“If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy. ”

Strategy is creating a unique, valuable position with a different set of activities.As a content creator, you can decide between three sources to create your strategic positioning: <ul><li>Serving few needs of many content consumers. </li><li>Serving broad needs of few content consumers. </li><li>Serving broad needs of many content consumers in a narrow market. </li></ul>

Create a Unique Valuable Position

Trade-offs achieve two things: <ul><li>Create the need for choice. </li><li>Protect against repositioners and straddlers.  </li></ul>Trade-offs happen when activities are incompatible. One way to think of trade-offs is that having more of one thing requires less of another.

Make Tradeoffs — Choose What Not to Do

There are three types of fit: <ul><li>The first type of fit is consistency between each activity and the overall strategy. </li><li>The second type of fit happens when activities reinforce each other. </li><li>The third type of fit goes beyond activity reinforcement to optimization of effort.  </li></ul>

Create Fit Among Your Activities

<ul><li>Producing and releasing lots of content isn't a strategy. </li><li>Increasing the quality of your content isn’t a strategy.  </li></ul>

Quality and Quantity Are Not Strategies

<figure><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/500/1*hwucqfN4c32i8k6VpwYkuw" width="680" height="385"><figcaption class="ic id cz cx cy ie if ce b ga cg fi" data-selectable-paragraph="" dir="ltr">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@spanic?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText" class="ck ig" rel="noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">Damir Spanic</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/collections/74632998/medium-articles-images-j.e.-guzman/7c72eb7bb940112460d841b2675618c0?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText" class="ck ig" rel="noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">Unsplash</a></figcaption></figure><BLOCKQUOTE>“If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy. ” ― Alvin Toffler</BLOCKQUOTE>Strategy is so cool that we all feel tempted to use the word. I guess it makes us feel smarter. But most of the time, it is used to mean anything but strategy. A sin I am not exempt of.Today I talked with a friend who read something I wrote. He asked me what my content creator strategy is?At first, I thought, oh, I guess by definition I am a content creator. Then I felt embarrassed because I don't have one. A proper one.The embarrassing part is that I am the one who insists to him on having a strategy when playing chess. Implying that is the reason he loses very often.I am not foreign to strategy because anyone who studied or dived in the business world sooner or later comes across <a href="https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy" rel="noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">What is Strategy?</a> by Michael E. Porter. A superb piece of business wisdom.While popular, it takes a bright mind or several readings and thinking hours to grasp the wisdom tightly packed in Porter’s 37 pages article.Furthermore, it is thought of for traditional industries and businesses and not for content creators. However, if we see beyond the shape, the wisdom it contains is timeless.Therefore, what we are going to do is to surgically extract, translate, and simplify the most relevant insights for a content creator’s strategy.<h1 data-selectable-paragraph="">Step 1: Create a Unique Valuable Position</h1>As a content creator, you can decide between three sources to create your strategic positioning:<UL><LI>Serving few needs of many content consumers.</LI><LI>Serving broad needs of few content consumers.</LI><LI>Serving broad needs of many content consumers in a narrow market.</LI></UL>A content creator has a competitive strategy when he is different. It means he consciously chooses a combination of activities to deliver a unique value mix.The core of a content creator’s strategy is in the activities he chooses to do differently than others or the activities he chooses to do that others aren't doing. Otherwise, the content strategy is not a strategy but a catchy phrase that won't withstand competition.<BLOCKQUOTE>Content creators compete for content consumer's time.</BLOCKQUOTE><BLOCKQUOTE>Dimension 1: Strategy is creating a unique valuable position with a different set of activities. It doesn't exist one ideal position. Otherwise, we wouldn't need a strategy.