04 — Create / 04.01

Study your niche

Before you create content, you need to understand what is already capturing attention within your market.

7 principles3 min readTraining film

One of the biggest mistakes brands make is creating content based purely on what they think people want to see. We take a different approach. We study what the audience is already responding to and use that information to make smarter creative decisions.

The objective is not to copy other people. The objective is to understand what is working and why.

Training film / 04.01

Study your niche

On this page / 7
  1. 01Find the right accounts
  2. 02Find their outlier content
  3. 03Look for patterns
  4. 04Study the audience
  5. 05Look outside your industry
  6. 06Separate the idea from the execution
  7. 07Build a research habit
Section 01

Find the right accounts

Start by identifying the strongest accounts within your space.

Look at

  1. 01Direct competitors
  2. 02Industry leaders
  3. 03Founders and personalities within your industry
  4. 04Creators speaking to the same audience
  5. 05Businesses targeting the same customer

Do not only look at the biggest accounts. A smaller creator consistently generating high views can often teach you more than a large company with millions of followers.

Section 02

Find their outlier content

Do not judge an account based on its average content. Look for the videos that significantly outperform everything else they post.

If someone normally receives 20,000 views and one video receives 500,000 views, pay attention. Something about that video connected with a much larger audience.

Study

  • The topic
  • The opening line
  • The format
  • The question being answered
  • The story
  • The visual
  • The length
  • The way the information was presented
  • The comments

Your job is to work out why people cared.

Outliers, from the library