Make Your Content More Appealing by Adopting a Creator Mindset

This article is the second in a series. Catch up with the first article 10 Common Content Mistakes Social Impact Organizations Make if you missed it.

Ok, be honest here. When you produce any given piece of content for your brand — whether it’s an email, a social post, an article, a live event, or a video — how much time do you spend creating the content itself versus thinking about how you’re going to frame and package that content? 

If you’re like most creators, you probably spend 95% of your time coming up with the idea, actually creating the content, editing the content, getting feedback, and iterating on that feedback. And then, once you’re basically done and ready to post or publish, you quickly write the final headline, or design the thumbnail or image, or write the subject line and preview text, or bang out the promotional content you’ll use to entice your audience. 

Framing and Packaging Your Content is More Important Than You Think

What if we told you that the ratio between the time you spend working on the content itself and the time you spend getting strategic about how you’ll frame, package, and distribute that content should be roughly equal?

If there’s one thing you do to change your approach to content creation, let it be this:

All good content starts with a good idea. But how you package that idea can be the difference between a viral hit and another content flop. We’d go as far as to say that a generic idea with creative and strategic packaging will almost always perform better than a great idea with bad packaging.

How you package and frame your content is the most important part of the process to approach creatively. You’ll have to find your own distinct way of packaging and framing your content that’s aligned with your brand and appropriate for the channel that the content will eventually live in.

But there are a few best practices when it comes to packaging and framing your content that can help get you on the right path.

Hook Your Audience

Crafting a powerful hook is the first and possibly the most important step in creating scroll-stopping content.

Depending on the type of content, the hook might be crafted from copy, or an image or video, or a combination of the two.

There are limitless ways to craft creative hooks. But all good hooks do one thing really well. They create what’s called a curiosity gap.

A curiosity gap is the space between what you know and what you don’t yet know, based on how the hook is designed. A good curiosity gap creates an itch in our psychology that’s almost impossible to resist.

Chances are, you’ve seen a curiosity gap taken to its extreme form — This is called clickbait. A lot of clickbait content leverages a curiosity gap to get clicks and engagement. The difference between clickbait content and authentic content with a good hook is that you have to actually deliver the goods.

If you get someone to engage with your content after opening a curiosity gap, you have to make sure you’re delivering truly valuable content in the end. Remember, the end goal is not clicks, but connection and value creation. 

Elicit an Emotional Response

A good hook does more than just create a curiosity gap. Good hooks are built using a two-pronged strategy. 

• Prong 1: Create a curiosity gap
• Prong 2: Create an emotional hook 

When crafting a hook, think about what emotional response you want to elicit in the hook itself, not necessarily in the full piece of content. 

There are obviously a ton of different emotions your hook might create, but there are 2 main emotions that good hooks will usually boil down to fear and desire. 

Fear and curiosity, or desire and curiosity, are a powerful combination. Keep in mind, we don’t want to fall into the transactional marketing trap of “Fear-based” marketing. But that doesn’t mean you have to avoid tapping into fear entirely. There’s a careful balance to strike here. 

Example Hooks

The concept of packaging and crafting hooks is relevant for all content formats and channels in distinct ways. Let’s look at a hypothetical email subject line to help clarify.

Let’s say your organization works on affordable housing and housing insecurity. If you were sending an email that featured an impact story about a homeowner named Lauren who your organization had helped, you could simply use “Lauren’s Story” as a subject line. Or “Stories of Impact: Lauren.” But this doesn’t really create much curiosity or elicit much of an emotional response. In fact, I’m probably not opening that email. Are you?

Let’s rethink this subject line using some of what we’ve learned about crafting compelling hooks. 

How about “Lauren’s Story: One Paycheck from Homelessness” Ok, that’s getting somewhere. That generates a lot of questions for the reader. What caused Lauren to get that close to losing her home? How did she overcome these challenges? Did your organization help Lauren? How? How might we prevent other people from going through what Lauren did?

It also generates an immediate emotional response and creates a feeling of empathy, sadness, and even frustration in the reader at income inequality and the growing problem of high cost of living.

Now, a couple of things to consider. Was Lauren actually 1 paycheck away from losing her home? If not, this would certainly be clickbait content. So again, you need to come through on the curiosity gap that you open up here. 

