5 content formats every brand should study

Welcome to Content Department.

This newsletter is designed to give you a marketing edge.

Each week, I break down top 1% content and share the most important marketing learnings/trends that will help grow your business faster.

OUTLIER CONTENT

How to find outlier content formats that crush consistently

Every business wants to grow faster.

The best way to accelerate growth is to consistently producing winning content.

We all know this, but here’s the problem…

Most brands are flying blind when it comes to figuring out which types of content to make.

The common approach to content creation is hiring someone creative and hoping they can brainstorm unique styles consistently. This puts a lot of pressure on the creator and is hard to execute in practice.

The good news is…there is a much easier (and more predictable) way.

I call it the “Outlier Strategy.”

For all of my brand clients, this is the first thing I recommend we solve.

Here’s the playbook:

1. Confirm ICP

2. Define home-field platforms

3. Select category winners

4. Identify outliers

5. Remix

Let’s break down each step…

1. Confirm ICP

Your ICP is your Ideal Customer Profile.

You should know your customer archetype like the back of your hand.

Who are they? How old are they? Where do they spend time? What do they like/dislike? What psychological triggers drive them to take action? Etc.

This sounds like an obvious first step, but you’d be surprised how many brands have not spent time defining what this persona looks like.

A simple exercise is to imagine a single person that fits your desired customer criteria…I call this an audience of one.

If there was one person sitting across from you that embodied everything about your product, process, customer service, messaging, targeting, etc….who would they be?

Ideally you can literally find this person online and reference them as you build out your content strategy.

2. Define “home-field” platforms

The reason it’s so critical to have clarity around your ICP is because you need to figure out where they spend time online.

There are different groups that live on Instagram vs Tiktok vs LinkedIn vs X vs Threads vs YouTube vs Snapchat vs Reddit vs Facebook vs Substack vs Twitch and so on.

Where your ICP spends time will largely determine your content strategy (formats, topics, styles, inspiration).

I’m not going to spend time diving into the nuances of each platform and how they differ in this post, but if you’re unsure which is best for you and your brand, shoot me a reply with some context and I can try to help.

For the rest of this example, let’s assume your core demographic spends most of their time on Instagram.

3. Select Category Winners

Based on your home-field platforms, you need to curate a list of existing content channels, creators, brands, and influencers that are dominating with their own content.

Think of this like a series of concentric rings.

At the center, you want as many people as possible that live on your desired home-field platforms and currently serve your target demographic. These are likely competitors or desirable influencer partners.

A bit wider, you want a sizeable amount of people that live on your desired home-field platform but serve an audience profile adjacent to yours. For example, if you are building a financial product that helps millennials with financial planning and budgeting, maybe these people are financial influencers/brands that don’t target Millennials or focus on other financial categories (e.g., taxes, insurance, real estate, etc.).

Furthest out, you want a few people that live on your desired home-field platform but serve an audience completely separate from you (e.g., if you’re doing Millennial Finance, these people make sports content, etc.).

This mixture will help give you directly applicable ideas as well as outside the box inspiration…this is the most powerful combination.

As you find these people, make a list of their name and account handles so that you can easily access them.

4. Identify Outliers

This is the most important step.

On a daily basis, have someone on your team check all of the content streams from each of these identified category leaders.

You can look at new content as well as their historical archive (would recommend going back as far as 3-6 months).

You’re looking for outlier performing content.

How do you define outliers?

As you’re scrolling through their profile, try to get a rough sense for their average views over the last 3 months. For any video that is above 20x that average, write it down in your notes…this is an outlier.

When you find outliers, you want to spend as much time as possible doing two things:

1. Analyzing each individual video on its own: What about this video made it materially more compelling than everything else they made? Try to find the reason for the breakout. If you can find it, write this down in your notes as well

2. Analyzing the outliers as a bucket: As you zoom out and look at 10-20 outliers at once, can you notice a trend or pattern about the outliers? Maybe they all start the same way or cover a certain idea

You’re looking for patterns in the outlier content.

5. Remixing

Virgil Abloh had a design methodology called the 3% rule. He said, “A creative only has to add a three per cent tweak to a pre-existing concept in order to generate a cultural contribution deemed innovative”

This means that if you take an outlier video made by someone in your category, you can reframe, repackage, or remix that idea. Doing this will give you a much higher hit rate than trying to come up with something from scratch.