</BLOCKQUOTE><h1 data-selectable-paragraph="">Step 2: Make Tradeoffs — Choose What Not to Do</h1>The first problem you will encounter after creating your unique value position is that you will attract imitation.That is why a value position alone is not enough to guarantee a sustainable advantage. Imitators will copy your strategic position in two ways:First, another content creator can reposition himself as your clone to match your superior performance and add a subtle twist like being a more fashionable creator.Secondly, content creators will imitate you by straddling. The straddlers want the benefits of your successful position while keeping their existing position. Thus, the imitator will graft your differentiating features onto the activities he already performs.Many believe competitors can copy any market position. So it might seem like nearly any content creator could imitate any other creator’s activities. But that is not the case.To have a sustainable strategic position, we need trade-offs with other positions. Trade-offs happen when activities are incompatible. One way to think of trade-offs is that having more of one thing requires less of another.Trade-offs achieve two things:<UL><LI>Create the need for choice.</LI><LI>Protect against repositioners and straddlers.</LI></UL><h1 data-selectable-paragraph="">Trade-offs Happen Because of 3 Reasons</h1>The first reason is an inconsistency between image and reputation. A content creator who built his image delivering one type of value might lack credibility and confuse content consumers when delivering another kind of value or when attempting to deliver two incompatible things simultaneously. In the end, he might end up undermining his reputation.The second reason is that trade-offs arise naturally from the tailored activities you perform to deliver value from a strategic position. You have to be aware that different positions demand different content configurations, different work routines, different behavior, different equipment, and different skills. Many trade-offs reflect inflexibilities in work habits, people, gadgets, or equipment.Finally, trade-offs occur because of limitations on the internal team coordination or self-management of the individual creator. When you clearly choose to compete in one way and not another, you are making your team’s priorities clear.<BLOCKQUOTE>Content creators who attemps to be all things to all content consumers risk confusion in their trenches.</BLOCKQUOTE>Your team members or yourself may fall into confusion even while making simple daily operative decisions because of the lack of a clear framework as a consequence of being everything for everyone.<h1 data-selectable-paragraph="">Positioning Trade-offs Are Pervasive In Competition and Essential to Strategy</h1>Tradeoffs create the need for choosing and intently limit what a content creator offers. But, at the same time, tradeoffs deter straddling or repositioning because competitors imitating us undermine their own strategies — if they have any — and degrade the value of their existing activities.<BLOCKQUOTE>Dimension 2: Strategy is making trade-offs to compete. Without trade-offs, we wouldn't need to choose, and thus we wouldn’t need a strategy.</BLOCKQUOTE><BLOCKQUOTE>The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.</BLOCKQUOTE><h1 data-selectable-paragraph="">Step 3: Create Fit Among Your Activities</h1>To create a strategy, we combine activities. It is key to understand that strategy involves a whole system of activities. Strategy is not a collection of individual parts.<BLOCKQUOTE>Strategy provides a competitive advantage when its activities fit and reinforce each other.</BLOCKQUOTE>Fit deter imitators because it creates a chain that is as strong as its strongest link. Don't think of your content creation system as something divided into core competencies, critical resources, and key success factors. Instead, think of it as a whole unitary system of activities.In fact, the fit is far more important to achieve a competitive advantage than you might think. It is paramount because discrete activities often affect each other.There are three types of fit:<UL><LI>The first type of fit is consistency between each activity and the overall strategy.</LI><LI>The second type of fit happens when activities reinforce each other.</LI><LI>The third type of fit goes beyond activity reinforcement to optimization of effort.