Batch preparation
Charlotte Booth • 1 November 2022
It's not just for food

Many of us are familiar with batch cooking at the weekend, where you have a week's worth of food all prepared and boxed up in portion sizes ready to heat. I am a big fan of this, as I can rarely be bothered to cook of an evening, but I get to eat fresh food every day, thanks to my Saturday morning batch preparation.
But batch preparation is not just for food. It's for anything that you need to do every day, which can be prepared in advance.
Like blog posts. Or social media posts. Or newsletters.
As a copywriter, I found that my own content (blogs, social media posts) could often get missed if I was busy, until I decided to batch prepare things. When I'm quiet or have a spare hour I sit down and prepare content in advance. At the moment, my content is completed for the next 12 weeks.
Whilst this sounds easy, it does take some planning in order to maximise use of time. For social media posts, for example you need to know how often you want to post every week, and then decide on a theme for each day. For example:
Monday - Product post
Tuesday - Top Tips
Wednesday - Testimonials
Thursday - Industry news
Friday - Sales
Then you need to have a list of ideas for 12 weeks of Monday posts (12 posts), and put time by to create these. Repeat for the other days of the week. Depending on how complex your graphics are, this can be done in a couple of hours, with an extra 30 minutes to upload to a scheduler. This means that 12 months of daily posts could take 15 hours to write and upload.
It's a lot of time, but it is then done for the next three months, and you only have to worry about interacting with other's posts and by writing off-the-cuff posts as you feel inspired.
But why not outsource that 15 hours of work to a copywriter like myself? You let me know the themes for each day, and ideas, quotes, products or images you would like to include and I will write them for you and upload them to your scheduler. What could you do with 15 extra hours?
To find out more about how I can help you batch prepare your social media posts or blogs drop me an email
or book a zoom chat.

There is nothing more amusing than checking out mediaeval artistic renditions of lions and other heraldic creatures. These beasts, grimacing and gurning are a strange juxtaposition of human, animal and demon and as far from the cute image of Alex from the Madagascar franchise or in fact a real lion as you could possibly get. There are three main reasons mediaeval lions are so ‘bad’ and un-representational; The artists were following a very tight brief. Some of the artists may never have seen a lion, and were following the descriptions they were given. These lions were representing heraldic principals of bravery, nobility and authority; all very human characteristics. When viewed through this lens it becomes more understandable why they look the way they do, but they are still ‘not right’ and not a great tool for learning about lions. Generative AI is very similar to an uninformed but talented mediaeval artist. There is a element of intelligence but at the end of the day it is following a brief, with no actual ‘knowledge’ of the thing it is producing. As an example, if you prompt your generative AI (ChatGPT and the like) to produce a blog for your new product or service, aimed at your ideal customer avatar you will in all likelihood get a mediaeval lion out the other end. Sort of recognisable, and sort of not. This is because AI doesn’t know what a customer is (ideal or otherwise), has no idea what your product or service is and does, and has no true understanding of how this service or product will serve your ideal customer and their needs. Of course, AI is pulling all the information available from the internet to help with its answer but there is no understanding there. There is no determining fact from falsehoods or even which websites are trustworthy and which are not. So, it skims the internet and puts together content which suits the brief as it understands it. This is then when the actual work should start as this content shouldn’t be used in the raw. It should be edited and tweaked by a human who DOES understand the brief, has been a customer (ideal or otherwise) and can imagine what your ideal customer will feel when using your product or services. We are in a world now, where we have generative AI promoting products and services to humans, when it has no concept of what a human is and how it thinks, meaning the marketing department are in fact more important than ever for ensuring content and copy is aimed at humans and human emotions. You could argue that the world would be a more entertaining place if there were more mediaeval lions in it, but it wouldn’t be a great environment for learning, or for basing purchasing decisions on. If you want to maintain the human element in your content, then I would love to help . Explain the brief, your CTA and your ideal client and I will know what I need to ask to get a clear idea before writing. Then you can rest assured your content was written by a human for a human and we can leave the mediaeval lions to the museums.