Reels, cover images, etc.
Once you have the list, it’s time to start creating. For custom branded graphics, you can use a tool like Canva. Create (or purchase) a library of templates you can easily customize with different content each week. This keeps your branding consistent and also saves you time as opposed to starting designs from scratch each week.
Photo by Canva.Step 3: Write All Captions
Captions do not have to take a long time to create. By batching captions and following a caption formula, you can quickly write captions that convert your audience. A good caption should include:

Hook: Grab their attention right off the bat. Think of the first 7-14 words of your caption like an email subject line. You have to inspire your audience to click “read more”.

Value: Deliver on what you promised in your hook and share content that educates, entertains, or sells.

Call to Action: Tell your audience what you want them to do next (i.e. share, like, comment, click, buy, sign up, tag, etc.). Keep your calls to action simple and fun to increase the likelihood that your audience will follow through.

Photo: Luke Southern via Unsplash
Step 4: Schedule Posts
Now that you have your visuals and captions, it’s time to schedule your posts according to your content calendar. Using Buffer’s Publishing tool, go to Settings and set your posting schedule.
Then navigate to your queue, drag and drop images and copy/paste captions and click “Schedule Post” or “Add to Queue”. Depending on the type of post, your post will either automatically publish at the scheduled time, or you will receive a push notification at the scheduled time to post yourself.
Step 5: Add Hashtags (if posting to Instagram)
If you are posting to Instagram, when you schedule your post, you also have the option to add up to 30 hashtags to the first comment of your post. Buffer’s hashtag manager allows you to save hashtag groups right in the platform. This makes it easy to choose the right hashtag group(s) to add to your post. When used thoughtfully and strategically, hashtags are a great way to extend the reach of your content.

Enjoy The Benefits of Planning & Scheduling Your Content in Advance
Imagine not having to constantly be wondering, “What should I post?”. As you get into the habit of planning and scheduling content in advance, you will start to see your efforts pay off. Not only will your content strategy benefit you, but you will also save yourself time and reduce stress around social media content. Instead of “posting just to post”, adopting a content batching routine allows you to create high-quality content when you are in your “content zone” and schedule it according to your social media strategy.
When you plan content in advance, your content can better support your overall business goals. If you have a product or service that you want to promote, an event or a company milestone, planning in advance lets you work backward to create strategic social media content that supports those goals.
Finally, by freeing up time and energy in the content creation process, you allow yourself to spend more time in other areas of your business. That extra time can be spent building connections and relationships with your social media community, or in other areas of your business like sales, admin tasks, networking or growing your team, or even on self-care. Think about what you would spend those extra hours on each month, and use that as motivation for sticking with your new content process.
Social media is a powerful tool for businesses. By planning in advance, you can leverage social media strategically and thoughtfully.

Big Idea or Enduring Question: Provide a wizard that allows your Inside Sales Team, Telemarketers to add Lead to multiple Campaigns. 6 years ago I wrote an article (Add Record to Multiple Chatter Groups – Parsing Multi-Select Picklist fields) to parse Multi-Select Picklist or Checkbox Group in Salesforce Flow. Not
The post Getting Started with Salesforce Flow – Part 67 (Hurray! Parsing a Multi-Select Picklist is Trouble No More! Phew!) appeared first on Automation Champion.

Educator and computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
If you work for a growing company, be it a startup or scale-up, you’ll know that attempting to “invent” the future isn’t a matter of waiting around for flashes of inspiration and eureka moments — rather, it requires proactive planning, excellent execution, and awesome alignment. You’ll also know that these ingredients aren’t easy to come by. Not by a long shot.

