Content Creation 101: How To Create Content People Will Love (Part 1)

Content is all around us. There is no place you can go where you will not find one form of content or another. But, just like how in the dating world “you are not for everyone”, the content you create isn’t going to be palatable to everyone.

There are as many different ways as there are reasons that you can go about creating content and in the article, I will highlight a few reasons on how to create compelling content.

1: Decide Who You Are Creating For & Why

This is a make-or-break question. Traditional marketing taught us just to create advertising content we assumed people would love, shoot it out there and expect results. For the most part, this approach was hit or miss because you did not have a lot of control and data to determine who your audience was.

With the advent of digital marketing, you are able to research audience personas that will guide you in creating the right content.

In essence, what I am saying is that you want to know who you are creating content for and why. You want to understand what your audience loves to consume so that you are creating content they will actually consume!

You dig?

2: Where Will You Create The Content

Imagine setting up a stage in the middle of nowhere, singing and then hoping that you’ll magically attract a crowd! That won’t work clearly.

When you are creating content, you want to do some research on where people are and create content in the places in which you have found them. This will tie to the first question you asked up there. Once you know who you are creating content for, you can then determine where that content can be shown.

If your audience is younger, you are probably looking at social media platforms like TikTok. If there are more on the millennial side then perhaps your focus should be on Instagram. Maybe you love creating more professional and long-form videos, then YouTube could be the answer.

The who will determine the where.

There are many research tools you can use to determine this and companies like Hootsuite always produce research on where different audiences are online.

3: What Type of Content Will You Create

The who and where will then lead you to the what…

Each audience responds to different types of content. Think of the very fast-paced and trending content on TikTok. Consider the more lifestyle-centred content on Instagram. What about the audiences represented here?

Again, you want to lean into research for this. Hubspot is another company that produces key research on this kind of thing on visual content strategy and you will be amazed at what a Google search can do for you.

Each platform has content formats that do better than the others. Stories and Reels do well on Instagram for example. High-quality, problem-solving videos do well on YouTube. Fun and trending content seem to be the order of the day on TikTok.

Look at things like media types. Should you create a video and should you use vertical aspect ratios like 9:16? Should your content be short or long? Should it have sound? Doing research will help you come up with a solid content strategy.

Once you have ironed out these issues, you can then move on to the actual content creation which will require a creative strategy. Here you are asking questions about the creative tools you will use, editing style, brand voice for the captions and other relevant considerations.

We will cover this in the second instalment of this article. For now, consider what you’ve read so far.