As the landscape of content marketing evolves, Anuj Gosalia of TTT draws parallels between how content creation on social media has altered in recent years and what it means for brands today.
When the world placed more trust in long-form content which had the window to capture more information for developing a brand image, Anuj Gosalia, Co-Founder & CEO, Terribly Tiny Tales (TTT), added a twist to content marketing by limiting it to 140 characters only. TTT is a narration platform that allows writers to create micro-fiction and has now built a community of creators and has seen growing interest from advertisers.
According to a Microsoft study, the human attention span has shrunk to eight seconds, a decrease of about 25% in just a few years. This is where short-form content can work wonders. Creating bite-sized content has its perks as it’s easy to consume, its demand is growing, it’s built for quicker conversions, and its production time is faster.
In conversation with Social Samosa, Anuj shares TTT’s journey and content strategy, how he believes AI will definitely take over the minuscule tasks, and more .
Content Marketing Strategy
Anuj said, “People come to TTT for stories that they can relate to – that show them a glimpse of their own lives. They come to feel comforted, and entertained to find some kind of solace. Our stories are built around that universe.”
Catering to its young audience, TTT speaks about things that would impact an 18-24 year old’s life. Therefore, anything about love, introspection, breakups, long-distance friendships, best friends, career, and mental health are widely spoken about.
Role of Data in Content Marketing
Earlier everything was based on instincts. While the gut feeling of the creative person is very vital in the production process, what to create is now mostly guided by data and should be influenced by data. Without supporting facts, instinct has a smaller role.
There are no rules or truths with content but there are guiding principles, Anuj shares.
These guiding principles are immersed in data, especially when a brand is involved, but sometimes risky plans work out for writers.
Anuj said, “Some of the funniest wacky viral ideas come because someone didn't listen to data, so there's always room for that, but at the same time what you can be creating on a consistent basis cannot be devoid of some data input.”
Every creative person today should be very comfortable with insights on Instagram, Facebook – understand metrics like shares and likes are influencing the kind of content people are consuming.
This is more from a marketer's lens and not a purist writer's lens. A purist writer should write for an audience of one, which is themselves. But when you are a custodian of a brand, you don't have that privilege. You have a responsibility to engage people and therefore, data is extremely important.
Impact of AI on Content Creation
OpenAI's ChatGPT tool has made an impression on the content-creating economy with its realistic responses and subject summaries and, as ChatGPT demonstrates, AI-generated content is growing more human-like qualities on a daily basis.
While AI has not yet taken over the creative career, Anuj feels it is just a matter of time.
Anuj said, “Eventually, if you look at writing as a medium, it is my thoughts articulated in words, and if the words are not written by me, but by someone else, as long as the thought is articulated, I'm a good writer. For employees it may no longer be ‘hey write me an article’ but ‘write me an AI-generated article that gets the job done’ and therefore most of the writer's job may not be about the actual writing bit, but just about the efficacy. ”
AI would change a writer’s role. It would be more about supervision than writing itself.
Further breaking down the fundamentals of writing, he explained that the piece of text needs to touch and engage people, and connect with them. Whether it's written by AI or a human, would be secondary.
To give us a better idea he uses an example of animated films. He explains that it doesn't matter if the animated film doesn't have real people, it still requires a storyteller to ensure that the animation is coherent, makes sense, and is impacting people.
Writing will evolve in that direction where humans will be required to make the writing more human and AI will do the slightly boring bits of assembling the text and correcting grammar along with putting it in structure.
Content Marketing Mistakes
Pointing out the mistakes that brands make, he explained that brands tend to play too safe and therefore most of the brand-powered content just completely disappears.
There's no room for safe and it was true during the time of T.V. and now it's 100 X more true in the time of the internet.
He firmly believes that the ads have to be entertaining, and emotional, and should get a bunch of people to connect with the ads and if it doesn't, then there is no reason to make such an ad.
“Brands should hire either a great team or a great content company/ agency and take small risks with them and once the brand feels confident with the content, it should let them fly, trust them and empower them to make brave choices,” he added.
There might be a few setbacks while taking risks. However, Gosalia reminds that brands should look at long-term goals.
Gosalia said, “There will be the occasional screw-up but creating content and building your own content engine is a very different skill than necessarily running a business. It requires long-term investment and therefore needs specialists. So once you are able to identify good creators, trust them and let them free.”
Content Marketing Trends in 2023
Anuj shares a few content marketing trends that would take shape this year.
- A lot of chat GPT will be used to create SEO content. So lots and lots of startups and smarter companies will use AI in a meaningful way to drive up the volume required for things like SEO and even for some of the social media content.
- Forward-thinking brands will start running their own YouTube and Instagram channels and have their own creative pool. So they'll start operating like content and media companies. The likes of SUGAR, even Lenskart, and Nike, Red Bull is one of the classic examples.
- We'll see more adventurous performance marketing ads because as that place gets more crowded it's eventually who was able to get the most attention. Performance marketing ads which look a lot like salesman ad usually goes like ‘Hi, this is the new face cream we've launched, and please try it.’ People may get a bit tired of clicking on these and so companies will have to take more risks with their performance marketing.
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