If your brand is new, your content strategy is likely a monstrous clusterfuck. Maybe you are hitting your social “checkboxes:” starting a Facebook page that you are struggling to keep updated, “getting serious about the blog” that you never actually develop or, “learning how to tweet” without a plan for meaningfully doing it every day—which is what Twitter usually requires. On top of this, you might have plans for starting a YouTube stream, a podcast, and—I don’t know, fuck it—a clothing line, all under the banner of your freshly minted brand. While your friends, family, and colleagues may have you feeling encouraged, and you may have good reason to be that way, I think it is time to ask yourself a critical question: Are you trying to do everything with your brand?
If so, you should stop.
I want you to think about something: When was it in your journey as a content creator or content marketer, that you were told to throw your efforts at all of this extra shit? Because that is exactly what it is: extra. Whether this is a podcast, a YouTube series, or something more convoluted like an Instagram product line, somehow, someway, you are trying to implement it into your promotional vertical. Maybe you have plans of doing this in the future, and if that is the case, good on you. But more likely, someone, somewhere (and let’s be real, you found them on YouTube or LinkedIn), has convinced you that these are things you need to do NOW. That without them, you are leaving customers on the table, or that for want of them, you are not doing your job as a marketer, brand manager, or content producer. Even worse, maybe you have looked around at other businesses online and feel that because a company has a Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and SoundCloud that maybe you need to do the same.
Now before continuing, let’s be fair: To a certain degree, this is true. As businesses and business models become increasingly digitized and online-dependent, part of securing leads involves some degree of interaction with the social space. Moreover, it requires more standard fare items, such as a website.
These things are unavoidable about being in business in the 21st century. But let’s also be clear about something: Regardless of the degree of urgency that some LinkedIn influencer, or Gary Vaynerchuck, has put on the creation of these deliverables, nothing in marketing is a silver bullet.
While this may seem relatively obvious, what I mean by this is that regardless of what marketing techniques are espoused by experts, the efficacy of these techniques is only realized after making extended commitments to their implementation. So, you can’t just go out there and say “I want to run ads,” “I want to create a podcast,” or “I want to update the blog” without understanding that it will most likely be the result of multiple ads, multiple podcast deliverables, and multiple blog updates before you even reach some measure of success.
Adding more components, such as YouTube streams, or podcasts, won’t change that—unless those things contribute to the basis of what you do. If they do not, I would endeavor to say that adding these things doesn’t make doing business easier—it makes doing business harder.
For example: If you are the owner of a Yoga Studio that is tasked with teaching your own classes, and doing your own marketing, how does it serve your business to have your time tied up in something like—I don’t know—making a weekly YouTube series? Or getting your teachers together to record a podcast? Or making graphics for your Facebook posts? This is time that is spent not teaching.
While these practices do help the promotional functions of the business, within the context of its operational functions, they don’t. Rather, they tie your time up into activities that don’t actually serve your customers and keep you from being able to address the things that make you money—instead of merely build awareness.
To be clear, I am not making an argument against content. Rather, I am making an argument against making content that doesn’t scale. Determining scalability is a practice that is as easy as taking into consideration whether or not the content you have planned will take you too far out of your key business functions. Or, even more simply—if you do something once, could you efficiently do it again, and into infinity? If you have to put down money-making activities in order to address your promotional needs, your promotional needs need to be re-tailored to better accommodate your money-making activities—because, in an ideal world, the production of either would not be jeopardized by the existence of both.
How do we do this? To start, I think that the first thing is to focus on what it is that you do well—that should be the bread and butter of the content that you deliver. The reason why is because the things you do well are also most likely the things that you enjoy doing, and are also the things that you can do the fastest—minimizing the amount of time that you spend on creating content.
For someone like myself, that is writing. It is very easy for me to sit in front of the computer and just jot down pages of my thoughts—which is why writing accounts for most of the content that I create today. Will that be forever? Probably not. But as far as the content that I can produce now, and can attach a name to, currently that content that is written in form.
This leads me to the next step: After you have figured out what you do well, you must identify the platforms that exist where your target audience will appreciate your talents. No one group is a monolith. There are nerds that like sports, just as much as there are jocks that like to read. My point is that you shouldn’t be discouraged by how you communicate—rather, you should find the individuals within your target audience that are capable of communicating the same way as you do.
What both of these considerations will do, is not only inform the production focus of your content creation, but also the choices that you make in publishing platforms—which will keep you from signing up with useless, or outright redundant, promotional channels.
If you are someone that can communicate best with images, then your preferred platform should be Instagram. If you are someone that prefers to communicate with video, then it should be YouTube. If you are someone that prefers to communicate with short, sweet, blurbs of text, then you should be on Twitter. But don’t sign up for all three because “that’s the thing you should do” or some contrived bullshit like that—all you are doing is making more work for yourself.
I think it is easy for most to assume that when it comes to their business, demographic interest will be represented uniformly across media channels. But that’s just not how it works. Baby boomers and Gen X’ers are on Facebook. Millennials and Generation Z are on TikTok and Instagram, while YouTube has a little bit of everybody, and your blog can appeal to anybody. Furthermore, this representation can vary beyond just generational interest—representation on media channels can vary by professional interest, socioeconomic interest, and gender interest. What you want to do, thus, is find the platform that is most favorable to how you create content, and who you are trying to target.
This cannot be said without also suggesting that it is possible for there to be a misalignment in your content creation strengths and your target demographic. However, this is not an excuse to shy away from what you are good at creating. Rather, it can suggest a couple of things: first, that there is no requirement for only one property to account for your promotional mix. Second: that you can tailor your content to be better digested by people who are misaligned with your preferred medium. For instance, if you like to write, but your audience hates to read, write content that is very short in form, and heavy on supporting media such as 3rd party pictures, videos, and audio. Over time, you can increase the sophistication of your content creation—as well as branch out—as you become a master of your key channel.
To be clear, it is not that doing fewer things makes you better. It is that doing more things at the wrong time can actively make you worse. Entertaining the idea that you are not seeing promotional success because “you don’t have a podcast” or video content, or merch, is fantastical at best when in reality, all you need to do is find a few scalable things, and commit to them wholeheartedly.
And look: nobody is forcing you to listen to me. If you feel like you need a million different social media properties, sub-brands, and sub-products, you have every right to go the fuck ahead. But understand that the risk of observing this route is having your brand affiliated with myriad products, and an over-extended channel presence—all with little substance. In the end, the choice is clear: you can do a few things well, or you can do everything poorly.
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