How Grace Andrews Builds A Content Strategy In 5 Steps

We all search on social for everything every single day. And if I search your brand and you've got 139 followers, I'm probably not going to believe it's real. If you were to walk into a brand tomorrow, where would you start? When it comes to just creating a content strategy, you've got to start with the goal. What are we trying to achieve here? They're so easy to talk about because they're just doing it so well. They're just such a great example of how you can do it on low budget. We don't need to think, okay, we need 50k here to get this off the ground. Like, do you have five pounds? Do you know what I mean? Do we have. Can we commit to a five pound capcut subscription? Welcome back to Building Brand Advocacy. We're back with Grace Andrews and this time we're doing something a little different. In today's episode, we're digging deep in the content strategy for brands. I know content feels overwhelming at the moment with so many options and avenues. So I'm going to be asking Grace, if I was in a brand and wanted to build out my content strategy, how would I go about it? Grace, welcome to Building Brand Advocacy and this special mastermind session. I'm so excited to dig into this with you. So excited. A big blank space that we need to fill. If you were to walk into a brand tomorrow, like, let's just start quite big, quite vague, like, where would you start? When it comes to just creating a content strategy, I think the first thing is, for me, content has got to serve business goals. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense financially. It doesn't make sense for the CMO who's got to pitch it in, it doesn't make sense. So the team, whoever is developing the content, have to understand that it's got to feed a business goal. So I always start with a goal. What are we trying to achieve with content? What role does content play in your company? Because it can't do everything. It can't fulfill all of your values, your wants, your missions, your goals for the year, but it can help contribute to something. So I'm always going to come in and go, what is your goal with your content? Because everything else, we can build the system off the back of that. If the goal is to purely gain market share through entertainment and get word of mouth spreading, great, then we have a really clear idea of what we're going to create. But if you go in being like, we need to sell product and we need to gain market share and we need to gain followers and we need to be the best person for doing this and people need to trust us. And when you start throwing all these words around, it can get really confusing. And then you just start getting in this system of, like, post something, post something, post something. And it's like, no, no, no. We need to create the system that runs to achieve the goal. Otherwise, how do we measure if any of this is working? Yeah. So I always, always, I'm going to put it right. I'm going to put it right at the top, in the middle here. Like, you've got to start with the goal. What are we trying to achieve here? Just one. I think if you said, day one, we're getting started, we're coming in, we're figuring out what content looks like in your business. I think one. And that can be a big goal. You know, that can be. We want to stick on them. We want to increase our awareness by 7% or whatever it's going to be. We want to become the number one choice of brand in the UK for this certain product or industry. That's fine. But we know what we're trying to achieve. It can be sort of very ambitious. And then we ladder back, right? Then we get into the signals and the content and all of that. But we can measure up to something. And at the end of the year, at the end of the quarters, we can go, are we edging towards that goal with our content, or is our content sitting over here and the goal sitting over here and we need to reevaluate the system? Do you think if there's only kind of like one biggish goal, do you think people are afraid to kind of say, this is because we want more followers, we want that more reach, we need the awareness. Because that sounds so kind of like shallow, doesn't it? Or do you think they overcomplicate it by saying because they're kind of afraid to kind of just go with, I'm not saying it's the vanity metrics, but I think when brands are starting out, they want the followers, they want the awareness, but they almost overcomplicate it because they don't want to just say, this is because we want the reach. