When it comes to creating content, there are a variety of aspects to take into consideration. To begin, it’s important to focus on your brand. Branding is the practice of marketing people, their careers or businesses as brands. What is your brand? What niche are you in and how do you want people to perceive your brand? Branding is the key to reliability and trustworthiness of clients. It’s also the key to getting recognized if your branding is clean and consistent. It could be a logo and a color palette that physically define your brand, but your purpose and mission can also serve as your branding.
Establish Your Brand
Once you have established your brand and what it is supposed to mean or serve as, you can begin creating content. Content that is created with branding guidelines in mind not only gives your audience the opportunity to know what to expect, but in general makes the entire content creation process run smoothly. To create valuable, creative content, it is imperative to create content with a purpose. Connecting content to your mission or purpose will make it much more valuable. Any content that you create should have a specific goal to achieve in mind. Following that, consistency is what keeps clients coming back for more. If people know what to expect, they will continue to look for it in your future content. Sticking to your branding guidelines and your mission will ease clients into trusting your brand. Inconsistent content or content without branding guidelines can appear chaotic or lackluster and does nothing to establish your brand identity. When finding purpose and remaining consistent, you should also identify what makes your brand stand out from the rest. What is your unique selling point? Your values can be used to direct the expansion of your brand. By establishing all these aspects of your brand and your content, the value of your content grows exponentially.
Be Creative
After you have established your branding and the type of content that you are putting out, it’s time to get creative. When it comes to creating content, it can get rather overwhelming. It’s important to identify your audience before you begin creating content. Content for social media could be required daily which can be strenuous on your creative side. A good way to prevent yourself from getting bogged down by the work is to set a posting calendar and designate a theme to each weekday you post. By starting your content with a specific direction in mind, you can funnel your creative energies into achieving a specific goal through each post. Making each day a different direction for your content, allows for variety which helps to keep your audience engaged. Be careful though, creative content does not mean it has to be complicated. Actually, it’s best for content to remain simple to be easy to understand and easily shareable. Use useful information in your content to add value and make it worth sharing. In keeping the content creative, utilize your personality! Use humor to make your audience laugh or create content with your heart to form a closer connection with the audience.
Share Your Opinions
A tougher aspect of content creation and branding is determining how opinionated you are willing or allowed to be. Many in the professional world are taught to stay away from opinions, but opinions are a great way to attract attention from those who agree with you and even those who don’t agree with you. If people disagree, it brings about discussion and your content will be the center of that discussion. This means more people sharing your content as it has information worth being discussed. Not only that, but by sharing what you believe in people will feel a more authentic connection to you or your brand. That being said, always keep facts and statistics in mind and at the forefront when creating content. When you are able to source information and back it up, people are more likely to trust you and rely on your content for information.
Find Inspiration
Using templates may seem like it goes against creativity, but they can be very helpful when trying to determine the layout of your content. Canva is a favorite site for content creation and even allows you to post directly to social media channels with a subscription. There are hundreds of templates to browse and choose from. Even if you don’t use a template when creating your content, it can be beneficial to browse in order to get your creativity flowing. Collaboration can also be key to creative content. Collaboration applications have risen in popularity due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Applications like Slack allow for easy communication and sharing of files in a central location rather than emailing back and forth. Asana is useful in project tracking and allows you to track tasks so you never miss another assignment. Using these applications makes virtual collaboration seamless, but it can be a little frustrating to download multiple applications and go through the trouble of learning their interfaces. Nifty combines both the chat ability of Slack and the tracking ability of Asana for a one stop project management application. There is even seamless integration with Google Drive and Zoom so you never have to leave the application when collaborating.
Once you establish your branding, mission, and the type of content you want to produce, it’s important for your content to be worth reading. Some people compromise on quality just to have a lot for the audience to read. This can drag out content and make it difficult for your audience to want to finish reading. Make sure your work is cohesive, well-worded and easy to understand. It can be beneficial to get right to the point when writing content as dragging it out just dilutes the quality of the work. Additionally, be sure your content is original and you aren’t replicating anything done by someone else. Through all these steps, your brand and content will be a reliable and trustworthy source for any client. Keep building on the momentum brought through your creative content and make it a habit. Habitually creating content will be what makes or breaks your brand.
About the Author
Kelsey Osborne – a 2020 graduate with her Bachelor of Arts in Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication. Writing for Nifty since March and traveling to Hawaii to teach sailing following her Covid-19 vaccine, she hopes to eventually take a full-time career in nonprofits.