A quick reminder: You should spend just as much time brainstorming subject lines and preview text for your emails as you do on writing the rest of the email, if not the entire impact story. 

Let’s do one more. Let’s say that your organization is unveiling a new youth climate education program in your community and you want to announce the launch of this program on LinkedIn. You could go with something standard like “We’re excited to introduce our Climate4Kids Program'' or something like that. But let’s see if we can get more creative with a few alternative hooks. 

How about “Can grade schoolers crush the climate crisis?” or “Meet the kids solving climate change” or “Is your kid the next climate change warrior?”

These hooks all create curiosity, and hopefully elicit an emotional response as well that entices you to learn more. Are these the most amazing hooks ever? No. But hopefully they help illustrate the mindset you need to develop when crafting your content. 

A Few More Tips About Good Hooks 

Good hooks come in 3 major flavors:

• A Question Hook: Ask the audience a question they want to know the answer to, similar to the ones for our the Climate4Kids example above.
• A Context Hook: Drop the audience into the most exciting part of your story. “Lauren’s Story: One Paycheck from Homelessness” is an example of this type of hook.
• A Statement Hook: Start with a bold statement that you can back up. “Don’t Build Your Brand on Rented Land” is one we used for one of our articles.

Include Visual Hooks

Good hooks and packaging are about more than just good writing. For many formats, hooks can be visual. Think about how captivating a compelling image can be. Or a video. Good visual hooks can do everything good written hooks can do, and more. They can stop us in our scroll, create curiosity, and elicit strong emotional responses. 

The most powerful hooks work when captivating imagery and compelling copy work together. When this is done well, the impact can be exponentially better than just the sum of both parts. 

Crafting compelling hooks and packaging for your content is one of the most important ways you can take your content from a flop to meaningful engagement with your audience. But there’s more that can help you supercharge your content creation journey beyond good packaging. 

We need to explore the strategies and mindset of the world’s most successful content creators and marketers to understand how they’ve made it from content nobodies to legendary examples.

Adopt a Creator Mindset & Strategies

We’ve covered the common content mistakes we see time and time again and discussed the importance of a good hook and packaging for your content. Now let’s cover the strategies and mindset that top creators and marketers use to truly set their content apart and build a sustainable approach to their content strategy and production. 

Here are some ingredients to explore and combine as you work to take your content to the next level:

1. Believe It’s Possible

This one might feel a bit lofty, but stick with us here. Aiming to craft truly scroll-stopping, engaging, mission-moving content is an ambitious endeavor. And there will be many, many times along the way that you’ll feel like throwing in the towel. We’ve been there. So, cultivating a belief that you can do this is super important to help you get through the low times when your content is flopping, or you’re not getting the results you’re looking for. 

At Cosmic, we published articles and insights regularly for years without getting the traction we wanted. In the early days, we’d put hours of time and effort into our articles only to have it feel like we shipped them off into the void. 

Maybe we could have been more strategic about our target keywords or distribution strategy. And we made plenty of mistakes along the way. But we persevered. We kept going. And over time, we started seeing some signs of success. Slowly, organic traffic started to grow on our site. We started getting people mentioning articles we’d written that they resonated with and potential clients coming to us saying they’d been following us for years. 

2. Remember the Lurkers

On the internet, there’s a general rule of thumb that for any given platform or channel, 90% of users are silent lurkers, 9% of users contribute a little, and just 1% of users contribute almost all of the content and measurable engagement on the platform. 

If you’re consistently creating content you’re part of the 1% of people on the internet publishing regularly. But, more importantly, 90% of the people who see your content don’t ever engage with it. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t making an impact on them.

3. Create Content Pillars (and stick with them)

One of the worst feelings as a creator is the blank canvas problem. If you know you need to create a piece of content, but it feels like you’re starting from scratch every time, it’s going to eat into valuable content creation time. 

Creating content pillars can be a game changer for this. Determine what topics, formats, and types of content are most viable for your team to produce — and valuable to your audiences. This is a good time to get creative with packaging. When you have a predetermined content strategy with content pillars, you have helpful constraints that can help hone your creativity and idea generation. 