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think two things can be true at the same time. I often say, oh, followers don't matter anymore. The algorithm's changed. That is true. The way the algorithm works now it's a discovery feed rather than the following feed. So we're going to be served 80, 90% of content from people we don't follow before we see the people we follow. So the role and the value in a follower has weakened, has lessened. Yeah, but that's not to say that when you're a business starting out, you need a follower base for people to take you seriously. Of course you do. We all search on social for everything every single day. And if I search a brand and you've got 139 followers, I'm probably not going to believe it's real or I'm not going to feel aligned with it. Because you don't care about social. Yeah. And. And so I'm not going to be able to connect with you through that platform, so. Absolutely. I think when you're starting out, when we're starting social channels, they've got to be metrics that we're looking to achieve when we look at how we measure this. But my, my belief is that if you set a business goal, if you set a business goal when you're creating your content strategy, it means it ladders up to something bigger. And it doesn't sit in isolation, because what so often happens with businesses is they have an amazing product, they have an amazing mission, they know how they're going to sell it and get it in retail and all of that sort of thing. If you're a consumer product, and then they go, oh, should we just stick something on social? And it's an afterthought. And the reason why I always want to ladder up to a business goal is that it drives impact so much wider in the business and it's thought of with so much more, so much more strategically and so much more intentionally than being an afterthought. So when I say goal, I don't necessarily mean a social goal, a following goal, a number of engagements, whatever. I mean, what role is content going to play in influencing your business goals that you've said at the start of January or start of Q1 or whatever. Yeah. What are you trying to achieve in your business and how are we going to achieve that through content? So we're talking like big business goals here. Choose one. And that's what we're going to ladder up our content. Okay, great. We got our goal. What is kind of like the next step then for you? And something that I wanted to touch on is like the branded content. Like, how do we approach that? Because obviously we're talking about ugc. It's all customers, it's even employees that are creating the content. And we don't want to hear from the brands anymore, but we kind of do. What does that approach look like for you from a branded content perspective? So the first part of the question, I've given you three questions. No, no, it's fine. I'm like, how do we approach this in a way that's going to ladder up? So I think the first part is let's talk about content more broadly. What do we need to do when we, when we have the goal is we have to ask ourselves, what do our audience need to believe to be true to achieve that goal? So this is something I call signals. So a lot of the time people will jump straight into, like, what do we create today? Like the panic mode of the newsroom style of what are we going to write today? What are we going to create today before they've done all this work? And what we actually need to go into is what I call your signals. And this is like, what do people need to believe to be true when you're creating your content? Like, what is the feeling? What is the signal you're sending out that is going to allow you to achieve that goal? So a lot of brands are like, we want people to trust us. And it's like, well, what proof are you going to share to generate that trust? You can't just share loads of content and expect your trust barometer to increase. We need to be thinking very strategically about the signals that are going to achieve the metrics of what we're trying to achieve with the goal. So if it is trust, how are you going to prove that in your content? How are you going to create a sense of trust? What signals are you going to give off to achieve that trust? And when it comes to branded content as a brand, as a business, I think the whole everything has just got to ladder back up to this. So if you're trying to create, I think about brands like, I don't know, let's just say Perfect Ted for now, Perfect Ted are a Matcha energy drink. And their goal is, is to spread positive energy. That is their mission, that is their goal. Through selling product, they spread positive energy. It's an energy drink. Through their content, they create entertaining, exciting, shareable, fun, interesting content. And so those are the signals. The signals for spreading positive energy are it's got to be light hearted, it's got to be entertaining, it's got to be shareable, it's got to be interesting to our target audience, it's got to have shock factor and, and it's got to be energizing. And so when you know, all of those feelings and the signals that you want to give off with your content. Then the formats, which is what would be next on the cycle, become really obvious because you go, okay, well, we're not probably going to focus on sit down, podcast style short form clips, because that doesn't really fit into the signals we're trying to make people feel. We're going to go for skits, we're going to go for a serialized, entertaining, UGC style, EGC style series. We're going to bring all of the voices from the company through. We're going to do quick fire vox pops on the street. We're going to, you know, immediately I go, okay, I know what, where we're playing. I know exactly the sort of thing we want to create here because I know the feeling we want to create to achieve that goal. So a lot of people skip over this stage and they just jump to content. But I would be really sort of trying to think, how do we want to make people feel and how do we prove that to be true? And