Welcome to Your Content Should Sell, a newsletter that only gives you practicals about how to create content for your brand.

This week, I have seen brands that I love, like Haus and Genusee, have to close down.

Building brands is not easy, so shoutout to anyone who is doing this hard work.We are all in it together!Let's keep building.

This newsletter is sponsored by Motion. They are putting on a free summit on September 14th that you won't want to miss.

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Next week we are doing a full audit of a company's content and acquisition.

We are looking at all of the ad data, organic channels, and other marketing channels to give them suggestions on how they can better create content at all parts of the funnel, not just ads.

I thought, why not give you all the questions to think about, and you can self-assess your brand and content?

We are all stuck and have some pain with something when it comes to content

If you have pain when you go to the doctor, they don't diagnose immediately.

They ask questions, take X-rays, and run tests.

Once they get enough information, they can make a diagnosis.

This newsletter aims to help you become a doctor of your content and start asking questions.

I would love to go through these questions with you, so feel free to ask for help or if you want me to take a look at any of your content. Just reply - it's free!

1. Ideal Customer and Why They Buy

People say they talk to their customers... but do they really?

Nothing after this part matters because you could make great content for the wrong audience.

1. Are you getting customer feedback and data? How are you capturing this data?2. What are the trends that you see in the data?3. Can you give three reasons why people buy your product? If so, what are they?

You should check in on this aspect every month because there can be new insights from your customers over time.

Customers and people change, so you need to be able to adapt to your customer base.

Brands have fallen because they lose touch with their customer base, so always speak to them and understand their needs to create content that aligns with them.

2. Organic Social Media Content

Social media is the first aspect of your brand and content outside your website that can help your discovery and get in front of people.

Social allows you to start to express your brand voice and positioning to people.

I believe that before you jump into paid media, you want to focus on organic to find your brand voice, so I think this part of the audit is the second important step after understanding your customer.

1. What are the top two social media platforms your customers use?2. How often are you posting on those specific channels?3. What is your most liked/watched piece of content? Why do you think that is?4. Do you have a system to post consistently? It doesn't have to be every day, just consistent.5. Are you creating content for customers who have already bought your product or just to acquire new customers?6. Does what you say on your content align with the customer data and why people buy?7. How do you show the brand's lifestyle outside product information?8. What would you say is your biggest challenge when creating content on social media?9. Of the content you have, look at the data; when do people scroll away? What could you do to improve the retention of people watching?10. Why do you think certain content isn't performing? Be honest with yourself and look at the content objectively.

Many brands lose so much money on ads because they get creative and wrong messaging.

Invest first into creating organic content to get data and feedback on what content your customers enjoy and want to see.

Once you get a good rhythm creating for organic, find ways to leverage content from one platform to another platform.

The Creative Strategy Summit

Motion is putting on a summit to help you and your team become creative strategists on September 14 for free.

Learn from amazing DTC minds like Nik Sharma, Dara Denney, Savannah Sanchez, and more.

You'll learn how to:

1. Create scroll-stopping ads

2. Scale ad spend

3. Refining influencer marketing strategies

4. Improve creative optimization AND SO MUCH MORE!

Anyone in DTC marketing needs to be at the summit. See you there!

3. Paid Media Content

Once you have nailed messaging and content creation on the organic side, you start to leverage that on paid with all of your customer insights.

I have started to use Motion to look at the brand's content data to help analyze the data.

1. What platforms are you producing ads for?2. How often are you testing ads on a weekly or bi-weekly cadence?3. What are your highest converting ads? Why do you think that is?4. Of the content you have, look at the data; when do people scroll away? What could you do to improve the retention of people watching?5. What are your lowest converting ads? Why do you think that is?6. Do you have a system in place to post consistently? It doesn't have to be every day, just consistent.7. Are you creating content for customers who have already bought your product or just to acquire new customers?8. Does what you say on your content align with the customer data and why people buy?9. What would you say is your biggest challenge in creating content for paid media?

You might have left these questions will 100+ tests that you want to do on your ads.

Focus on the psychology of the consumer and messaging tests before you spend a ton of money on content creation - yes, this is coming from a guy who sells those services.

I don't want you to pay a lot while still figuring out messaging.

The other thing is that building a strong organic channel will help you with ads.

The paid and organic channels are not separate, they are intertwined.

Use the insight of each channel to help the other channel.

4. Website / Community Content

Customers go on your website to buy, and we need to look at the experience that customers have on your site, which comes from your content.1. Do you have videos on your product pages?2. Do you just have photos of the product on a plain background or also lifestyle photos?3. Outside of the product page and homepage, do you have any other content like a founder's video or brand story video on your site?4. Are you doing long-form content for customers who have already bought?5. If not, how are you serving customers who have already bought from you? How are you engaging with them?6. How are you creating community around your brand?Product features are great, but eventually, once people know and love your product, they could care less about your Us vs. Them ads and other top-of-funnel content.

Retention is not about how many texts and emails you send.

You need to build a community for people who already like and buy your product.

Content is a great way to bring people together.

Brands are missing out on in-depth, long-form content.

5. Team Organization and Content Creation System

The thing that hangs up most brands from creating more is not content but the organization of content and the team.This is the most unsexy part of creating content, but probably so important for you as a brand as you scale.1. Do you have someone who looks at your ad data and comes up with creative tests and briefs?2. Who is in charge of creating the ad creative?3. Is the person creating ad creative doing other jobs? Do they have more capacity if you want to test more ads?4. Who is in charge of creating the content for organic content?5. Is the person creating the organic content doing other jobs?6. What are your biggest challenges when creating content as a team?7. Do you have a central location where your content library is?8. What is the state of the organization to access photos and videos from your past shoots?9. Do you have a clear organizational chart of each person's job on what needs to be created by whom?10. Do you have written SOPs on creating and posting content internally?11. Do you have a clear posting schedule and ad testing schedule?

The goal with these questions is to get you to really look at the structure of your team and agency partners to make sure everyone is on the same page.

You need to have systems in place with time deadlines if you want to create consistently and scale.

Lastly, file management can cost you HOURS of time editing.

Save your team or agency partners time by organizing your content library.

I threw many questions at you, but I think these can help you and your team dissect your content and brand to take it to the next level.

Content is in every part of your business, don't skip out on understanding your content strategy.

Like a doctor, don't diagnose right away until you have asked enough questions.

Before you launch into Q4, take some time with your team to ask these questions so you can have a strong brand and messaging that sells your products.

Again, a massive shoutout to Motion for sponsoring this newsletter over the past month.

Keep creating!

Matthew Gattozzi

In Other News

🍷 Aperitif startup Haus is trying to sell itself

👓 Warby Parker lays off 15% of its corporate workforce

🕶️ Genusee will be closing after four years in business

👫 How Lomi Does 9 Figures in Revenue by Putting Brand First with Matt Bertulli

Resources

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