You Ask, I Answer: Unique Content Marketing?

In today's video, Jeremy asks, how do you make unique, better content for content marketing? How do you continue to improve your content? Um here's the thing. If you're doing content marketing, and you as an individual are doing content marketing, like this video, for example, you're already unique in some aspect, right? Because it's you.

Nobody else could be in my video except me and still have it be my content, right? Just simple logic. Um how do you make better content comes down to what is it that your content's supposed to do? Right? What is the purpose of the content for your audience?

Not for your business, not for your company, your brand, your organization, your marketing objectives, whatever. Put that aside. What is your content marketing supposed to do for your audience? What value does it provide them? If you don't have a clear answer to that question, it's gonna be really difficult to make better content because you don't know what good content is.

Right? Good content, we've talked in the past, has to pass the 3L test, right? Um Did you laugh when you made it? Do you love it so much that you talk to your significant other or friends or whatever uh about it unsolicited, unprompted, and they're like really tired of hearing about it? Or did you learn something when you were putting that content together?

Right? Content has to be uh educational to some degree, it has to be entertaining to some degree, and it has to be emotionally engaging. And if your content doesn't do any of those things, that's a good place to start. Right? That is a great place to start improving your content.

Ask yourself which of those three axes, engaging, uh, entertaining or educational, which are you is your content strongest in? Which is your content weakest in, and then based on that information, what should you be doing more of? And there's a couple of different perspectives on this. If you were really good at educational content, but you're not really focused on the entertainment aspect, that's okay. Um, there are still ways to create something that's educational as long as it's emotionally engaging, right?

So of those three E's, you need two out of three. You need two out of three. Educational alone isn't enough. If that were uh true, college professors would be the most followed people on YouTube, right? That's we know that's not true.

Um, just because something's educational does not mean it's entertaining or emotionally engaging. So, what of those other two things can you get down and improve upon? It doesn't mean that you have to do all kinds of crazy stuff, it just means that you've got to be able to connect with people. Part of that is understanding what it is your audience wants. And a big part of that is thinking about content as a sale, right?

Is a sale of an idea. Somebody has to make an emotional decision because that's how we buy, right? We that's how we accept new things. We make an emotional decision, and then we use all of our rational brain to justify our emotional reaction. So what emotions does your content satisfy?

What emotions does your content fulfill? Is your content reassuring? Is it help supposed to help somebody feel more secure, more safe, more insulated from harm or risk? Is your content supposed to be angering? Right?

There is nothing wrong from a strategic perspective about content that makes people angry because it inspires an emotional reaction. Every politician, regardless of philosophy or perspective, understands the value of pissing people off. Because it's how you energize a population. Give them something to fight against, give them something to fight for. Making better content is about improving those reactions in your audience.

Why? I want to be able to video during my talks my whole audience. I want to see how they react when I'm saying something. I don't care about how I react. I know how I react.

It's the audience themselves. I want to know, like during parts of my talk, are people like this? Right? Knowing that I'm not engaging them. I'm not saying things that keep their attention.

On the other hand, I'm looking for those points when people viscerally react. How carefully are you keeping track of your audience's reactions? I just sent out my newsletter for this week, and I've got a decent number of replies in my inbox from people who felt very strongly about the topic that I was presenting on this week about AI and inequality. Some weeks I send out a newsletter, nothing. No retweets, no shares, no comments, no replies.

And those are the weeks that I think content didn't land, right? Other weeks, the inbox fills up, right? Some weeks, um, it's really busy. And those are the weeks I know the content landed, right? It stuck with people, it resonated with people.

They uh consumed it, and they're like, I need to say something or do something with this content. So if you want to make better content, keep track of what you get reactions to. What do people have to say? What do people think? What do you how do people feel about the content you're making?

And if you never get any reactions, you know you've got probably two or even all three of the three E's missing from your content. If it's just not resonating with people, on the other hand, if people are like, yeah, I gotta, you know, I gotta hit reply and tell you exactly how I feel, even if they are telling you that you're wrong, you still landed, right? Even if you say something, people are like, ah, it's not that's not all how it's done at all, that's okay. Because you've engaged people, you've elicited a reaction, you've provoked their emotions in some way. Bear in mind that from an emotional perspective, um, pissing people off all the time is not a sustainable long-term strategy.

I'll just put that caution out there. It does work for a long time, but it has deleterious effects in that people associate your brand with being angry. And that's probably not again, not the best long term strategy for um for marketers. Now, if you're a politician, again, you can make a lot of hay, uh, making people angry all the time, but for marketers, probably not the best overall strategy. So uh that's some thoughts on how you make unique better content for any kind of marketing, not just content marketing, any kind of marketing at all.

Good question.