KIMBERLY ALEAH: As a content creator, data is one of the most powerful tools that you have at your disposal. Ultimately, when you make something, you want to make sure that you’re getting it out in front of as many different eyes as possible. What I do when making a piece of content from a creative standpoint, is always start with the fact that we need a hook. We need something that’s going to add something different to the larger cultural conversation. This is because when you’re on the internet, there’s unfortunately a lot of other stuff to compete with.
Once I have that hook that we’ve used from pre production, production, editing, all the way through the development process, we have to figure out where we’re going to put it. This is when data comes into play, because data allows you to profile your audiences. That can look like a number of things.
For one, you want to find out when people are consuming content. Are people consuming content on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays at noon? Are people consuming content on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:00 PM?
Another thing you want to ask yourself is – what is my target audience? Am I going for school age children? In which case, maybe I want to publish stuff before the school day starts at 8:00 or after the school day is over at 3:00? Is my audience younger professionals? In that case I might want to wait until they get off from work. Is my audience more based in New York than LA? What does that day look like for them?
Just asking all the different questions about who an audience is, what type of content they want to consume, when they want to consume it, and then lastly, on what device, is important to effectively reaching them.
Are they consuming content on a smartphone? Are they consuming the content on a desktop computer?
Across different age demographics, you’ll find that for the 13 to 18 window, a lot of that is vertical video. When you’re a creator, it might incline you to consider shaping your piece so that it plays a little bit more aesthetically for a phone.
It’s just thinking about all the different questions of who the audience is, what time they consume their content, where they are consuming their content, and lastly the ideal duration. Duration is one of the most powerful aspects of data because it lets you know that not only is an audience engaging with content, but they’re sticking with it. They’re watching for more than three to five minutes. They’re watching the full 12 to 15 minutes.
This is where you find your strongest audiences, because you’ve made something that they find interesting. If you’re already starting with something on your phone, and you’re doing it with a group of diverse individuals, and throwing it into this larger ecosystem, it’s not only going to inspire other people to share your work, but it’s also going to inspire you to create new things that you didn’t think of originally.
And so for me, I love smartphones, which are very on brand for millennials. It really is one of those things that you have as a tool in your pocket to tell stories instantaneously. When we talk about these larger social movements that are happening, there’s a reason that a lot of the stimulus, a lot of the incidents that start those movements were recorded on phones.
They’re so much more accessible. They just let everyone have an immediate voice that doesn’t have to be mitigated by a traditional development room, a traditional studio process. A lot of the bureaucracy gets skipped, and a lot of the content making gets put first.
