1. Be intentional with content. Define your goals clearly.
Just making content is never enough. Unless you're doing it as a pure hobby, but even then, define that and set expectations accordingly.
For most businesses, content comes down to two things. Brand awareness, where you're building trust and staying top of mind. And growth, where you're actually trying to generate inbound leads and get people to your landing page. Usually it's a combination of both, which is why you end up making different types of content. Some posts are pure brand play with no conversion push, and others get specific about what you actually sell.
The reason this matters is that once you decide you want content to drive real business results, there's a whole backend you need to set up. Link in bio, DM automation, making sure every piece of content connects back to why your ideal customer should care. We'll get into ManyChat later, but the point is that content alone won't do it.
Here's the other thing. Once you nail organic video content, those become your best ad creatives. You get lower CPMs because the content feels native. And you start seeing where people are actually dropping off in your funnel, which you'd never know unless you're getting enough of the right eyeballs on your product. Not just any eyeballs. Your ideal customer.
So have the goals conversation up front. It might feel uncomfortable, but you need to have it. Because the worst outcome is being three months in with a million followers and nobody buying your product. Or wanting brand awareness but posting random stuff that gets likes without anyone learning what your brand actually is.
Define what you're optimizing for, then check in on it every few weeks with your team. That's it.
2. Be patient, but iterate aggressively.
Content is a compounding game. Think about it the same way you'd think about fitness or learning any new skill. You're not going to see real results in a week. You might see some noob gains early on, especially if you haven't been posting at all. Your vanity metrics will spike, maybe you get some landing page visits, people start recognizing your brand a little more. But for any actual, meaningful change, this is a long-term play.
Now, the cool thing about content is that it's also one of the only things where you can have exponential growth from day one. Sometimes the first or second video completely changes everything. But if that doesn't happen, don't be discouraged. Making content that people actually want to watch, content that builds trust, is genuinely hard. If it was easy, every company would be crushing it. They're not.
It's time-consuming. It takes a lot of ideation, creation, and honestly an engineering mindset to break things down properly. You need to find the right people too. The right editor, the right copywriter, the right strategist, the right social media manager. If the first person isn't working out, keep iterating on the team just like you'd iterate on a product.
If you've posted a concept five times and it's not landing, and you've genuinely done everything right in execution, then pivot. Try a different hook, a different format.
Maybe it's faceless video. Maybe it's B-roll. Maybe it's a talking head.
You need to find your content-market fit, and that only happens by taking as many shots as possible, especially in the first month.
Think long-term, but day to day, be aggressive about testing everything. Try AI content, try human content, try a mix. Look at what competitors are doing, look at what completely different industries are doing. Stay plugged in. Sign up to newsletters that track trends and culture shifts (Our newsletter is useful for this).
In our company, we keep a data room of every script we've ever written, for ourselves and for clients. We track the hook, the duration, the voiceover style, views, likes, comments. All of it lives on a live sheet that we use as a research document every single week. We pull insights from it and apply them to the next batch. We do the same thing for competitors. By the time we start identifying patterns, we've looked at hundreds of scripts. That's what iterating aggressively actually looks like.
3. Leverage AI to move faster.
Do I even need to say this out loud? If you're reading this right now, I hope you're smart enough to know you need to be using AI in 2026.
You couldn't be in the 2000s and say "I'm not gonna use the internet for my business." This is that moment. AI is the basic layer now.
I'm not saying automate everything and let AI do all the work for you. I'm saying use it to move faster. Let me give you practical examples.
ElevenLabs is incredible for text-to-speech. A lot of the videos on our page, our clients' pages, and pretty much every big content page out there uses AI voice now. And it doesn't have to sound generic. You can literally clone your own voice or prompt a completely unique one. So that whole barrier of "I don't want to speak on camera" or "I need a good mic" goes away.
Here's how we actually use it. We work with founders who are busy. They don't have time to come in and record every time we need a new piece of content. So we clone their voices. For some of our clients running education platforms, we've cloned every single teacher, every founder, everyone. When we want to make content featuring someone specific, we just use their voice. No scheduling, no time zone issues, and it sounds perfect. ElevenLabs also does sound effects and video gen, so it covers a lot of ground.
Claude is where the strategy work happens. Make a project for every single thing you do. Give it a knowledge base, give it context. The key thing to understand is that AI is better than humans at pattern recognition, but it's not as good at coming up with the original data and knowing what to do with those patterns. That's your job. You're the creator, the engineer. AI gives you leverage, not replacement.
