Welcome back to another week of Everitt’s Bangin’ Blogs!
This week is all about brand personality/identity, and understanding your audience. I think the absolute best case study for understanding your audience is the YouTube comedy group, Smosh. Smosh was created in 2005 by two friends, Ian Hecox, and Anthony Padilla. These two made internet classics that are still relevant over 15 years later, even becoming the most subscribed to YouTube channel on the platform at one point. To personalize it, I grew up watching new Smosh videos weekly such as food battles and their parody videos. However, in 2017, Anthony left the group to pursue his own creative ventures. Ian brought in a new group of actors to join him as the faces of Smosh while trying to keep the style and vibe of the videos as close to before as possible. Smosh’s audience was not a fan of this sudden and drastic change, and channel views and growth saw a sharp decline. Recently in 2023, Anthony rejoined Smosh full time again and the views and channel growth instantaneously shot back up to where they once were.
Using the Smosh example as context for the argument, I would like to respectfully disagree with our readings which state that content planning/content strategy is the most important part of a successful content rollout. Michelle Martin even writes “Content planning is the most important factor in the success of your social media strategy”. I would argue that understanding what your audience is looking for, as described by our guest speaker, Kayla Stuckart. The Smosh example exemplifies this point wonderfully as Ian and the team maintained a great content strategy and content calendar, it is just that even though the content they were creating was as optimized as possible, it was impossible to create what the audience truly wanted until Anthony joined the team again.
In conclusion, I think that the most important factor in successful content is delivering exactly what your audience wants. The planning of your content should be based around what your audience wants, not the other way around.