This is also good for your audiences. Over time, your followers will learn what niche, topics, cadence, and formats to expect from you and your content. And this helps them relate to your brand and quickly determine if they are a good fit for your content. 

4. Good Planning Creates Good Luck

We have to acknowledge that there’s a certain amount of luck involved with having your content really get traction or even go viral. But luck isn’t totally passive. You can plan for good luck and increase your odds of success by being consistent, having an intentional content strategy, and being ready to capitalize on earned attention when you do break through. 

Set yourself up to take good luck and convert it into fuel for your mission.  

5. Create Hero or Featured Pieces

Although consistency is key, and creating smaller, bite-sized content truly does add up exponentially over time, you should also plan for some larger hero or featured pieces of content as part of your broader content strategy. 

Some examples of hero pieces would be: 

• Year-in-reviews 
• Brand Narrative Video 
• Interactive experiences and microsites
• Launching larger media like podcasts, video series, or a digital magazine

This is next-level content that can help you stand out. People recognize quality and are more compelled to engage and spread the word when they find something worth sharing. 

6. Tap into Timeliness

Look for ways to make your cause and your mission relevant to what’s timely and relevant to culture. If you can find ways to tie into the current discussion and zeitgeist, you can show how your work is relevant and worthy of attention. 

We’re not talking about feeling like you have to post something for “national xyz day” here either. It means tying your work into important cultural conversations and ideas that matter. If you can tap into timeliness, you’re more likely to capture attention and drive action for your mission. 

7. Cultivate Curiosity

When you’re assessing your content strategy and engagement, you have to learn to generate a mindset of curiosity. When things don’t go as planned or your content flops, you have to resist the urge to see yourself and your content as a failure. Instead, you need to reframe this through the lens of curiosity and investigate what may be causing your lackluster results. Sometimes, things just flop, and it doesn’t seem to make any sense. And other times things take off, and you really can’t explain why. There’s definitely a certain randomness to this that’s real. 

So you have to look for larger trends and patterns to see what seems to get the most engagement and traction with your community and what tends to get lost in the noise. 

Remember, take a deeper look at engagement beyond vanity metrics like views, clicks, likes, and shares. Those signals are important, but not as important as engagement with your broader brand, mission, and community. 

8. Have Fun 

Chances are, if you’re having fun making your content, your audience will have fun following your brand. It might sound counterintuitive to talk about having fun creating content when you’re working on important social impact issues that often deal with injustices and inequalities in our society. And there are times to be serious with your content. But if you get truly creative, you can find ways to have fun and create interesting, engaging content that your audience loves. 

We once did a campaign for a climate justice organization in California. We leaned into a light-hearted, fun, nostalgic tone for the brand that made people feel hopeful, optimistic, and activated rather than hopeless and apathetic. The campaign garnered outsized support and engagement, largely because it just felt good to be part of it. Climate justice work is serious work. But we can have fun while making a serious impact. 

When you can craft a content strategy and approach that is fun and creative, it can be a lifesaver when you are dealing with the harder parts of content marketing and keeps you motivated and active when you most feel like throwing in the towel.

Eric, our Founder & Creative Director is a huge music nerd. Writing and recording the music for our Designing Tomorrow podcast is one of his favorite parts of producing it. When things feel tough or like he’s in a rut, he can focus on writing some new ambient tracks that we can use for future episodes. This charges him up and keeps him motivated to work through the harder parts.

Full Speed Ahead

Creating content that actually breaks through is becoming increasingly important for social impact brands of all shapes and sizes. Because in our digital-first culture, content is the currency of attention, affinity, and action.

In this article, we covered the importance of framing and packaging your content. How to craft a compelling hook, create a curiosity gap, and elicit powerful emotional responses to your content that drives meaningful engagement and opportunity. 

We examined the strategies and mindsets that top content creators and marketers use to set their content, and their brands, apart. These creators believe it’s possible, and cultivate a culture of curiosity with their content production. And, perhaps most importantly, they find a way to keep content production fun. 

We hope these ideas and this advice inspire you to reach your true potential as a content creator and marketer. Learning to harness the power of effective content and storytelling for your mission can make a massive difference for your growth and progress as a social impact organization.