</LI></UL>Consistency ensures the accumulation of competitive advantages of activities, preventing them from eroding or cancel themselves out. In addition, it makes the strategy easier to communicate to content consumers, team members, and shareholders. Finally, it makes it easier to implement the strategy through single-mindedness in your content creation team or self.Fit has to do with the ways a content creator’s activities interact and reinforce each other.<BLOCKQUOTE>Fit drives both competitive advantage and sustainability.</BLOCKQUOTE>When activities mutually reinforce each other, your competitors can’t easily imitate you. If they try to match a few of your activities but not your whole interlocking system, their results will be disastrous.<BLOCKQUOTE>Dimension 3: Strategy is about combining activities to create fit as a whole system.</BLOCKQUOTE>Those are the 3 steps and 3 strategies dimensions that I promised you to create your strategy and establish your competitive advantage. Now comes an extra something for you.<h1 data-selectable-paragraph="">Bonus: Notes on Creating Your Strategy</h1>These notes are intended to give you a deeper understanding of what you just read. Why not a conclusion? Because the story is written in a very straightforward fashion, you can see that for the way we jumped directly to the steps and dimensions of strategy as well.But if there is a reason, it is that these notes deliver huge extra value to you because they contain insights that weren't developed in this story to avoid doubling its length but not its value.<h1 data-selectable-paragraph="">Quality and Quantity Are Not Strategies</h1>You will often listen or read content creators saying that their strategy is releasing content frequently or delivering high-quality content. About those statements, you need to know that:<UL><LI>Producing and releasing lots of content isn't a strategy.</LI><LI>Increasing the quality of your content isn’t a strategy.</LI></UL>Increasing content production and quality are operational effectiveness results but not strategies.Both strategy and operational effectiveness are essential to superior performance. However, operational effectiveness results without a proper strategy can get us frustrated by our inability to turn them into sustainable profitability. What is to say, steadily monthly money into our pockets.<h1 data-selectable-paragraph="">Example of Interlocking Your Activities as a Whole System</h1>Suppose your content creation system consists of 5 activities. After reading this story, you ensured your 5 activities are consistent, reinforce each other, and optimize efforts.Because you are a successful and popular content creator, you attract imitators who are trying to reposition themself as your clones and straddle by grafting your distinct features onto their existing activities. They want to reap the benefits from your strategic position, which has proved successful.But don't worry, your fit interlocked set of activities (Step 3) that you handpicked after making trade-offs by deciding what not to do (Step 2) to support your value position that arises from the few or many content consumers whose few or broad needs you decided to serve (Step 1) will deter imitators.How so?To illustrate, let us calculate the probability of someone imitating your strategy.The probability of an imitator matching a single activity is often less than one. For our example, we will assume a 90% probability which is 0.9 in decimals.Now we calculate the probabilities of matching your entire system by multiplying 5 times 90% because your strategy has 5 activities (0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.59). It means a 59% of probabilities of imitating your whole system.However, the 59% would be true if imitators know everything you do. But in reality, imitators do not have access to the activities they cannot see you perform or guess from your content.For our example, assume you perform 1 activity no one could guess which is meeting your friends at the bar on Fridays who happen to be experts on finance, public policies, and philosophy whose contradictory opinions provide you the deep analysis for which your podcast is famous.If we calculate the new probabilities considering the chances of imitating your friends meeting at the bar with a 10% it results (0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.1 = 0.07). In other words, imitators in reality only have a 7% probability of replicating your whole system.<BLOCKQUOTE>Now imagine if you have not 1 but 2 or 3 of those secret activities hidden backstage. Any competitor will face formidable barriers to imitation. Such is the power of your content creator strategy!</BLOCKQUOTE>

