How Did You Discover What You Love?
Think about something meaningful to you and how you discovered it.
As a young Boy Scout out on a paper drive, going house to house in the back of an open pickup to collect newspapers to haul to the local recycler, I discovered something that would change my life. Which isn’t anyone’s idea of a customer journey.
In the corner of a suburban garage on top of a neat stack of old periodicals was an issue of Sport Magazine with Julius Erving on the cover, which I rolled and stuffed into the back pocket of my Toughskins. I was taken by both by the image and the idea that one player, one man, might be transformative enough to save an entire league or sport. I read the article, and then whatever I could find about Doctor J, and I became a fan of both Erving and the sport he represented.
Basketball is one of those things I discovered in a trash pile.
Basketball is my favorite sport, even if I later forsook my hometown Sixers when they traded Charles Barkley for a sack of spare parts and eventually entered into a fraught romance with my new town’s team, The Knicks. But what changed my life wasn’t just setting down the path of basketball fandom that lead to 20 years of season tickets at Madison Square Garden, it was that unexpected act of discovery. The thrill of finding this young man’s treasure in another’s (literal) trash created the unshakeable idea that I could and would find what moves me outside established channels.
Too often when we think about content and curation, we assume a sense of logic to discovery, a roadmap. Finding a discarded magazine would lead to afternoons spent combing record store used bins, used book shops, and thrift stores in search of what would (affordably) excite or move me, which in turn led to a career writing about music (and clothes and cars and other things). My story may sound unusual, but its arc is not that unlikely.
You have an seemingly unlikely story, too. Did one taste of Thai food lead you from being a picky eater who ordered nothing more exotic than chicken parm to becoming an offal-eating foodie? (Okay, that’s me again.) Or did you fall hard for Dale Chihuly‘s glass art (see above) after reading about him in a faded art magazine left in a grandmother’s bathroom? (Me, again.) The details of what makes it unlikely are your own, but the randomness of that discovery is what’s entirely likely when it comes to finding those things we really love. Because that’s what makes them seem like ours.
If you use content to market what you do or sell – and you should – this is mildly terrifying, because the truth is you can’t map out that customer journey to point unwaveringly to the slavering maw of the sales funnel. But it’s also freeing. Think about it: Your job is to make content an experience, and an authentic one at that. So think back to something, like the briny taste and disconcertingly mucilaginous texture of your first oyster – it was exciting! You felt brave and alive and curious and probably hungry for more. Or you were grossed out! Find those moments in your life and those around you or on your team, and meditate on that moment when you knew, then apply that level of detail to how you bring value to your audiences. Those details matter way more than outdated notions about the centrality of your sales funnel.
That is what’s freeing. Your story isn’t really your brand story. It’s about the value you bring and how it fits into your audience’s lives. Assume they’ve come across you randomly, which on social media is likely the case. People believe what they discover for themselves. Overlay your experience on top of your audience profiles and learn from what the data tells you, and you’re onto a method for making your content authentic.
Do it right and consistently, and your audience will recognize your content not just as your story, but part of theirs.