For the broader themes you pulled out, and/or ideas from sources that play on your platform but not in your category, use these as creative constraints to guide your ideation.

This may sound counterintuitive, but I don’t view content as a “creative game.”

It’s an outliers game.

The best way to make outliers is to start with inspiration from those made before you.

As someone who has tried both to come up with completely novel ideas and remixed off others in a new way, I can tell you that the remixing resulted in significantly more success and less stress.

The most common question I get when I explain this framework is, “Isn’t this copying other people’s work?”

I don’t believe so.

Remixing via inspiration is what the internet was built on…in fact, it’s what all art is built on.

All great works are derivatives of those that came before…adding and subtracting, infusing new takes and taste on top of a canvas that was already started.

To me, this is the beauty of the internet.

When I release a piece, I fully expect others to take it, build upon it, and have it inspire them to make something else. This should be your default state as a creative.

SANDCASTLES.AI

The fastest way to level up your short-form content

If you need help telling better stories in your content, I’m building your dream product.

It’s called Sandcastles (currently waitlist only).

I’ve spent hundreds of hours writing short-form video scripts.

After billions of views and a 50%+ viral hit rate, I’m taking everything I know and packaging into an easy to use software product.

Think of it like adding the world’s best storyteller to your content team.

We’ve opened up a waitlist for a limited time…those on the list will receive founding member pricing for life.

You can reserve your spot here: https://sandcastles.ai

CONTENT FORMATS

5 content formats every brand should be studying

The more videos I make, the easier it becomes for me to identify when something is working.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been collecting examples of killer brand content that is crushing on social media.

If you make content or run marketing for a brand, here are 5 content formats you should be studying.

1. Product as Content (ex: Daze)

This is a cheat code if you can pull it off.

Product as content means that the act of using your product can be recorded and serve as compelling content itself.

A great example of this that I found recently is a new chat app called Daze.

Daze was able to grow a waitlist to 150,000 users just from posting a single video format over and over on TikTok.

@daze.chat

Theres a troll on the next stop… #collage #drawing #textingmycrush #creative #brat #relationshipadvice #chat

^Here’s their best example…this video got 8.3M views and probably drove 10K+ signups.

For context, Daze is building a next generation chat app that lets users drag, drop, resize, and reformat their messages anywhere on the canvas.

It’s kind of like Figma for messaging.

The experience of chatting with Daze is inherently entertaining, so just screen recording while using the app can be content.

This is the ultimate content hack because it means you have infinite content ideas (just using the product).

As a bonus, the reason this video worked so well is because the storytelling (the messages being posted) was also compelling.

So the combination of great storytelling + unique visual experience was a winning format.

You’ll notice that Daze hasn’t tried to stray away from this winning format at all.

They’ve posted 192 videos in the exact style. This follows the guidance I shared around consistency of format in my piece about variety shows (if you haven’t read that, I suggest you do).

And to tie a bow on it, the reason why this approach works so well is because the product is a secondary background focus of the video.

The video is not aimed to educate the viewer about the product. It’s simply telling the viewer a compelling story enabled by the product.

If they like the story, they will inherently like the product.

Product as content is a cheat code.

2. Customers in the wild (ex: Stan, Immi, StarterStory)

This is an obvious tactic, but few brands do it well…I call it customers in the wild.

Put simply, this approach is making content about your best customers

Either you go find them randomly on the street or you set up in person experiential interviews with them.

A brand that is crushing this is Stan, the link in bio company aimed at helping creators monetize their following.

They have a channel called Stan Stories dedicated to interviewing top creators, hosted by this kid Caleb.

stan__stories

View more on Instagram

Now this channel is new (only 5 weeks old), but when you watch the videos, you can immediately tell they have something here if they keep going.

And why does this work?

Stan is in an arms race for creators to use their link in bio product.

And the best way for them to get creators to pay attention is to spotlight successful creators that embody the desired outcome.

This is the classic “Before & After” approach that you used to see on old Beachbody commercials.

Every creator wants to become financially independent and build a viable business. Stan is putting ones that have already done this front and center.

When beginners see this content, and aspire to reach this end state, the first thing they do is ask for the tools that made it happen…Stan.

Another brand that does this super well is Immi, a healthy instant ramen product.

They’ve been doing this style for a bit longer, and have 176K followers on their @ramenonthestreet account.

