How can you create high quality content regularly?
As most professionals out there, I keep hitting a wall on what content I should post. I also get clients who keep asking us “what should we post on our social media”?
Posting high quality content that is completely mine and as a consequence, my brand’s expression is just SO DAMN HARD! I have tried a mix of things and each of them without fail has fizzled out. Some are:
- Hiring an intern to create a content repository and keep creating + posting content — She used to keep looking upto me to provide her with content ideas and I was frequently at a loss. She was awesome to keep at it though with minimal help from me and my full time team. One of the content that I enjoyed the most was comics she created about our team and our life as creative professionals. (The comic below was made my Aradhita Som who was a rockstars intern - https://www.behance.net/aradhitasom)
- Randomly post what I like — I am sure all of you have gone down this path of picking up a trend or posting a rant on a random topic far removed from your core business and waiting for the river of content to keep flowing.
- Deciding content is not my thing and I will never be able to crack this piece constantly. Especially considering the amount of client work I need to do. Yeah, I can create high quality content if I am paid to do so but there is simply no motivator for me to do it for my brand. Yes, I know the power of high quality and regular content in growing my business. Yes, I have heard of many success stories. Yea, I have consumed articles after articles and videos after videos that kept giving me tips and tricks and what works on producing high quality content regularly.
However nothing really worked and I now know why.
I did not have a stand that I was taking as a brand.
Even though I am a 2 member brand, I had no place to stand that I could call my own. I wasn’t worried about others doing it too as long as it deeply appealed to me. Most of my earlier attempts at content was usually being impressed by something or wanting to be like something or wishing I could be that thing or waiting to be unique.
It took a lot of soul searching and asking myself tough questions that has finally brought me to a place that I can say with some certainty is my own.
I realised that I am a stand for brands communicating authentically and brands inspiring each of its stakeholders.
Now this is not something that I created out of thin air or had to make up. It was something that I realised by observing myself. I realised that most of what I speak and think around this topic is about how affected I am by brands and marketing completely being about manipulating and exploiting our cognitive biases. Everytime I came across this (which was many times in a day), I used to flinch and even though I could not always pinpoint the issue, I knww that I did not approve of what was happening.
I have absolutely no idea how successful or not I will become but I am secure in the thought that my design practice is my authentic expression.
And now the tons of strategic advice on creating content is starting to make perfect sense and I am starting to become a tap from which content that is high quality and most importantly, authentic to me is starting to flow.
So how can you identify what your brand can stand for?
- Start observing what your brand/your team/you yourself are naturally aligning with.
- Start observing what your brand/your team/you yourself do not align with. It can be something that is a widely accepted practice and yet you feel uncomfortable aligning with it.
- You are willing to stand for your voice. It will need courage and vulnerability on your part to take a stand and you are willing to go the distance to have your brand stand for this voice.
If you are struggling with identifying your and your brand’s voice, drop me an email on [email protected] with the subject line for this post (or DM me here) and I will send you a set of questions that can help you start the process of identifying your brand’s voice.