that immediately I go, well, the content formats and systems and platforms are really obvious, but so often we start with the platform and work backwards. And I think what's so great about this method of sort of getting to your content system and content engine is you're not treating any platform in isolation. You're not treating any channel as an isolated media platform for your business. You see it all as sort of a cohesive world. And I talk a lot about brand world building and about the signals and the touch points. And we're thinking about how it all works in tandem, all together and moves as one as opposed to what's happening on Instagram today? What's happening on TikTok? Have you written a LinkedIn post? What's happening in our out of home? What's happening with our creators? It's like, no, no, no. Start with the signal. What do we want to make them feel? The content then speaks for itself. And then it's so clear where that should live and what platforms that should go on because there are native places for that to live. It's a great point. It makes me think, are you familiar with Beekman 1802? No. They're like, they're, they're, they sell here. They're mainly a us brand, but it started off with the two founders kind of inheriting like a goat farm from their neighbors. Amazing. And so they're now like the biggest kind of beauty product in skincare, all made out of goat milk. And they call their customers neighbors because that's how they've kind of. But it's all based on kindness. And that feeling that I get from Beekman is exactly that. And when they have a great advocacy program, when you sign up, you do a kindness test on like how kind you are obsessed. And it's just, it just made me really kind of relate back to that because everything they do is kindness all the way through. It's so deep rooted and I think that's so rare that a brand can get a feeling kind of intertwined into everything. It's that moment of I'm seeing this brand show up across everything. Their email, their website, their out of home, their banners, their everything. It's making me feel the same thing over and over. And it's that repetition that makes people ultimately convert to buy something. So that's why sort of starting with this business goal and understanding the role content plays towards your business is going okay. This isn't just like a nice to have thing, it's not like a fun thing. It's like this is genuinely going to contribute to like our bottom line. Yeah, of course you mentioned like you were talking about trust, but you threw out loads of different kind of content ideas straight away. And it's all great. But how does a brand prioritize like sort of which pieces of content and where? Yeah, so from signals we're like, okay, let's start thinking about our content. This is only when content starts to get into the conversation so we understand the role it's playing, we understand how we want to make people feel and then we start to look at content and it's kind of hard to give a blanket formula here because it's so dependent on the type of business and what they're trying to achieve. But what I'd be looking at is I think you need, and this is before platform, we're not even at platform yet, we're just understanding formats. And when I say formats, it's repeatable formats. Because if we're building an engine that's going to serve the goal, we can't be thinking every day what are we going to post. So I'd be thinking about sort of an always on format, always on format. What's something that we can produce week in, week out that's going to contribute to producing those signals for people that will achieve our goal. So that could be a multi part series, it could be a sub stack, it could be the founder note or editorial letter from the founder every Monday on LinkedIn. Because the ritual of Going weekly starts to sort of occupy space in people's brains where they start to expect you to show up. So even when I look at sort of myself in the Brown dime building, I was very intentional about releasing a YouTube episode every single Friday. Because what now happens 30, 40 weeks in is if I don't get that YouTube episode, they're messaging. Where is this 8:00am on a Friday? 8:01. I've got six messages on Instagram. 10 by 8:02. Come on, Grace. Because no, honestly. And I'm like, oh. And when I was in another country last week and I got the time difference completely wrong and I woke up to all these messages, I was like, you know when you wake up and your heart's in your mouth? I was like. But they hold you into account, but they also. You become part of their routine. Can I just stop? One quick question here. If it is something more long form like YouTube or a podcast, and you can't commit to a weekly thing because that's quite an investment. Yeah. Do you then think, I need it always on? So it's going to have to be something a bit more kind of like a substack. There are some businesses who are starting from scratch, but they have millions in the pot for budget. And a weekly podcast or a weekly YouTube episode or a weekly subsec or whatever it is, is attainable. But if I'm talking with a really small business, I'm like, what is realistic for you? You're probably wearing many hats right now as well. What is sustainable and what is realistic for