7 Lessons from Jay Acunzo for Creators and Marketers
Jay Acunzo has been creating content on the Internet for a long time. His journey on social media began when, as a sports journalist in 2005, he started a blog while interning and writing for a student paper.
When he moved into marketing, his sports blog called “Blog, Don’t Lie” (named after the infamous quote by NBA player Rasheed Wallace) shifted focus to writing about sports writing. He wrote about other creators who were writing about sports, connecting with and celebrating their work. And to find those people, there was no better place than social media.
Thanks to his early start on social media and his deep understanding of the relationship between marketing and creativity, Jay brings a unique perspective from which creators and marketers can learn a lot. In this article, we dive into the lessons from Jay Acunzo for the modern creator.
Your job isn’t to speak clearly – it’s to create connection
It’s easy to get sucked into the numbers and metrics and make that the focus of your work as a creator or marketer. Your audience doesn’t have that perspective, and so your content may not perform well because you think the job is to create content.
However, the job is to create connection, and the best way to do that is to ensure that your own personal creative fingerprints are all over the work. Infuse your personal perspective, your lived experiences, and your stories, and you become irreplaceable in the eyes of your audience.
In other words, share the things you lived through, observed, or remember that led to a meaningful experience or insight. That's what effective storytellers do.
You might be wondering how practical “creating connection” is, but Jay shares a great way to reframe your perspective: “Yes, you can measure things you can buy. Or the things social networks say you should prioritize. But you can also measure the things you have to earn – and marketers don't do the second one nearly enough.”
So you can buy downloads to a podcast, but you have to earn episode completions. You can buy traffic to your website, you have to earn repeat visitors. You can buy emails for your list, you have to earn replies to your email. These are the signals that your work matters and resonates because you created connection with your audience.
If you’re worried about AI, you’ve got it all wrong
There are two sides to the coin when it comes to the use of AI in content creation and marketing – those who use it to produce their work instead of to unblock or facilitate it.
On one side, if they think the job is to create content, will worry about or use AI as a creator replacement. They will let it create whole pieces of content for them, essentially outsourcing their imagination.
However, the other side, if they know the …read more
Source:: Buffer Blog
