The hard truth about content creation is that it’s not a very long-term game. There will always be something new or someone new who will come and take over. Thus, finding out what you’ve earned through your content creation process and how you can effectively utilize it in your next endeavour is absolutely crucial.
As a content creator, your most powerful tool is your loyal audience that you build over the years. Through this audience, you can build a community – those that will follow you and stick with you for years together no matter what. With a strong community comes strong distribution. Any business has to focus a lot of its manpower, money and time towards creating a good distribution network. Content creators have the privilege of already having a very large and very effective distribution. The audience that will listen to what you have to offer.
Nikhil Kamath, co-founder of Zerodha recently hosted a group of successful content creators on his podcast – WTF. The panel included Tanmay Bhat, Nuseir Yassin, Ranveer Allahbadia and Prajakta Koli. One of the topics they were discussing was the ideal way to build distribution. Is it through business, though brand deals or through community?
Tanmay Bhat, renowned comic and ad maker said a rather interesting thing. “If I was hiring for marketing and there’s a kid who has grown an Instagram page from 0 to 10k followers, that kid is a killer. Most CMO’s would not know where to spend money to make this happen.”
Well, to give some context, Nuseir Yassin of Nas Daily was speaking about building business around your community. He set up Nas Travels, where they take groups of people to visit countries around the world. Cancel culture being a big thing among influencers, Yassin shared that if he were cancelled by a brand in the US for something he said, it wouldn’t affect a person buying the product in Columbia. Similarly, Bhat too shared that he is working on building businesses to leverage the distribution that he has.
For influencers, building businesses that leverage their distribution is a very smart move and is highly recommended. Many non-entertainment creators usually already have this model built-in in their content creation plan. For example, Sharan Hegde has already thought of this with One Percent Club. For Bhat, writing content is something he has always loved doing. Hence, writing ads and marketing came very naturally to him.
Coming back to Bhat’s statement, he added that what people who are in marketing jobs are doing is exercising their judgement on what’s good and what isn’t. They’re spending dollars on making a decision. So, how do you know what’s good or not if you haven’t done it 20 times over and figured it out? Thus, those who make content today and have had the experience for around 10 years, there is a very good marking job at the end of it.
To take away, there are multiple pathways that are created through content creation. You can build influence, build your distribution and use it to start a business. That could be anything – fashion, restaurants, SaaS, etc and use that distribution to sell.
On the other hand, you can build your distribution and then get hired by a brand. In this case, as mentioned earlier, you learn multiple skills and are able to perfect those skills by performing them multiple times and understanding what works and what doesn’t. This will give you a better edge in the hiring process.