you? I say weekly because I really think if you're going to build the muscle, you have to commit to something weekly. And that can be a LinkedIn post, but it's got to be a formatted LinkedIn post, not just what am I going to post on LinkedIn today? And when I say format, that means it's almost like a template. So whether it's a show on YouTube or whether it's a letter from the founder on LinkedIn each week, it almost has a similar structure that people start to recognize and they look forward to. I mean, there are some marketing businesses I know that post a weekly roundup, for example, and I know on a Wednesday that I'm going to see their roundup of what's working for them this week. And it doesn't need to be a huge investment. It's more about the rhythm and the commitment. And I talk about building the muscle because it's. It's hard to commit to something. But once you get Past that sort of four week, five week window, it starts to become part of your routine and getting started is the hardest bit. So I say format, but it could also be template or repeatable structure. It's something that's repeatable and sustainable that's going to evoke that feeling for your audience, that's going to contribute to that wider goal of what you're trying to achieve. And then at a base level, I'd be looking to create some sort of multi part series which is more campaign or moment driven, that really, really sort of is your shareable moment. Because we'll talk about metrics and measuring, but if this is sort of reaching your existing audience, there's always going to be an element of needing to reach new audience, but also generate awareness and visibility for what you're creating. Because otherwise we're always going to be at the same sort of level. Like every business that I've ever come across wants to grow. Like that is ultimately whether it's the goal you're going with with your content. It's we're starting from scratch. We need a certain base level of followers here. We need to gain visibility, new audience. Discovery is always really important and so easy and so cheap with socials. So I'd be looking at some sort of serialized moment around something you're creating, whether it's a product, whether it's a moment you're going through in the business, whether you're moving offices, like whatever it is, can you turn one of those moments into sort of a serialized episode one, episode two, episode three or part one, part two, part three moment? And that leans itself more towards a short form piece of content. Yeah, because I think there's room in here for this to be and not that it has to be split like this. This leans itself more to maybe a long form piece of content, whether it's a newsletter, whether It's a longer LinkedIn post which can be long form, whether it's a YouTube series, whether it's a podcast, whatever it is, this sort of like episodic serialized moment content, it leans itself more towards shore form. Short form is huge for discovery and long form is amazing for cementing that loyalty and trust. So we really need to think about both. And the last, I mean you could go, it's so different for every business. But the sort of, the last core thing I'd be thinking about is there's got to be space for sort of the reactivity, the reactive content or the. So where this is sort of scheduled, planned, you know, what's Coming. This is like campaign driven. It's moment driven. This is something's just happened and we want to react to it and we want to be part of the conversation or we've just achieved this award and we want to shout about it, or we've just hit this moment and we want to tell everyone about it. Because it makes it feel real, it makes it feel raw, and it makes it feel like humans are actually behind this, rather than a machine or AI or someone being like, we planned a month out, we're not touching this. It makes people feel like people are there and they're on the journey with you. So I would sort of make sure you've got space for that. Like reactivity. I don't even know if that's a word reaction reactivity. It is. Now layer. I don't know what I usually use, but something like that, something that is able to react in real time because it just makes it feel more human. Yeah. But I think if I was starting with a business, most businesses, I'd be developing some sort of stack that looked like that as a base. I'm seeing a lot of talk around super fandom and that. That whole super fandom piece, this is probably where the whole advocate piece comes into, comes from this serialized TV style kind of content. And that's the thing that people get really deep rooted into it. And it might. It's branded content, but it might not feel like it's branded content. And me and you have actually, because you mentioned built on a recent podcast in January. I use built as an example in an internal meeting in terms of like they built room is. And it's not really related to built at all in terms of product. Yeah. And. But then. So you've got that going on and then the other side of culture, you've got the lo fi kind of meme. Kind of the thing that we find funny, the thing that we, you know, we find it so easy to share. Does it have to be something that isn't necessarily related to the product for a brand? If you think about built and roomies