How To Create Content that Shapes Culture, Part 1
By: Ashlyn Rochester, ACN Communications Specialist
The Marketing Millennials Podcast shares the knowledge of marketing’s top voices. Recently, they featured special guest Ross Simmonds. He’s the CEO of Foundation Inc Co. and Hustle & Grind Co. Foundation Inc Co. is a content marketing firm that specializes in content strategy, creation, distribution, and more. Hustle & Grind Co. is an apparel shop selling coffee mugs, hoodies, posters, and more with quotes and images to inspire you to hustle and grind.
This will be a two-part series with three nuggets of wisdom the featured guest shared when it comes to content.
Here’s what he had to say about creating content that shapes culture.
1. All great content falls into these four categories.
Good content falls into four categories: education, engaging, entertaining, or empowering. No matter who your audience is, they want content that will educate, engage, entertain, or empower them. Engaging content lures people in. Some examples are personal stories, opinion pieces, or being controversial. For entertainment, emotions like sadness, anger, and shock can be used as inspiration for content. Lastly, empowering content celebrates, showcases, and elevates other people.
2. Understanding your audience is important.
Two critical things to assess when creating content are: who is your audience, and what platform are you using? You should investigate who your audience is by spending time discovering the stories and topics that motivate them. Some examples would be in attending a community or group meeting, joining a subreddit (link out to subreddit) about the group or topic, and seeing who they follow and engage with online. Once you understand your audience, you can create more engaging content.
3. You need a creator mindset.
A creator mindset accepts that “doing hard things is what leads to the greatest breakthroughs in content”. It’s going above and beyond because you’re not comfortable with being mediocre and like everyone else. An example he mentioned was Mr. Beast, who has broken records on YouTube and TikTok for most subscribers and followers. He’s successful because he “invested in creating content that requires research to understand your audience, what moves people, and the psychology of content”. Creating extremely good content is hard.
Stay tuned for next week! We’ll continue the content conversation with tips about platforms and distributing content.