What is authentic content and why is it important?
In a digital world increasingly concentrated with content, the work that stands apart is often the most authentic. Authentic content is media in any form built upon a base of honesty and connection with its creators, that goes beyond results, products, or sales. This content pierces through the noise and builds a genuine bridge with the audience through shared interests or values.
Whether you are an individual creator or a part of group or organization of creators, it’s important to be aware of what you bring to the table. What is your mission and what defines your voice? What’s the personality of the content you’re seeking to create? What tone comes naturally without effort? Consider your voice and how you want to represent yourself, as well as what will set you apart. Look to your strengths and your values.
In order to create authentic content, it’s crucial to stay true to your intentions and your personality, which is to say, your brand.
This doesn’t mean that you should not evolve and change—this is a necessary consideration in terms of authenticity also—but it means always keeping your mission in mind and letting organic shifts happen while maintaining a focus.
Get to know your target audience. Creating authentic content satisfies a real need, but it is also for real people. Establishing who your content serves, or the people it’s meant to reach, is a necessary step in connecting ideas in a way that actually matters. Consider the demographics and identities that make up your audience, how they access content, and the kind of content they are interested in.
Define your purpose. What is the content for? What purpose does it serve? Consider the ways the purpose can respond to an authentic need or desire. Instead of contributing to the endless void of digital information ask yourself, why does this content exist in the first place? Your purpose should satisfy an authentic need. That doesn’t have to be deeply noble, it can also just be as simple as sharing something beautiful or interesting. Little things expand our world and connect us in profound ways.
Some potential purposes could be:
Answering a question
Comparing solutions to a problem
Teaching your audience something
There is a balance here between creating content that you personally feel compelled to create and creating for an audience. Content that is too geared to an audience or bypasses the creator’s knowledge and personality veers into a space of people-pleasing. While there is no definitive point of successful balance here, attune yourself to your creative drive and the needs and responses of your audience. Keep in mind that creating authentic content is about your mission, not results. Work to balance your target between your goals and the needs of your audience, but always remember that the key to authenticity is not focused on outcome.
What type of content is aligned with your purpose, message, and target audience? Consider its form, format, the channel through which you’re delivering it, and the ways it can best sync up with these goals. Is it a blog post, images, video, or social media post?
Feel free to experiment. Part of understanding yourself as a creator is actually creating and learning through that experience. That means making mistakes along the way, but also noticing and embracing when your content is successful. Perhaps you diversify the type of content you want to create. Maybe you’ve focused primarily on written blog posts, but want to try your hand at videos. Take those leaps. What you decide to publish is up to you, but being able to experiment in view of your audience also builds a trust in your authenticity as a creator.
Minding the details and the readability of your content will ensure it lands or reaches your audience successfully.
Clarity of messaging
Simply, if the content makes sense. Making sure your points come across is central here. Get very clear on your intentions and the direction of the content and ensure that the end product is focused there.
Avoiding technicality, jargon
Using technical language can confuse or distract your audience. Try to communicate your points in a straightforward way. Saying it simply is often best. If relevant jargon is unavoidable, break it down in the most accessible way possible.
Relatability
An audience has to connect to your content for it to be successful, so it should relate to them in some way. Building understanding through shared experience or commonality is crucial here.
Your content should play to your experience and actual knowledge of a given topic, not reach beyond the limits of your ability and insight. Your audience will notice when you are attempting to engage something you don’t know much about, which can potentially damage your integrity. In some cases, it will aid you to acknowledge ignorance. Research is one way you can more actively take on topics that you are relatively uniformed about. You can also defer to experts on any given topic or idea. Citation is a great way to bring credibility to your content and honest interaction with new ideas. This will build trust with your audience and provide you with an air of creative integrity.
It's crucial to take ownership of your field and your voice, acknowledging both your strengths and weaknesses. Being vulnerable with your audience will ultimately show your most authentic creative self.
Contextualizing the content in time can give it more credibility and lend itself to responding to an actual need. Trends and topical issues should be integrated into content when relevant to your brand or what you create. Not every trend will have to be created around, but they can be opportunities to engage with communal experiences, things people are thinking about on a mass level. Some content will be more evergreen and have a timelessness that doesn’t require keeping up with what’s topical. When you establish your voice, thinking about the ways you can naturally step in and out of engaging with trend and the news cycle will be useful to establishing your relationship to authentic creation.
Prioritize creating quality content over a high volume of less valuable content. If you are constantly pushing content that doesn’t have substance to it, you will lose the trust of your audience. Focus on doing it well rather than constantly having something flimsy to offer.
Is there a way for you to break down the fourth wall and acknowledge your own humanity? We have experienced this with more regularity collectively, with the realities of video conferencing and technology-dependent connection by way of Covid. Our private lives were made more public due to the necessities of quarantining.
Enacting gestures of relatability can be as simple as mentioning your mood or your surroundings, the reality of your work day (maybe you’re tired), or the fact that you’re wearing athletic shorts at the exact moment that you type this.
In video, this could mean including bloopers or missteps. Including less produced moments or the less glamorous aspects of filming, so the audience has a fuller picture of the reality. For example, we’ve all seen music festival street style, but what about the mountains of trash, portable bathrooms, or the realities of sweating in huge groups of spectators? Keeping your ethics in mind, how can you show a fuller picture, not just a sliver or hyper-edited version of the topic you’re covering.
Visual aspects of your content should feel authentic and not overly produced. Images shouldn’t feel too much like a set or too perfect to be real. If a studio or similarly minimal space is a reality of the production, bring in elements of the production, like equipment to give it some life. Or include behind-the-scenes supplementary content to complexify the space. These gestures can give life to your work and keep them from seeming overly polished or impenetrable.
Establishing a rapport with your audience will position you to better respond in an authentic way. Time and continued production will allow you to track your results and refine your content strategy over time. Embrace listening as a creator and pivoting when necessary. Having flexibility means interacting with the world of content in a way you can genuinely respond and adapt to the world around you. Empathy plays a key role here and will see you in a more relational place rather than creating as if in an ivory tower. As mentioned before, play to your instincts, but be open to feedback.
So there you have it, your guide to creating authentic content. Don’t be afraid to take a step back and cleanse your palette. The pace of content creation can be dizzying and there is a lot of noise around us constantly. Trust yourself and have fun. Happy creating!