for an example. No, I don't. No, no, no, not at all. I think it. I think you'd have to look at your priorities and your calendar of what's going on. I think for something like roomies, roomies, roomies. Clearly they were trying to build like awareness, generate interest, generate conversation. That's super relatable. They're creating skits that. That are essentially real life situations, but with humor. The bits we don't talk about of Living with roommates and especially in New York City and all of this sort of thing. And then you look, you know, if, if you are the target audience for that and you're paying attention, you're listening, you'll notice the sort of subtle references and you'll click through and you might be like, oh, this is a cool platform. I want to be associated with this platform when I choose to move in New York City, for example. But it captures wider attention, it captures wider interest. But there is that product line still through it, you don't have to sort of be centering everything around the product for it still to be like product based or to still be associated with the product. In style magazines Intern series again, fantastic. Showing that inner workings through humor and scripted content. I think we're seeing a huge rise in scripted. That's what's really interesting. We've seen like Jamie Lang's Candy Kitten series where they're doing these, written by a comedian, these skits where there are actors involved, there are some employees, there's Jamie, and they're sort of creating these scenarios and it's like social meets TV meets comedy meets everything sort of TV are trying to be. But it's branded. It's Candy Kittens TV that is branded content. And it's associated very closely with Jamie and his business and what they're creating. But essentially they're like, this is like the big brand world piece. Like they're going, this is our world. Step into it. You know, we're showing you what happens in our world. Welcome. Yeah, you are invited in. It's funny, it's witty, it's everything their brand sort of wants to. Wants to evoke with their product. And so you start to associate the media and the content as another arm to the product. But they're. But they're really closely related. And it's all about creating that, like that sense of connection with your audience through humor and through entertainment and through something they can consume every day. That means when they go to the supermarket, they choose your product over someone else's because you've given them more, you know, makes sense. And then the second part of that is. And you may be covering this in a bit, so Tom made to stop jumping the gun. But when I look at that, that still feels like it's a lot of work and a lot of resource, which I. I know many brands, even the bigger brands that you would expect to probably have like a full content team. Don't have one. No, no, no. Still the one Social media Exact is doing it all. Exactly. And so in terms of resource, like, in terms of like a dream world scenario, like how much should a brand be investing in this part of the business? When it comes to content, I mean, I'm gonna be so biased here, but as a content professional, my genuine belief is that content has to set the whole heart of the org chart of the ecosystem. I think everything has to start with content, especially if you're a business who's starting out like, because businesses are built differently these days. Like you have to have an audience first before you want to sell them a product. If you start with a product and then try and find the audience, you're going to be on an uphill battle with those paid ads forever, you know, and then when you want to release yourself of the paid ads because you've built this big brand, no one knows who you are, no one knows what you stand for. Because they've only bought because you've converted them through a product purchase. They're not bought into the brand, they're not invested in the brand. So for me, the brand world build, the content build has to sit at the heart, it has to be at the start of the conversation and the end of the conversation. So something I'm doing with a lot of businesses now is like looking, genuinely looking at their org charts and going especially, we'll talk about creators, especially with creators. Because creators are sort of this industry that have come in, these, these people that have come in. And for some companies they sit in pr. Yeah. Some companies they sit in social, some they sit in experiential, some they sit in under the cmo, some they sit with an intern who's doing the event and no one speaks to each other. So you've got these businesses who are spending five times the amount because no one's speaking to each other about how they're working with creators. But if you had this centralized sort of ecosystem in the middle, this like content of your org chart, then, then everything kind of circles and comes back to it. Because I, I genuinely believe like most businesses should be thinking like media companies, they should be thinking like content businesses that happen to sell product. Because I think any other route is you're just uphill forever. Like I think it's really, really hard. Whereas the easier route or the way that makes sense in 2026 is treating