We simplify the most relevant insights for a content creator's strategy based on What is Strategy? by Michael E. Porter to gain a competitive advantage.

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Marketing & Sales

strategy

Strategy

“If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy. ” ― Alvin Toffler

S trategy is so cool that we all feel tempted to use the word. I guess it makes us feel smarter. But most of the time, it is used to mean anything but strategy. A sin I am not exempt of.

Today I talked with a friend who read something I wrote. He asked me what my content creator strategy is?

At first, I thought, oh, I guess by definition I am a content creator. Then I felt embarrassed because I don't have one. A proper one.

The embarrassing part is that I am the one who insists to him on having a strategy when playing chess. Implying that is the reason he loses very often.

I am not foreign to strategy because anyone who studied or dived in the business world sooner or later comes across <a href="https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy">What is Strategy? </a>by Michael E. Porter . A superb piece of business wisdom.

While popular, it takes a bright mind or several readings and thinking hours to grasp the wisdom tightly packed in Porter’s 37 pages article.

Furthermore, it is thought of for traditional industries and businesses and not for content creators. However, if we see beyond the shape,the wisdom it contains is timeless .

Therefore, what we are going to do is to surgically extract, translate, and simplify the most relevant insights for a content creator’s strategy.

Step 1: Create a Unique Valuable Position

As a content creator, you can decide between three sources to create your strategic positioning:

<ul><li>Serving few needs of many content consumers. </li><li>Serving broad needs of few content consumers. </li><li>Serving broad needs of many content consumers in a narrow market. </li> </ul>

A content creator has a competitive strategy when he is different . It means he consciously chooses a combination of activities to deliver a unique value mix.

The core of a content creator’s strategy is in the activities he chooses to do differently than others or the activities he chooses to do that others aren't doing. Otherwise, the content strategy is not a strategy but a catchy phrase that won't withstand competition.

Content creators compete for content consumer's time.

Dimension 1: Strategy is creating a unique valuable position with a different set of activities. It doesn't exist one ideal position. Otherwise, we wouldn't need a strategy.

Step 2: Make Tradeoffs — Choose What Not to Do

The first problem you will encounter after creating your unique value position is that you will attract imitation .

That is why a value position alone is not enough to guarantee a sustainable advantage. Imitators will copy your strategic position in two ways :

First, another content creator can reposition himself as your clone to match your superior performance and add a subtle twist like being a more fashionable creator.

Secondly, content creators will imitate you by straddling . The straddlers want the benefits of your successful position while keeping their existing position. Thus, the imitator will graft your differentiating features onto the activities he already performs.

Many believe competitors can copy any market position . So it might seem like nearly any content creator could imitate any other creator’s activities. But that is not the case.

To have a sustainable strategic position, we need trade-offs with other positions . Trade-offs happen when activities are incompatible. One way to think of trade-offs is that having more of one thing requires less of another.

<ul><li>Create the need for choice. </li><li>Protect against repositioners and straddlers. </li> </ul>

The first reason is an inconsistency between image and reputation. A content creator who built his image delivering one type of value might lack credibility and confuse content consumers when delivering another kind of value or when attempting to deliver two incompatible things simultaneously. In the end, he might end up undermining his reputation.

The second reason is that trade-offs arise naturally from the tailored activities you perform to deliver value from a strategic position. You have to be aware that different positions demand different content configurations, different work routines, different behavior, different equipment, and different skills. Many trade-offs reflect inflexibilities in work habits, people, gadgets, or equipment.

Finally, trade-offs occur because of limitations on the internal team coordination or self-management of the individual creator . When you clearly choose to compete in one way and not another, you are making your team’s priorities clear.

Content creators who attemps to be all things to all content consumers risk confusion in their trenches.

Your team members or yourself may fall into confusion even while making simple daily operative decisions because of the lack of a clear framework as a consequence of being everything for everyone.

Positioning Trade-offs Are Pervasive In Competition and Essential to Strategy

Tradeoffs create the need for choosing and intently limit what a content creator offers. But, at the same time, tradeoffs deter straddling or repositioning because competitors imitating us undermine their own strategies — if they have any — and degrade the value of their existing activities.

Dimension 2: Strategy is making trade-offs to compete. Without trade-offs, we wouldn't need to choose, and thus we wouldn’t need a strategy.

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

To create a strategy, we combine activities. It is key to understand that strategy involves a whole system of activities. Strategy is not a collection of individual parts.

Strategy provides a competitive advantage when its activities fit and reinforce each other.

Fit deter imitators because it creates a chain that is as strong as its strongest link. Don't think of your content creation system as something divided into core competencies, critical resources, and key success factors. Instead, think of it as a whole unitary system of activities.

