It’s the word on everybody’s lips these days. From big businesses to little ma and pop shops, the local cafes to local councils–everybody wants it, needs it, and they need someone to make it. We’re talking about content and content creators! Suddenly, every organisation has a social media manager role to fill or are desperately hunting down a content creation specialist.
But what is content, really? Content is more than simply stuff posted online. Content has a purpose, it’s meant for something to be communicated to someone, and the beauty about it is technically, anything can be content! But only if you know how to make it work for you.
With that said, here are some key skills to hone if you want to become an all-star professional content creator.
Master the Art of (and Technology Behind) Graphic Design
Catch the Eye—Get Creative!
One key skill required for strong content creation is knowing how to catch the audience’s eye – and honing strong, digital-savvy graphic design skills is key here. You’re competing for people’s attention online and there is a lot of stuff to look at. So your content needs to stand out!
Try creating a variety of content and see what works best for you and what you enjoy the most. What do you like to see? There are many tools out there to help you come up with striking visuals and get creative, like Adobe Firefly’s AI image generator. Generative AI programs like Firefly help you conceptualise your ideas before executing them.
Alongside engaging with emerging AI technologies for graphic design, it also helps to equip yourself with a working knowledge of commonly used industry tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and even Adobe XD and Figma for experimenting both with graphic design and website UI principles. Playing around with those can help you connect the dots between the intersecting digital art behind all of your content and the technology making it work.
Other resources waiting to inspire you include magazines, scrapbooks, and even those old Tumblr blogs from way back when! Find whatever online stops you mid-scroll and think about why (and how) it worked.
Engage with the Basic Principles of Art for Balanced Designs
It’s All By Design, Really
It’s one thing to know what catches people’s attention, but it’s another entirely to keep it. In an attention economy as tough as today’s, you can hope to stand out by making content that is good to look at. Not only did they stop scrolling, but maybe they reacted to it or saved it.
We’ve all swiped quickly away from something that was unpleasant or made our eyes strain, and you do not want that to happen to your content. This is where design know-how becomes integral to professional content creation. Whether it’s posts on social media or short-to-long form videos, a balanced and aesthetic eye will take you far.
Look at big platforms or content creators and see what visually gels together with their work, like a general tone or colour palette. There are so many elements to take into consideration to creating content: colour theory, balance, tone, typography, and more.
You can conduct research into all these basic artistic principles to help build your knowledge banks in the world of design – and you can even learn by simply practicing a little trial and error. This is why learning how to use AI for graphic design will also help you explore how these elements work together digitally. Look at how generative tools execute your ideas and ask them why. By doing so, you can reverse engineer their prompt responses and better understand how to elevate your own content with these foundational principles in action.
Understand the Allowances of Different Platforms
The Medium Is The Message
Marshall McLuhan, the media theory king, famously said, “The Medium is The Message.” What he meant was the medium with which you communicate is just as important as the message itself, and maybe even more so!
The medium you’re using dictates how you can communicate and in what ways. For example, the kind of news article you’ll write for a newspaper will likely be different in tone and structure than one in a magazine or online somewhere.
Even digital mediums differ greatly; you wouldn’t share the exact same post from Instagram onto Facebook without some tweaks here and there, right? A professional content creator knows what works best for each medium (print media, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc.) and how to optimise their content for each medium.
It will take some time to learn how to adapt your content to a chosen medium. But when you master the ins-and-outs of what makes a medium work effectively, you can easily repurpose content for multiple mediums! Adapting a long-form YouTube video to a shorter TikTok-style reel will be second nature soon enough. And from there, you can strengthen your capabilities to create compelling video content for virtually all other platforms by using the same thought processes when it comes to content development.
Do some research and examine what it is about each medium that makes them tick, what works and what doesn’t. You need to know what you’re hoping to make your audience do after seeing your post, as well as who your audience is.
Learn how to Create for Particular Audiences
Who, What, Where, When, Why?
And of course, you won’t get anywhere without knowing your audience. Audience analysis will turn you into a part-time journalist! You need to ask lots of questions and scrutinize every angle: Who are we posting for? How old are they? Where do they live? What do they like? What do they hate? And lastly, what do we hope they will do?
The motivations behind your content really do depend on your audience. As such, professional content creators need to be trend savvy to know what makes their target audiences tick. Will they engage with what you’re posting if it includes a trending audio loop? Can you use a popular meme to boost your post’s likeability? Will your post become a meme, hopefully? If it aligns with the interests and tastes of your audience, then it might!
Remember that you are as much a content curator as you are a creator. If you’re not making something for a specific target audience, you’ll essentially end up making something for no one. In this sense, learning how to engage your audience is a foundational skill for all content creators that want to add some seriously high-value campaigns to their portfolio.
Get Out There & Flex your Skills as a Content Creator
In the creator-consumer landscape, simply producing content isn’t enough. Or else, you’re just posting to the wind, and to yourself! True impactful content creation is a result of getting out into the world and seeing who and what is out there, understanding how and why they all respond to each other. Once you understand who is responding to what and why, your voice will be clearly discernible above the rest.
By honing these skills, you’ll be on your way to creating content like a true professional. These aren’t the only skills you’ll adopt, of course. Alongside learning how to use graphic design tools and even AI content generators, there are plenty of other technical skills that you can add to your repertoire as a content creator. But by flexing your creativity, design, media literacy, and audience muscles, you’ll start to learn what makes it all work together, and create content that sticks with its viewers.