yourself like a media company. And so then you need to think, okay, the content team, we need in house production, we need an in house strategist, we need in house project management to bring this to life. And then we look at sort of, okay, what is our business, what does it do and how does this serve the rest of the business as well? But I see it like the nucleus. I see it in the middle and everything else comes off it. Okay, is it channels next in terms of prioritizing where this all goes? Yeah. So I'd be looking. And also just on your. Sorry, just on what you said before about it's expensive. This is going to require a lot of resource. We've referenced like some high production. Candy Kittens, tv, the Intern and Roomies, Roomies, Roomies. This doesn't have to be like that. I mean, I give them so much airtime. But one of my favorite bootstrap businesses is Salt S U L T. And those guys are Henry, Millie and they've just hired a girl called Sophie to do their job. I just talked about them in our other episodes. I mean, they're so easy to talk about because they're just doing it so well. They're just such a great example of how you can do it on low budget. So they take you on the journey. They've just done a sort of episodic series around. I mean, they've done loads. But one, for example is like when they were getting into boots. So they had all these highs and lows and they took you on the journey and you were wanting to watch the next episode. They're filming that on an iPhone and then editing it in capcut. That's free. If you've got a phone, that's free. So it doesn't need. We don't need to think, okay, we need 50k here to get this off the ground. Like, do you have £5? Do you know what I mean? Can we commit to a £5 capcut subscription? It doesn't need to be sort of high production at all times because the reality is a lot of the lo fi stuff is going to probably hit more. Yeah. Especially if you're starting from the beginning. So, yeah, we're going to look at this and we're going to go, okay, what platforms do we want this to live on? Like what? Where do we want our always on format to live? Where do we want our short form or serialized content to live? And where do we want our reactivity to live? And so by going at it this way, we're not going, okay, how do we build a strategy for LinkedIn? We're going, this is who we want to be. This is the feeling we want to create. This is the content we want to generate. Where does this Live and where should it live? And so maybe, you know, there's, there's no right or wrong here. And this is so dependent on the type of content you're creating. But you're always on might be. It might be your sub stack, it might be YouTube, it might be. I mean, it literally could be every platform, but it might be LinkedIn. This is just like one example of a mix. Then you've got your serialized. It might be your TikTok or your Instagram, and then your human layer might be your employees channels or your founder channel, which might be on TikTok, it might be on LinkedIn, it might be on Insta. It doesn't matter too much as long as you know what you're creating, who you're creating it for and what you're creating it for. And then the platform will speak for itself because you'll go, well, obviously that's got to be a newsletter or obviously that's got to be a series on LinkedIn, because you know what you're doing it for and what you're trying to create. And as long as you've done the big sort of business brand strategy before you've come to content, which has to happen, first of, who is our audience, who are we trying to reach, who's our discovery audience, our desirable audience, all of that sort of thing, then, you know, okay, well, we're, we're going to try and reach them on these platforms. That's where our audience hang out. Yeah. So that the whole. Whenever I've done this with a business, you sort of start here and it starts big and it starts a bit scary. And then you get into signals, you go, well, obviously we want to make people feel this way. And everything just sort of flows. It becomes very obvious. And it's not hard work. It's like, oh, yeah, of course we'll create that series that feels so natural and it makes so much sense. And of course that's going to live on Instagram. I think people overthink this and they start with this, which is terrifying. They do. It's always like, can we have a LinkedIn strategy? What platform should we be on? Like, how about we figure out who you're trying to speak to, what you're trying to achieve and how you want to communicate that and the platform will just make sense. I want to talk about creators, because where do they come into this mix? Creators have got to come in here. Okay? So you, as the business have got to decide what content means for you and what role it's going to play for your business? Like how is it going to contribute to your business goals and what business goals? Because if you're a tech business and your content is going to try, say you're a B2B business, you're going to try and attract new CTOs or CFOs to make a decision. The type of creators you need to bring on are going to be very different than if your goal with content is to raise awareness for the type of product you're creating within Gen Zs, who will be your end users? Because