In fact, the fit is far more important to achieve a competitive advantage than you might think . It is paramount because discrete activities often affect each other.

<ul><li>The first type of fit is consistency between each activity and the overall strategy. </li><li>The second type of fit happens when activities reinforce each other. </li><li>The third type of fit goes beyond activity reinforcement to optimization of effort. </li> </ul>

Consistency ensures the accumulation of competitive advantages of activities, preventing them from eroding or cancel themselves out. In addition, it makes the strategy easier to communicate to content consumers, team members, and shareholders. Finally, it makes it easier to implement the strategy through single-mindedness in your content creation team or self.

Fit has to do with the ways a content creator’s activities interact and reinforce each other.

Fit drives both competitive advantage and sustainability.

When activities mutually reinforce each other, your competitors can’t easily imitate you. If they try to match a few of your activities but not your whole interlocking system, their results will be disastrous.

Dimension 3: Strategy is about combining activities to create fit as a whole system.

Those are the 3 steps and 3 strategies dimensions that I promised you to create your strategy and establish your competitive advantage. Now comes an extra something for you.

These notes are intended to give you a deeper understanding of what you just read. Why not a conclusion? Because the story is written in a very straightforward fashion, you can see that for the way we jumped directly to the steps and dimensions of strategy as well.

But if there is a reason, it is that these notes deliver huge extra value to you because they contain insights that weren't developed in this story to avoid doubling its length but not its value.

You will often listen or read content creators saying that their strategy is releasing content frequently or delivering high-quality content. About those statements, you need to know that:

<ul><li>Producing and releasing lots of content isn't a strategy. </li><li>Increasing the quality of your content isn’t a strategy. </li> </ul>

Increasing content production and quality are operational effectiveness results but not strategies.

Both strategy and operational effectiveness are essential to superior performance. However, operational effectiveness results without a proper strategy can get us frustrated by our inability to turn them into sustainable profitability . What is to say, steadily monthly money into our pockets.

Example of Interlocking Your Activities as a Whole System

Suppose your content creation system consists of 5 activities. After reading this story, you ensured your 5 activities are consistent, reinforce each other, and optimize efforts.

Because you are a successful and popular content creator, you attract imitators who are trying to reposition themself as your clones and straddle by grafting your distinct features onto their existing activities. They want to reap the benefits from your strategic position, which has proved successful .

But don't worry, your fit interlocked set of activities ( Step 3 ) that you handpicked after making trade-offs by deciding what not to do ( Step 2 ) to support your value position that arises from the few or many content consumers whose few or broad needs you decided to serve ( Step 1 ) will deter imitators.

To illustrate, let us calculate the probability of someone imitating your strategy.

The probability of an imitator matching a single activity is often less than one. For our example, we will assume a 90% probability which is 0.9 in decimals.

Now we calculate the probabilities of matching your entire system by multiplying 5 times 90% because your strategy has 5 activities (0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.59). It means a 59% of probabilities of imitating your whole system.

However, the 59% would be true if imitators know everything you do.But in reality, imitators do not have access to the activities they cannot see you perform or guess from your content.

For our example, assume you perform 1 activity no one could guess which is meeting your friends at the bar on Fridays who happen to be experts on finance, public policies, and philosophy whose contradictory opinions provide you the deep analysis for which your podcast is famous.

If we calculate the new probabilities considering the chances of imitating your friends meeting at the bar with a 10% it results (0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.1 = 0.07). In other words, imitators in reality only have a 7% probability of replicating your whole system.

Now imagine if you have not 1 but 2 or 3 of those secret activities hidden backstage. Any competitor will face formidable barriers to imitation. Such is the power of your content creator strategy!

The Successful Content Creator’s Strategy

ALVIN TOFFLER

Create a Unique Valuable Position

Make Tradeoffs — Choose What Not to Do

Create Fit Among Your Activities

Quality and Quantity Are Not Strategies

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