Painlessly Create Great Content For Your Brand, Every Week
Painlessly Create Great Content For Your Brand, Every Week
Step 1: Look at what your competitors are doing and do the complete opposite.
Jakob Owens
Creating content for your brand blows if you don’t have a recipe to bake good content every week.
It is actually the most burdensome task to pull content out of your brain when you don’t have excited inspiration behind it — the struggle of getting something out in writing, and then feeling like you didn’t put your best face out there is a double whammy of regret that’s not pleasant to sit with.
On top of this, creating content is competitive now — you need to craft content that grabs people’s attention in a way that feels authentic. You basically have to be the most interesting person in the room to your audience. This is hard to do in real life and especially difficult to do online.
If you feel like it’s a struggle to create consistent social media content, riveting blog posts, or open-worthy emails, and you’re dry of inspiration or feeling like you’re falling flat, here’s my guide to creating good, consistent content.
Look at what your competitors are doing on repeat, and then drop it.
I’m generally of the camp that you should ignore everything that your competitors are doing on social media, email, blogging, etc. except when you’re checking in to see what your audience is seeing when they’re window shopping.
Doing recon on how your competitors are distributing content to your audience is necessary — do some inventory on patterns you see amongst competitors, things that they’re doing that are effective and straight-up boring.
Take this information and have it serve as guardrails and direction on what you should and shouldn’t be doing. Rather than copycatting what your competitors are doing right now, I actually want you to take the information and drop it out of your brain, classifying it as a do-not-enter-no-man’s-land.
Here’s why — when you’re window shopping and eye skimming a bunch of different stores at once, the thing that stops you and provokes you to stare and study is the garment that’s styled and looks different from what everyone else is putting out there.
It’s the pattern-interrupt garment.
It stops the strolling and literally causes someone to stop in their tracks to engage.
You can’t accomplish a pattern-interrupt if you’re doing, saying, and styling the way all of your competitors are. Now that you understand what you shouldn’t be doing, here’s how to pick out what you should be doing.
Pick your muse and stay loyal only to her.
Rather than crafting your content creation strategy from how you envision the end content to be, or what your competitors are doing with their content, you need to start from scratch and create content without any expectations on what the final product will look like.
Drop all your expectations, and start with just the bones of who your brand is and who its customers are.
You need to de-content your brain of what you’ve seen and create content solely for your ideal customer. We all have a strong idea of what business content looks like, but if we adhere to these guidelines, we end up creating content that’s stuffy, sounds robotic, and dehumanizes the voice.
Creating content that’s as human as possible and breaks down the corporate wall between a customer and a brand is what works today. How do you do this though? Creating content about your products and services is easy, but filling the dead air with other interesting content is challenging.
To make content human, you need to create content as if your brand is a living person with their own feelings, interests, and personality.
When creating content in this way, you need to have a muse that you constantly refer to and loyally create your content for.
Think of a person in your life or an influencer or celebrity who closely embodies your brand if it were manifested as a person. How does this person spend the majority of their time outside of interacting with your product or service? What core interests do they have outside of their interest for your products or services?
For the sake of this exercise, let’s say that your brand sells premium, stylish dog coats and your customer loves the quality you deliver in your garments.
Outside of their love for stylish, high-quality dog coats, let’s say that this customer also loves the outdoors, buying high-quality clothing for themselves, and the show The Bachelor.
How can you use these clues to show your customer that you relate to them through your content? To show that you’re a business owner with similar interests who created a dog jacket just for someone like them?
This is why you see so many brands creating culture-relevant memes and post content that’s not related to their products. They are looking to forge a connection with their audience by showing them that they are likeminded, and made a product or service for someone just like them.
As consumers, we crave the intimate experience of being sold a product or service that’s made just for someone like us. We love the attention of feeling seen.
The brands that get this and execute their content with this in mind create content that soars beautifully with its audience.
Identify content buckets, create an assembly line.
Now that you’ve identified what core interests your customer has, you should create 4–6 content buckets that your content is going to revolve around.
Using the dog brand example above, you can identify these content buckets for the dog brand as:
Our products
Outdoors / hiking
Owner fashion
TV shows & relevant pop culture memes
Dog memes
Under these identified buckets, you should create bridges to your brand so that you don’t have outdoor hiking content floating on your Instagram out of nowhere. If you post outdoor content under that bucket, it should probably have a dog in it, preferably a dog wearing your premium dog jackets.
If you post fashion content that the owner would like, these posts should bridge to your dog jackets. Maybe you sell neon yellow dog jackets and you found a neon yellow human jacket that would look cute and match well with your dog jackets to complete a dog-owner jacket look — a bit of humor and cuteness.
This will be a challenge for some of you, but the more time you spend on creative and personality-driven bridges between these content buckets and what your customers care to see from your brand, the more potent your content will be.
Once you’ve arrived on these buckets, create an assembly line or a formula of sorts to repeat this formula throughout the month. Cycling through these buckets will provide diversity and help crystallize a voice and personality for your brand that’s worth following.
Get into the flow of this over a couple of months and it’ll become progressively easier for your brand to create engaging and personality-driven content that your customers want to see.
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