What is a content creator? Why do brands need to become a content creator, when a brand needs to make profits, right? Let’s take it step by step and see why this is important and how it can impact your business.
A content creator is somebody who creates content for an audience that can potentially engage with them or buy a product or a service.
Anybody who creates any type of content and publishes it on the web is a content creator.
Is a business on Instagram a content creator? Well, if you think about it, yes they are, but they don’t have the mentality of a content creator. And this is why most businesses have a problem on social. They go on social with a business mentality (make profits) vs go on social to find an audience and be of service.
So why is it important to become a content creator? Well, let’s have a look at some data:
- 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing (HubSpot 2020)
- 78% of companies have a team of one-to-three content specialists (SEMrush2019)
- Web traffic is among the top two most-common measurements of success for content marketing strategies (HubSpot 2020)
- 24% of marketers are planning to increase their investment in content marketing in 2020 (HubSpot 2020)
- As of April 2020 there are over 30 million podcast episode in existence (iTunes 2020)
- 87% of video marketers say that video has increased traffic to their website. (Wyzowl 2020)
If you want to see all the research and the above data, you can see it here.
The data is overwhelmingly showing us that content marketing is on the rise and people are consuming more and more content. There are arguments that people want short form content because of our attention span. I agree and disagree – I believe if a particular piece of content is good, people will consume it (audio, video etc). Just have a look at Joe Rogan podcasts – 3 hours long episodes and his podcast is one of the most downloaded podcasts in the world.
That’s where the value comes in. So here’s the problem with businesses creating content. As I said earlier their mentality is all about bringing new clients (not even entertaining and keeping their current clients) which is sad, but that’s a different topic.
Most businesses create content that is exciting for them and boring for the audience. When we create content at Way, I know that if I want to get a quick approval for a piece of content we just need to create something that is self-serving to the client. If we create content that is not a ‘sales oriented’ or ‘brand oriented’ post then it will not get approved fast and might get rejected.
Businesses that create content and try to ‘hype’ the audience don’t really succeed on social media because nobody wants to hang out with a guy that always talks about his achievements and how great he is. Social media is like a dinner party where everyone hangs out and different people want to get different things out of it. But one thing nobody wants is to get involved in are self-serving posts about a brand.
Can you imagine listening to a 30-minute podcast that is basically talking about how great their business is, how wonderful their customer service is? Nobody would listen to that.
There is social media that can be used for distribution of long-format content; blogs, podcasts, eBooks etc, and then it can be used to create emotional connection by adding value to a potential audience.
How do you add value? Well, by thinking of your brand story that talks about the change you want to make, the story talks about challenges that the industry has, the challenges that potential customers have. For example, if you are a gym, you are selling memberships, right? To sell memberships most gyms do the same thing: ‘Look how great we are’, ‘Sign up for a trial’, ‘No sign-up fee required’ so these are all logical messages which make sense on a surface level but they don’t make sense on an emotional and practical level.
So basically, what a gym is trying to sell is basically a new habit, a new lifestyle, hope for a better and healthier tomorrow.
How would you sell that? Perhaps create content (long form; podcast, short form; social) and help people create new habits. There is a fantastic book called Atomic Habits by James Clear that I read twice.I think it’s an absolute must read for anyone who wants to develop new patterns. Yet I haven’t seen any gym speaking about habits, or sharing content that can help potential clients develop a new habit. There is a huge opportunity to do that and win market share and create content.
The question becomes how can a brand succeed with content? Brands can say, “We are on social”, but it doesn’t really work. Well of course it doesn’t. When we speak about ourselves, we can’t really win an audience over, can we?
To succeed in content marketing is very easy – put your customers/audience first. Think about how you can add more value to their lives by creating content that will educate, entertain or inspire them. This is where content strategy comes on board. But before doing that you need to really understand the mentality of a content creator, understand that content is all about the audience and what we need to do is add value. The more value we add the better results we will have.
The bottom line will increase if we add more value for people.
Successful content creators understand that the creative process takes time, ideas are not confined to only one space. Marketing is all about the user experience. Which is basically what the general public opinion is of a service/product. So people value a content creator more than any other promotional media.
Why bother? Well, the cost of acquiring a new client is growing day by day. Keep on running ads, speaking about the product and be in that loop and at some point the cost will be so high that the business will not be able to afford to bring in new clients or it will be less profitable business, as it will require X10 more investment to bring the same clients as a business that already has great content.
Because ultimately an advert can’t build trust so fast, you need to go through the process of the potential client seeing your advert multiple times, going to your website, doing the research. With great content marketing the customer can get ‘hooked’ on your content and consume your content so when he is ready to buy – he doesn’t need to spend so much time as the relationship is built with content.
