When we start our business, we have a lot of tasks to do, such as building our product, acquiring customers, building our team and defining our growth strategy. However, there is one thing that many people do not consider important, and it is one of the most important: content production.
Why do you need content in your business? Because content is the main tool for your personal credibility. In the first few years as a manager, the most important thing is to sell yourself and make people believe in what you do. Content production helps people to get to know and understand why you do what you do. People buy not just because they need something, but because they believe in someone.
Content production is important not only because you can convince people that you are credible, but also because it is one of the best ways to reach your customers. Social media platforms make it easy and cheap to reach a lot of people, giving you the opportunity to get more customers. On LinkedIn, for example, you can share very good text content, which can be useful for business sales. If you’re looking to reach the masses, Insta, Facebook, TikTok or YouTube are the best platforms.
When producing content, it’s important to put your face to your company or service. This means making videos showing yourself and talking about something useful to your followers. Your first couple of videos don’t have to be too complicated, just simply talk about the topics you know. You don’t have to be the best at it, but if there’s something you know more about than the average person, it’s worth communicating about it.
A continuous collection of topics will help you find interesting content for your videos. For example, use a phone note-taking app and collect ideas whenever they come to mind. Over time, you’ll gather enough subjects to sit down in front of the camera and talk about them whenever you want.
Don’t worry about the technical or visual details, the most important thing is that your content is understandable and provides value to your audience. All the other things – like the lights, the camera and the lens – are just decoration. The point is to find topics that are interesting and useful to others.
After the first steps, it is also important to create content regularly and build your personal brand consistently. In the beginning, don’t worry about how many followers you have or how many likes you have. The goal is to develop a content production routine and, over time, your following will increase. It’s important that your content is consistent with your company’s message and values, as you’re building your personal brand while indirectly building your business.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that different platforms can produce content in different formats and with different tones. On LinkedIn, for example, you can reach your audience with more professional, longer articles and posts, while on Facebook or Instagram, shorter, lighter content can be successful.
Personal branding is a long-term investment and takes time to pay off. The key is to work on it persistently and consistently. Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your content and adjust your strategy accordingly. The feedback will tell you which content is engaging and which is not.
It is important to be persistent and patient. Producing content is not a quick and easy process, but if you’re persistent, you’ll definitely see results over time.
Your face is your product: how to build your personal brand
You’ve already started your business, you’ve got your small team, you’re building your product, you might even have your first few new customers. And everyone encourages you to start producing content, post a video, write an article. But why? If you think this has nothing to do with you, think again! Because it’s important that your company has a superhero to put a face to it.
In the first years, one of the most important things is to be able to sell and make people believe in what you are doing. Content production helps people to get to know and understand why you do what you do. You are the one who is believed that what you do will make sense in time. You are the one who, when you promise something, sometimes gets a client to move. Content is your main tool for personal credibility.
On social media platforms, you can easily and relatively cheaply reach a large number of people who can later become your customers. There are many platforms for this. On LinkedIn, for example, you can share very good text content, which can be useful for B2B business sales. If you’re looking to reach the masses, Insta, Facebook, TikTok or YouTube are the best platforms. And it all leads to video, video, video. You’ll be forced to show your face, show yourself and talk to your followers about something useful.
All you need is a phone and some thinking. If you figure out what you want to talk about, it should be useful to your clients. Get out the phone and pick up as soon as you talk about it. For your first videos, you don’t have to aim for Hollywood production. What’s important is that it’s a habit that you have to get into, that you have to start. Decide in your head, click through that bit, get into it, make videos.
What to make a video about? Many people think they can only make a video about something they are the best at in the world. This is not the case. Whatever you do, the subject is probably something you know more about than the average person. And that’s enough to talk about it. You don’t have to be the best at it, if you have someone useful to talk to, it’s worth communicating about. On the one hand, because what you communicate about is what builds your brand, it’s what people believe you know about. On the other hand, what we always forget is that we don’t have to tell the best people how our profession works. They probably won’t buy anything from us anyway. We need to show our expertise to the people who will be our prospective customers and who will probably want to buy from us because they don’t understand enough about the subject. They need someone who knows better than they do and can show it.
To start producing content, perhaps the most important thing is to have a topic. Think about it: you’re actually building a content production line, where you want to produce a lot of content at once, so that you can block it and then spin it out to your interfaces relatively efficiently. But to do this, you have to mentally shift your mind to the idea that you don’t come up with a subject when the camera is looking you in the eye, but that you have to keep collecting subjects. Make a note on your phone and start brainstorming topics you want to talk about. Once you have 50-60, choose the 5 you feel like doing and are happy to talk about. Get your camera out! By the time you’ve said and recorded each topic 3 times, it’s probably already snappy and concise enough to post. So it doesn’t take much magic.
Don’t worry about the technical or visual details! No one watches your videos because the lights are good, they will watch your videos because they find your content useful. All the frills are just bullshit around it. Focus on finding a topic that will interest someone. It’s important that the picture and sound quality are intelligible, so don’t try to shoot in the wind or on the street, because then you won’t be heard. And if you can, you can figure out how the light will be in front of you and not behind you, because then you won’t be a big black blob, but meaningfully a visible human figure on the screen. There is not much more to think about at first. Sit down, take some videos, give them to someone who will edit them (or edit them yourself) and post them on social. That’s it!
The video on which this article is based can be found in the STRT Academy Knowledge Base: 100 days startup – Content production
