Value Over Viral

Digital content creation is a $27 billion industry as of 2023, forecasted to bump up to a $90.4 billion industry by 2033. So, it is safe to say there is a lot of money and growth within this industry. We as consumers fuel this industry by being exposed to thousands of ads per day. As a content creator, there has to be a lot of consideration towards differentiation. But why? the answer: to provide value to the company.

Marketing is about creating value, for a client, company, consumer, community, or any end point. There are plenty of different pathways to creating value that go beyond differentiation.

As a content creator success can come from different stages of the marketing funnel. Views, Likes, comments, and clicks are great metrics to be analyzing, but these can be extremely distracting to creators. These metrics create the most immediate satisfaction from your product, as a result the chase shifts from value creation to viral creation. Looking for ways to ensure your product goes viral, creating lots of views and likes, making the perception of success. Awesome, now tons of people know about and like your product, now what? what are the views and likers doing with your content? how many conversions has the content created? do you see where these high numbers take the customer to just an awareness level of your product?

All is not lost! Viral content is good in many ways, using the high amounts of engagement to make conversions for your product can be a common exercise. Direct your follower base to your end goal, direct your attention into your intended action. This is prioritizing the clients wants and needs, this is also something that is more important to analyze/track.

My Experience

Through working at Fit Evo as a content creator and as a product manager, to creating, managing, and now being the Analytics Director of IMC here at WWU, I have a fair amount of experience with content creation. I thought it was so impressive for some of my content to go viral with views and likes. I had the mindset of the popularity of my content being the same as its success.

An example of this comes from IMC, when I was a Product Manager, the squad I was managing wanted to reach currents students in the marketing program so that more marketing students would use advising resources and also make more advising appointments. Their first video created the greatest number of views than any other video on the same platform by around 30%! very impressive but the video lacked actual resources for students to use for advising. This example highlights the fact that their product (the video) was very successful on an awareness level, but it also lacked real value to be provided to the marketing program.

Another example I have is from my job at Fit Evo, when I was fairly new to doing their marketing/content: I had started creating social media posts that were getting consistently higher views than what was compared to their previous content. I soon had a few videos that surpassed their highest engaged post by about 60%, I was very impressed. I wanted to keep going and make a third video to have even more engagement then the previous two that had recently blown up. But my boss reached out to me and asked about the relevancy of the video I was just about to post, and it hit me all at once. What was it for? Relatability? Humor? these aspects are well needed for the social media at Fit Evo but not so relevant that it's the only content that is published. I soon started to shift gears and truly think within the realm of what our content at the gym is for, what value it provides the gym owner, what value is it providing our target market (members of the gym). Previously, I was targeting anyone that would engage with the social media, cutting out the "boring stuff", when in reality that "boring stuff" was not boring at all to other people who are paying members of our gym. The content I create/oversee now all have real intent and purpose behind, all bringing value to the gym, and the gym owner. This style of marketing I have implemented at Fit Evo brings a lot more engagement from our members (the target market) creating a gym experience that is also a community experience, making for long lasting relationships and members of our fitness center.

Thank you for reading and remember to use the whole marketing funnel when creating content.