@ramenonthestreet

Our first billboard!!! How exciting! #ramenonthestreet #fyp #motivational #immi #immiramen #timessquarenyc #billboard

It’s the same philosophy…show potential customers the joy that current customers are having with our product.

The last example I want to call out is my friend Pat, Founder of Starter Story.

His business curates case studies and playbooks for how online entrepreneurs built profitable companies.

So his content strategy, to showcase those “customers,” is to interview successful entrepreneurs that have made it.

As he does this, more beginners see their desired state and deem Starter Story as the best tool and community to help them get there.

The formula is: Find Beginner, Show Expert, Be The Bridge

3. Founding/Building Story (ex: Midday Squares, Elwood, Poorboy Coffee)

The founding/building story format is one of the hardest to execute consistently, but if done well, can pay the biggest dividends over time.

The best way to build long-term loyalty with fans is to let them feel like a part of the team.

Sharing your company’s founding story and behind-the-scenes build is great for a few reasons:

1. You’ll have infinite content ideas (because you can share all of the ups and downs that happen while building a company)

2. You can turn employees into characters that fans root for

3. You can build affinity for the products without talking about the products

You’ll notice that a common theme with most of these formats is that the products are not front and center.

The best brands don’t talk about their products…instead they visualize the desired emotion of the prospective customer and let viewers complete the loop in their own heads.

The classic example of a company that executed this to perfection is Midday Squares.

To help entrench their brand into this style, they also framed their launch video as going after BIG chocolate (companies like Nestle, Mars, Hershey, and Mondelez).

This created the David vs Goliath positioning.

If you’re in support of David…which many early adopters are in the beginning…this helped kickstart your loyalty.

Another example doing this well is Elwood, a clothing brand in Los Angeles.

They’re one of the best at showcasing the live build process.

Every time they’re working on a new garment, they feature it in BTS videos.

@elwood

Our Ceo breaks down the inpso behind our best selling tee #workinginfashion #btsfashion

They also do a great job at teasing their design aesthetic via videos in their offices.

4. Founder as Hero (ex: Represent (George Heaton), Minted (Marcus Milione), Barstool (Dave Portnoy))

The cousin of founding story content is building an entire channel around the founder as the hero.

This works super well for clothing brands when the founder was the original muse for the brand.

Where a company like Elwood uses their social channels to mostly showcase the products and team, companies like Represent & Minted lean heavily on the life and experiences of their founders, George Heaton and Marcus Milione.

This “through their eyes” style embodies the ideal aspirational lens for customers that want to be like the founder.

mintednewyork

View more on Instagram

It’s worth noting that each brand mentioned has a brand account with more traditional “lifestyle clothing brand” content, but the point is that these companies also invest heavily in building out founder driven channels, especially on YouTube.

In a way, the original inspiration for this type of style was Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports.

Much of the longitudinal content that chronicled Barstool’s rise featured Dave in the center.

Fans got to live the process of building a sports media company and being a sports fan through Dave.

As mentioned above, this format only works if the founder is the ideal representation of the target customer.

If not, it’s worth focusing more on the founding/building story format.

5. Category King

I’m shocked more brands don’t do this…dominate the video thought leadership in their category.

The playbook is as simple as this…if you’re an accounting firm, hire a creator to make daily content about any accounting or accounting adjacent related news.

If you’re a legal firm, same thing.

For every business, in every industry, there are hundreds of thousands of other professionals that want to know a) what’s happening and b) how it might impact them.

The reason this format is so helpful for driving massive lead gen over time is that it slowly turns that creator and the brand they work for as “the go-to authority” in the space.

If targeted correctly, and specific enough, this association will drive infinite leads.

When people think accounting, they think you…and then they go to you for their accounting needs.

News content is currently dominated by professional media companies.

Then non-media companies pay 6-figures to advertise in those media companies to drive leads for their business.

It’d be much cheaper to just hire a world-class creator, align incentives, and then own the media acquisition source in house. Over time, CAC will go down and you’ll be able to monetize the lead source as a bonus.

Today, most companies don’t think of themselves as a media company.

The truth is, all of them will need to become one or they’ll get overrun.

NIKE

I just dropped a video breaking down how Nike (and other luxury brands) use psychology to brainwash customers into purchasing their products.

The video explains:

• The 4 step framework for how brands hack your psychology to make you buy

• The 5 step tactical playbook for using these psychology principles to immediately improve your brand and business (two examples from my own videos)

You can watch the full video here.