That’s why I swear by a simple, unique framework to help me and my team at HubSpot prepare for the future. It’s called ‘rhythm of the business,’ and it involves visually mapping out the key events, milestones, and activities scheduled across the business year and ensuring that every team is intimately familiar with the plan — or rhythm — for the months ahead.
As a member of HubSpot’s revenue operations team, understanding the ‘rhythm of the business’ is critical for our success. Our team’s north-star goal is to remove friction for our customer-facing teams and help them to pass that friction-free experience on to customers.
The RevOps model sets us up for success because it breaks down silos between operations professionals, unifies them as a central team, and allows them to work collaboratively on the systems and processes that power a business.
As a result, duplicative work gets weeded out, repeatable tasks get automated, and time is spent proactively improving the customer experience, not frantically reacting to glitches in the system.
As the RevOps model aligns teams around the customer, the ‘rhythm of the business’ framework aligns the entire company around key events in the business year — those moments where outsized impact is possible and execution is everything.
Together, RevOps and ‘rhythm of the business’ are greater than the sum of their parts; a combination of mindset and method that enables growing continually to delight customers, even as their internal operating model becomes more complex.
How I Became a ‘Rhythm of the Business’ Believer
It was during my time working for Amazon that I first embraced ‘rhythm of the business.’ I picked up the habit of keeping a record of important milestones throughout the year, noting on my calendar the “fire drills” that occurred during the year and color-coded them.
Annual kick-offs were highlighted in blue, big customer events were orange. I used a printed wall calendar, which I know is “old school,” but it allowed me to visualize the entire year in a nanosecond.
Later in my time at Amazon, when I was in charge of planning, strategy, and enablement, I looked at the previous year’s calendar and noticed that some events had gone well for my team while others should have been given more preparation time. In short, I realized that we needed to plan better for the next 12 months.
So, when the time came to map out our calendar for the year ahead, I was able to take the learnings from the past 12 months and provide some informed structure to what otherwise would have been, in essence, an act of guesswork.
By structuring my team’s year in this way, not only were we able to kick off earlier than most teams, we gained the time needed to develop and refine our hypotheses, test them, and lay out a defensible data-driven strategy for the future.
This in turn enabled us to pursue better investments, see greater returns on those investments, and then be in a position to make greater investments going forward. The process took the form of a flywheel, feeding off its own momentum.
When I joined HubSpot in 2018, I brought the ‘rhythm of the business’ approach with me. Although the company had been growing well, it was about to hit a new phase of scale and we had the opportunity to improve our operating model by taking a step back from the whiteboard and considering the ebb and flow of the year.
This enabled us to kick off planning at the right time and be prepared for major milestones throughout the course of the year.
3 Ways ‘Rhythm of the Business’ Helps HubSpot Scale Better
At HubSpot, we have an annual planning cycle, and we recently observed that there were some areas of misalignment between teams. That was causing internal friction, and where there’s internal friction, it’s never too long before that friction seeps into the customer experience.
For example, at times our engineering team and product team were at advanced stages of their annual planning before other teams had fully defined what they needed from them.
At best, this type of disconnect can lead to a lot of lost time in meetings trying to re-assess plans, and at worst it can lead to ineffective, disjointed strategic execution — a thought that would keep most operations professionals I know up at night.
We turned to the ‘rhythm of the business’ model to root out this misalignment and implemented it with three straightforward steps that are easy for growing companies of any size to replicate.
1. Map the milestones.
The first thing my team at HubSpot did when adopting the ‘rhythm of the business’ was to note on our physical calendar when other teams were doing their annual planning and when their key milestones were due to occur.
We worked backward from those dates to set deadlines for the deliverables we owned for other teams’ key milestones, and once finalized, we distributed the calendar digitally across the company.
That allowed us to align our activities and priorities with those of other teams, giving us a tightly knit strategy for the year ahead.
2. Look long-term.
As important as it is to have the rhythm of the forthcoming year mapped out, it’s just as important to have a long-term plan in place.
At HubSpot, we recently mapped out a three-to-five-year plan, which is critically helpful from a systems perspective — it enables us to build a business strategy that is consistent, coherent, and clear. It also gives us the opportunity to ensure we’re making investments in the right systems at the right times.
Without this foresight, each team would likely pursue its own agenda and strategy, leading to different departments pointing in different directions, fractured investments, and potentially a clunky, cobbled-together tech stack — something that’s deeply detrimental to the customer experience.
3. Be a theme player.
With the key milestones for the year mapped out, it’s helpful to group them together under certain themes or seasons. This makes it easier for teams to organize their work mentally and remain focused on the overarching business purpose of their activities at any time of the year.
Here’s an example of how we at HubSpot group milestones by theme:
Q1: Kickoff Season
We kick the year off, set targets, and make sure that people have a clear understanding of their goals and feel motivated by them.
Q2: Think-big Season
We step back from the business and explore big opportunities and plan long-term. We look at what’s working well, we think about the future that’s not yet illuminated, and we assess the external factors that could impact our business.
It’s one of my favorite seasons because we consider the trends that might emerge three to five years from now. And that thinking helps inform the company in Q3.
Q3: Compass Season
We plan for the next year and identify the big plays we want to make, as well as the opportunities we will omit.
These choices are made with the learnings from Q2’s “think-big” season fresh in our minds, helping us to make decisions in the short term that will set us up for success in the long term.
Q4: Planning Season
You wrap up the year, finalizing the subsequent years’ targets, goals, investments, and divestments…and take some time to recharge!
Alignment Over Strategy
The ‘rhythm of the business’ framework has allowed the revenue operations team at HubSpot ensure that all teams are aligned on not only our priorities for the year ahead but also our vision of the future.
This in turn allows us to effectively create processes, construct systems, and organize data for our customer-facing teams, setting them up to successfully deliver a friction-free experience to our customers.
As our Chief Customer Officer Yamini Rangan often says, “Alignment eats strategy for breakfast.” This has become a mantra for us RevOps professionals at HubSpot as we ride the rhythm of the year.
After all, a strategy is only as good as its execution, and execution is entirely dependent on alignment, particularly at a scaling company.
To get started with “rhythm of the business” in your organization, start by looking back through your calendar — whether print, digital or memory-based — and mark down when key milestones occurred over the course of the previous year.
Then earmark when you began planning for each milestone and assess whether your team’s preparation was adequate or if it would benefit from more time, information, or support next year.
Once you’ve constructed this simple plan, you’ll be able to give your team a clear sense of the rhythm of your business for the next year. And in doing so, you’ll not only be able to prepare for the future, you’ll be able to invent it.
Final Thoughts
If you’d like to look into visualizing the future with the “rhythm of business” model, explore whether your company has rhythm or how to create a rhythm of business model. I also recommend a book we use at HubSpot, “Playing to Win,” which helped us ensure that we were all using similar nomenclature and frameworks.
Ultimately, the specific nomenclature or framework doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone is on the same page and uses it – this speeds up communication, decision-making, and results.