Once you have a solid data room of scripts, feed it into Claude. It can recognize patterns at scale that no human is going to sit down and do manually. Which hooks worked, how long the videos were, what formats performed. Then it can help you formulate similar concepts based on what's already proven. Just make sure you give it master prompts so it doesn't sound like AI. Remove the em dashes, train it on your voice, make it personal.
Envato and tools like Higgsfield are great for image and video generation. A lot of these platforms are consolidating now, so you can do most of what you need from one or two subscriptions. If you missed some B-roll on a shoot day, it's not a problem anymore. You can generate what you need. That's the whole point. Record once, then extrapolate from it.
If you work with a team like ours, we have all of this covered already. We train every editor and writer on these tools so they're equipped to move fast and not rely on stock footage or hope they got every shot on set. But even if you're doing this yourself, just get into these tools. They're not complicated. You just need to know what to do with them.
4. Making content isn't enough. Set up the funnel.
Remember the first point about defining your goals? This is where that comes back. If one of your goals is driving landing page visits or inbound leads, just posting great content won't get you there. You need the backend set up properly.
ManyChat is a big one for us. What it does is set up DM automations on your Instagram. You've probably seen creators say "comment 'link' and I'll send it to your DMs." That's ManyChat. When someone comments the trigger word, it automatically replies to their comment with something like "sent!" and then DMs them the actual link.
Why this works so much better than "go to the link in bio" is pretty simple. People are lazy. They're not going to leave the post, go to your profile, find the link, and click through. But if you DM it to them directly, the friction disappears. Conversion goes way up.
The other benefit is engagement. Every time someone comments a trigger word, that's a real comment on your post. Instagram sees that as engagement, which means the algorithm pushes your content harder. ManyChat is an official Instagram partner, so there's no risk of getting flagged. Every big creator and company uses it.
To give you a real example, we ran this for a client where the product was priced at $6,000. One application link post generated over 60,000 comments through ManyChat and increased landing page visits by 3,000% in a few days. We've had multiple posts hit 20,000 to 30,000 comments for clients purely because of this setup.
There are probably other tools out there, but ManyChat is the most reliable and the biggest in the market, so that's what we use and what I'd recommend. You can use it for links, app signups, email collection, newsletter subscriptions, whatever you need. There's a bit of a learning curve like any automation tool, but once it's set up, it just runs.
5. Focus on 3 types of content:
Not every post needs to serve the same purpose, and trying to make everything do everything is one of the fastest ways to burn out your team and confuse your audience. Over time, we've found that the accounts that grow consistently are running three lanes in parallel.
The first is value and education - usually faceless animated video. This is where you teach something, share an insight, break down a concept. It positions you as the expert without anyone needing to be on camera, which is huge for teams that don't have a founder who wants to film every day.
The second is founder or employee-facing content - talking head videos where a real person is on screen. This is the emotional layer. People don't connect with brands, they connect with people. When a founder shares a perspective or a team member tells a story, it builds a different kind of trust than any polished ad ever could.
The third is trendy B-roll vibes - think "POV you work at the fastest-growing fintech in Europe." It's lighter, more human, shows the culture. These are the posts that make people want to be part of what you're building.
With TKS, we ran all three. Faceless animated videos fully scripted and voiced with ElevenLabs. Founder-led talking heads with storytelling at the core. Trendy reels capturing the energy of their student sessions. That mix is what took them from 17K to 80K followers in less than a year. One format alone wouldn't have done it.
6. You’re building your OWN distribution, own your narrative too.
Most companies treat content as a marketing checkbox. They post because they feel like they should, not because they have something to say. And you can tell. The content is safe, generic, sounds like it could've come from any brand in the world.
But here's the thing. If you're investing the time and energy to build your own audience, that's your distribution. You own that. Nobody can take it away from you. It's not rented reach from ads or borrowed attention from a PR hit that disappears in 48 hours. It compounds over time and it's yours.
So why would you waste that by sounding like everyone else? Take a stance. Be opinionated. Talk about what you actually believe, not what feels safe. Show the real people behind the company. Share the wins, but also share what's hard and what you're learning. That's what builds trust with an audience, not polished corporate messaging that says nothing.