then you're going to go, okay, we need to speak to creators who are going to really resonate with Gen Z versus like we need to find tech CTO level influencers or creators. So you need to get really clear on what you're trying to achieve and then you need to bring them in. Yeah, like they need to be brought in all the way up here because they need to be part of this process. Because there is no point in bringing a creator in over here when you've decided all of this. Because they know their audience better than anyone else. They know what their audience care about. And the reason we're using creators is to reach their audience. That's it. We are renting the trust that they've created with their audience and we're trying to gain a little bit of it for ourselves. So why would we tell them what content they're going to be involved in? They should be telling us what content they're going to be involved in. So I always say tell them the what, but don't tell them how. So the what is what we're trying to achieve. Don't tell them how to do it. Bring them in, like bring them into the conversation. Say this is how we want to make people feel. How would you suggest we do that if we want to reach your audience? Yeah. When we're looking at the creative economy in the direction it's going in, it's going long term, it's going equity partnerships, it's going. People don't just want to be. Well, the creators and the audience don't want to see this transactional behavior happen anymore. That when everyone, you know, influencers are dying, like all of that stuff, like that's what they mean. Like this short term, transactional, see through, like partnership, if you can even call it that, is what's dying. But long term collaboration, bringing creators in who've built these incredible audiences with so much depth that brands are so envious of, bring them in earlier, like have the conversations and and go long term. That's what I'm, that's what I'm thinking about. Is there a good balance from your experience between creator content versus branded content? I think creators are a great way to fast track trust and distribution and audience because it already exists. You're essentially borrowing what they built for years and years and years. You can create amazing content without. There are other routes to building that trust. You know, creators on the only route, it's just one route and they're not right for every single business. And sometimes you might get the wrong creator, but it is the right route and that could tarnish something as well. So, I mean, bringing humans from inside the business to be your characters in your story is a great route. Creators are a great route. Bringing that layer of sort of micro influencer to generate masses of noise because that's what they're so effective at doing in this sort of like advocacy manner is a really cool way to go about it as well. I think when it's creators or employees or UGC or like micro influencers or whatever, you're thinking about the characters. Like who are your characters in your story going to be? And creators come with a price tag, but they also come with audience. Employees come with complications, but a huge amount of trust and buy in. Founders come with their own sort of baggage as well, but they can be an amazing way to build trust with an audience. So it's like, who are your characters gonna be and how can you get them to sort of be around for long enough for people to buy in? Yeah, love that. What's next? I always put like a little layer of the characters in here because I think it's a really good time to talk about it. But then beyond that, we've got to figure out how we measure this. Like there's, there's no point. And I can assure you it's the thing people ask me about the most. Oh, we want to try this, but my CMO doesn't know how we're going to prove it. Like all of that sort of thing. None of this works if it's not measurable. Because how on earth are we going to know if it's contributing to the goal if we can't measure it? So none of this can happen. None of this can go live. This format, this episodic content, this sort of reaction. Like unless we know exactly what we're measuring. And I think the blessing and the curse with social, paid, social, organic, whatever it is, is there is so much data, we are flooded. It's incredible. I mean, the back end of YouTube is like people need to. People are dedicated sort of YouTube specialists and professionals because there's so much to learn and study there and I think we can get really caught up in it. And something that I used to see happen a lot, ad brands I used to work with is no matter what happened with the content that month I would get a report that told me it went great because they would find one metric somewhere that that meant it performed well. I've been there myself. So yeah, so I would get this report and everything would. Every month it would be great, but we'd be tracking something completely different. And so at the end of the 12 months you've had 12 great months, but nothing has added up to the goal. So we've got to get so clear on the metrics that matter to us and how we're going to measure them with this. Because the reality with content and brand building pieces is it has a lagging effect. So what we do today, people