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Why Your Content Strategy Needs Brand Filters (A)
Alex Garcia
January 16, 2025
Great content passes your internal brand’s filters, creates a specific feeling, and is constantly getting optimized by feedback. So, let’s talk about a bunch of sh*t no one in the social game talks about. Great content passes your internal brand’s filters, creates a specific feeling, and is constantly getting optimized by feedback. So, let’s talk about a bunch of sh*t no one in the social game talks about.
But first, check out our partner Insense who lets me yap about social.
By the way, I’m doing monthly workshops on these topics. Tomorrow is the first one. You can join here.
Get your brand in front of 200,000+ marketers & founders.
In partnership with Insense
Here’s The Creator Funnel You Need To Build In 2025:
At the Top Of Funnel you need to focus on product seeding and briefing these creators with your top-performing creative.
At the middle of the funnel, focus on affiliate marketing and building longer-lasting relationships with the top creators.
At the bottom of the funnel, focus on having these top creators re-create your best-performing ad creative while allowing them to put their unique spin on it.
But the key is to never stop testing, seeding, and accumulating UGC content to continue feeding the funnel.
My favorite tool to do all of this is Insense.
I use it with multiple 8-9-figure brands to source, communicate, manage, and track all creator relationships.
You can book a free strategy call to start building your funnel.
Last week we talked about the importance of narrative building…remember? If not, read it here but narrative building is the ideas, values, and perceptions you want to imprint in your ideal customer’s mind.
That narrative is the intersection of:
Your Mission
What You Believe
What People Will Rally Behind
Then put it into 3-5 words.
But, the next step is establishing the feelings/emotions your content needs to evoke while creating brand filters for all content ideas.
1. Feelings
We’re not talking about a Drake song here. But great content makes you feel something. It evokes some emotion. Just like great writing. But we want to determine the feelings someone should experience/get from your content that matches the overarching narrative.
For example, we work with JockoFuel and their overarching narrative is “Discipline Equals Freedom.” So, would it make sense for people to consume content and feel “happy and light-hearted?”
Nope. It doesn’t match. The feelings need to be matched to your content pillars.
So, let’s say you have three content pillars like: Challenges, Documentaries, and Vlogs/BTS.
We’d then attach a feeling to each pillar because each pillar needs to serve a purpose attached to the greater narrative.
So, it’d look like this:
Challenge = Motivated & Pumped Up
Documentaries = Inspired & Introspective
Feeling Vlogs = Inclusive
With this, we can tailor the stories, scenes, and scripts to make sure we hit the nail on the head when it comes to the emotions we want to evoke.
2. Filters
To be able to achieve the above at the highest level, we then need to create filters for every content idea.
So, now the screening process looks like this:
Narrative > Content Idea > Feeling > Filter
The filters are specific to the overarching brand’s narrative.
Again, let’s use JockoFuel as an example…
Overarching Brand Narrative: Discipline Equals Freedom
So, we need to create filters for every content idea that we push and want to implement to make sure it always directly/or indirectly amplifies this narrative.
To do this ask yourself these questions:
How do you want someone to describe your content/account?
How do you want your content to position yourself?
Describe your content strategy in three words.
Round robin as a team. Select the common themes/answers. Dive deep into those and turn them into 1-2 word headlines with a short description.
For JockoFuel we ended up with these filters:
“Fuck Yeah” - Does this content make someone say, “Fuck yeah I needed to hear that or I needed that wake-up call” internally.
Perspective Shift - Does this alter someone’s perspective or thought process around a specific topic or idea?
Mentor-like - Are we giving you the information/education/inspiration from a mentorship place/perspective?
NOW, this is important because every content idea needs to run through the above filter and if it doesn’t meet the criteria, then the idea either needs to get dumped or refined until it meets the brand’s filter.
This is key. Because remember content is communication at scale. So, if you’re posting 30 pieces of content a month - it’s imperative to make sure that content serves a purpose.
As a brand, the aim should never be “volume.”
The aim should always be “impact.”
By creating the right brand filters - you create an internal screening process to make sure every piece of content serves a purpose for the brand.
3. Feedback
Everything is theory until it gets posted and validated. So, the next step to the above is to have weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly retros where you focus on the feedback/data you're getting from all of the content.
You should be focused on looking at feedback in two parts: Engagement & Impact.
The engagement metrics confirm that you’re structuring your content in the right way.
Think about your opening shot, hooks, scripting, storyboarding, etc. Engagement metrics validate this and/or give you data to help optimize these aspects.
So the metrics you should pay attention to are:
Views
Likes
Avg Watch Time
Replay
Now, it’s important to measure those metrics again “impact” metrics. These validate that you’re creating the right content, for the right people, for the right reasons.
Those metrics are:
Save to Like Ratio
Share-to-Like Ratio
Comments
DMs
If a piece of content has 100k views, 2k likes, but only 100 saves or shares then your ratio is off and your content isn’t having the impact it needs to have.
So, always separate the metrics and then compare them based on the goal.
Then, always rinse and repeat.
Hope you enjoyed this and that it helps. Again, over the next 10 weeks we’re diving deep into brand social so at the end of this you’ll be able to always create and execute a 10/10 brand social strategy.
Hope this helps and I’ll see you next week,
Alex