The companies that win at content are the ones that sound like themselves. They have a voice, a perspective, a point of view that you can recognize without seeing the logo. That's what owning your narrative means. You have the mic. Say something worth hearing.
7. Be personal.
Just making content and forgetting about it isn't enough. Yes, it's great to have that top of funnel traffic coming in, but you have to nurture the people who actually show up.
Think about it the same way Paul Graham talks about doing things that don't scale. When you're trying to find product-market fit, you have to be super personal, give care and attention to your early customers. Content works the same way.
Here are four things you should be doing:
Respond to comments. Every single one if you can. Obviously when you're getting thousands of comments it gets hard, but try your best. Maybe get someone to do it full time if you need to. And even when you have automated DMs set up through ManyChat, if someone comments something that's not the trigger word, take the time to manually reply. Show them you're actually there.
Reply to your DMs. If your content is working, you're going to get a lot of them. We get dozens every day from editors who want to learn how we edit, from founders asking questions, from people who might not look like qualified leads on paper. It would be easy to ignore all of that and just focus on targeted prospects, but that's short-term thinking. You never know what happens next. Maybe someone isn't qualified right now, but they raise money in six months, and that small interaction you had goes a long way. I can't count how many introductions and relationships came from me just checking my DMs consistently. It also helps a ton during the sales process if you're selling something.
Give away free lead magnets. It could be a newsletter, it could be a PDF like this one, it could be a tool you built internally. If you're an education platform, give something educational. If you're a finance company, maybe it's an Excel sheet with formulas people can use to track their finances. Whatever it is, give people something valuable for free. It builds trust and keeps them in your ecosystem.
Post more stories. This one is super important and most people underestimate it. When you post a reel or a video, most of your reach goes to non-followers. But stories are different. Stories are mostly viewed by people who already follow you, which means they're already more invested. That's where your highest chance of converting followers into actual customers or community members comes from. Do Q&As, share behind the scenes, engage directly. Especially every time you get a new batch of followers. If you're gaining 100 new followers a day, do a story Q&A every Saturday and let those people get to know you. That's what turns followers into fans.
8. Boost the best performing reels to double down.
This is one of the most underrated moves in content. Once you have organic content that's already performing, you don't need to go make a separate ad. Just take what's already working and put money behind it.
Think about it this way. Ad platforms like Meta and TikTok don't actually want ads on their feed. Their users hate ads. The platform's job is to show people content they want to watch, so when your ad looks like an ad, the platform works against you. Higher costs, less reach. But when your ad feels like real content, something worth watching or saving, the platform rewards you.
So here's what you do. Post consistently, at least three to five times a week, and give the algorithm enough data to work with. After about a month, look at what got the most saves. Not views. Views mean people watched. Saves mean people found it valuable enough to come back to. Those are the posts that convert.
Take those top performers and run them as ads. Don't reshoot anything, don't rewrite anything. Just add a simple banner overlay, something like "free guide" or "book a call," and put budget behind it. The content already did the selling. The banner just opens the door.
Alex Hormozi's team does this at scale. They post hundreds of pieces of content a week, let the algorithm tell them what's working, then take those top posts and boost them. We do the same thing for our clients. For TKS, all results were organic, but the framework is the same. You find what's already resonating and you amplify it.
The companies winning at paid media right now aren't making better ads. They're making better content and then putting money behind it. That's the whole game.
9. Measure ROI carefully. Not just views, not just followers. Everything.
This ties back to the very first point. You set your goals early, and now you need to actually measure against them.
You can't improve what you can't measure. And you need to detach yourself from vanity metrics. Maybe followers is your metric, and that's completely fine. But if you're business-focused, then you need to be looking at other things. Landing page visits, customers acquired, sales closed, calls booked, DMs coming in. All of that matters more than how many likes you got.
This is why it's useful to set up tools like PostHog and other analytics to track what's actually happening beyond the Instagram app. But that's a conversation for another time.
Here's the real reason measuring matters. You have to balance creativity and making money. Sometimes those two things are aligned, and sometimes they're not. There might be a video that you personally didn't love, but it performed incredibly well and brought in real business results.
That's the one that gave you the best ROI. So why not double down on that formula, capture more market, get more customers, and make more revenue, while also doing the creative stuff you enjoy on the side?
More often than not, the content you actually like making will be the content people resonate with. But it might not happen the first time. So experiment, measure what works, double down on what's driving results, and keep going.
And if you actually made it through all nine of these, respect.
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