aren't what we feel and see today is a result of what happened six months ago, it's not a result of what you're seeing today. So we have to get really clear on like what are the metrics that matter for our business and if the goal is say increase market share or trust or whatever, it's going to be how are we actually measuring success? And that might not be metrics within the platforms itself. It might be inquiries that on a website have come through when people have selected they heard about you through social or the reason the purchase decision was made through social, whatever it is, we have to understand what that is. Otherwise none of this makes sense. Because for me, content isn't like a nice fun thing to have. It's the thing that drives genuine like business success. Yeah, 100%. How many things do you measure at one time? Say you're always on format. I think it can change like quarter by quarter because that's what you're going to steer it in different directions. I don't think you can measure more than two to three things as your two to three measures of success because otherwise your focus dilutes. Personally, like I've had posts that by my measure of success have underperformed. So I've gone. This has not generated conversation in the comments which was exactly what I was measuring with this. And then I've had a notification from Instagram being this post is over performing because it's got 10% new non followers or whatever and it's very easy to get distracted by that. But if you know what you're measuring, then you, then you know against your metrics of success, what is an isn't working. So you can tweak it because it's actually way more helpful for sometimes for things not to work so you can learn and change and improve and make them better. If you're under the illusion the whole time that everything is performing or isn't performing, then you're never going to sort of move yourself in the direction because you're never going to evolve your strategy. And the most important thing with a content strategy, and I always try, whatever way we show it, it show it in a circle, is because it needs to be constantly evolving. This isn't a set of rules, this isn't a playbook, this isn't a framework. It's. It's a process. It's an engine that you move through that needs to constantly be tweaked and fixed and moved and evaluated. Because my goodness, as you said, the world of content is changing at the speed of light. The platforms are changing at the speed of light, the trends, the consumer behaviors. So this isn't like a set in stone, like marked forever. This is literally as it should be on a whiteboard. Can we rub that bit out? Can we rub that bit out? And I would always be looking at it sort of in motion. Yeah. Does AI come into your strategy at all? Yes, and it depends on the business, I think is the answer. This can live and breathe without AI. If you are a small business, I'd be looking to bring AI in to improve efficiencies at probably every single hurdle, whether you're using like a Claude coworker or something to go. Here is sort of the format. This is what we're creating, this is what we're measuring. Create me a dashboard. Yeah, you know, I mean, we were at Dirac, we bought in an engineer under a six month, very expensive contract to build live dashboard that I can now build and Claude coworker in like 30 seconds. It's crazy, isn't it? So that sort of thing for me, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Like improve it wherever you can, especially if you're a small business, but also a big business where you might have things leaking through that you don't need to be. Because we need a dashboard to measure. We need a dashboard to hold ourselves accountable. Because what used to be, you know, the commercial team going, hi, can you go onto Instagram and tell me how this one performed? Like it's, it's insane how that would slow us down. And now everything should be visible and everything should be accessible for what, £20amonth? Yeah. If you were to summarize this in three key things, how would you do it? I would say, please don't start with platforms. Start with signals. Yeah. Like, number one, like, signals. Like, how do you want me to make people feel? Because your content will just flow. Like, the amount of people that come to me and they're like, I'm so stuck with content. And we take one step backwards. It's like the floodgates open and people just get it. Please, please understand that your content is not a nice to have. It must be contributing to your business goals because it's got to be measurable. When you have conversations with your CFO about allocating more budget, you've got to have the proof. Two other things is like thinking about as a cohesive system because we want to build brand worlds. We don't want to build isolated channels that don't speak to each other. And this final piece of the characters, there are so many different routes you can take, whether it's creators, whether it's egc, whether it's founders, whether it's actors, whatever it is, your characters are the people people are going to connect with. So invest in them, identify them, and then just. Yeah, this isn't set in stone. Just like, keep moving, keep moving. Yeah. Grace, this is amazing. Thank you so much for.