We’re living in a moment when there’s an enormous amount of advice about how to create content that performs. And on LinkedIn, that advice has created a fairly recognizable playbook for what “good content” is supposed to look like.
The hooks. The personal stories. The lessons. The “unpopular opinions” (and…listicles). The advice about finding your niche, establishing your pillars, building your personal brand, and creating content that…stands out.
The problem is that the playbook is increasingly good at producing content that looks like it should stand out, and increasingly bad at helping people sound like themselves. When everyone is reaching for the same signals of expertise, authenticity, and originality, those signals start to lose some of their meaning.
That’s one reason we’ve been paying attention to Charlsie Niemiec. Niemiec is a writer and editorial strategist who has built a remarkably recognizable voice on LinkedIn without seeming to chase the conventions that are supposed to make a personal brand recognizable. Her writing is thoughtful, observant, occasionally strange, often funny, and—most importantly—has a point of view.
In other words, she isn’t just telling people how to create distinctive content. She’s actually doing it.
And that’s particularly interesting to us because higher education has its own version of the problem.
Colleges and universities are constantly being encouraged to differentiate themselves: develop a distinctive brand, establish a compelling point of view, tell better stories, and articulate what makes the institution different. Yet look across enough higher-ed websites, social feeds, campaigns, and marketing materials, and you can start to see the same thing Niemiec noticed when she posted on LinkedIn about opening more than 20 marketing websites and finding that generally, they all looked and sounded the same.
So what can higher-ed marketers—and really, anyone trying to develop a recognizable voice—learn from someone who has managed to be distinctive without turning distinctiveness into another formula?
We talked with Niemiec about what it takes to develop a point of view, trust your instincts, resist the pressure to follow every piece of advice, and make content that feels like it could only have come from you. The full conversation is worth a read, but we also pulled out 10 ideas that stood out.
10 Insights for Making Distinct Content
Don’t Hide Behind Best Practices, Benchmarks, or Trends
It’s easy to justify a marketing decision by pointing to a benchmark, a competitor, an industry trend, or something that performed well before. It’s much harder to decide when you genuinely believe it’s the right one.
“If it fails, there’s comfort in saying, ‘We followed the rules. We did what the experts said,’” Niemiec told us. “It’s much scarier to say, ‘I made this choice because I believed it was right.’”
That, she argues, is part of why content starts to look and sound the same. “We spend so much time asking what works that we forget to ask whether the thing we’re making is any good.”
Best practices and benchmarks can give us useful information. They just shouldn’t do our thinking for us. The next time you’re choosing because it’s what your industry recommends—or because everyone else is doing it—ask yourself: Would I still make this choice if I couldn’t use the best practice to justify it?
Stop Outsourcing Your Judgment
One of the easiest ways to make your content look like everyone else’s is to let someone—or something—else make too many of the decisions.
That might mean following a template exactly as designed, or adopting a content formula because someone says it performs. Or outsourcing your strategy to Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT.
Niemiec isn’t against any of those things. She loves a template, for example. But she sees templates as a starting point, not a substitute for judgment. “Templates ship with someone else’s advice already installed,” she points out.
The same is true of a lot of the advice (and ahem…technology) we utilize. Someone else has already decided where the hook should go, what the story should look like, what the reader should do next, or what a “good” piece of content is supposed to sound like.
Use the tools. Learn from the advice. But the judgment and thinking should be yours.
Experimentation—and Its Varied Results—Is Your Friend
If every piece of content has to perform, prove its value, or justify the time it took to make, it’s easy to gravitate toward the safest choice.
Distinctive work requires some room for uncertainty. As Niemiec puts it, developing judgment requires “room to fail.” Not because failure is the goal, but because you have to give yourself enough space to find out whether an unfamiliar idea is actually bad, really good, or…just there.
Before dismissing something because it feels outside the norm, ask yourself: Is this actually bad, or is it just something I wouldn’t have done?
Then ask a second question: What’s really at stake if it doesn’t work? Will it hurt the brand, or will it possibly just not produce the results you hoped for? There’s a difference between going viral for the wrong reasons and a low number of likes.
Work Through Ideas
We’re often taught that good content should sound authoritative. Have the answer. Back it up. Show your work. Make a convincing case.
That can be useful, but it can also leave very little room for figuring something out before you write the polished version. Niemiec says that when she’s writing for a client, she wants the research, evidence, and rationale. But her own writing often starts somewhere less certain: a feeling that there’s “something here.” As she puts it, “I stopped requiring it to show me all its work before I trusted it.”
Your first instinct doesn’t have to be your finished argument. Give the idea some room to develop. Write it down. Let it sit. See where it takes you.
Sometimes the most interesting content comes from working through an idea, rather than pretending you already had the answer.
Lean Into Perspectives and Points of View
One of Niemiec’s sharpest observations about personal branding is also one of the simplest: “One of the stranger things about personal branding is watching people remove themselves from it.”
The irony is hard to miss. We’re told to make our content more personal, then given so much advice about how to do that that we can end up stripping out the very things that make us individuals.
Niemiec describes keeping different parts of herself in separate rooms: content strategy in one, writing about power in another, music, work, grief, and pop culture in their own filing cabinets. Her voice became more recognizable when she stopped keeping those things apart.
For anyone sharing their perspective, that might mean asking: What experiences, expertise, observations, or opinions do I bring to this subject that someone else might not?
Look Beyond Conventional “Expertise”
We have developed a fairly specific picture of what an expert looks like: someone with the right credentials, the right title, the right platform, and a polished way of communicating what they know.
Niemiec pushes back by asking us to consider what a longtime cashier might know about human behavior after decades of watching people navigate money, embarrassment, impatience, and generosity. Or what a tattoo artist with 22 years of experience might understand about trust, taste, regret, and running a creative business.
The same applies in higher education. Universities are full of people with deep, unusual expertise, but we don’t always recognize it as such—particularly when it doesn’t fit our conventional definition of an expert.
As Niemiec puts it, “Having a platform can amplify what someone knows, but I’ve learned not to confuse the size of the platform with the depth of the knowledge.”
The challenge isn’t always finding someone “worth” listening to. It’s finding folks with ideas, insights, and stories worth sharing.
Ensure Your Content Has a Point
There’s no shortage of things to write about. The harder question is whether you have anything to say about them.
Niemiec has a simple test: Can you explain what you believe about the subject in three sentences?
You don’t need a fully formed argument. You don’t even need to know where the idea will take you. But you should have some thought, observation, tension, or belief that makes you want to explore it.
Otherwise, you may have a topic—but you don’t yet have a point.
And distinctive content needs one.
Content Ideas Are Everywhere
“Everything is copy.”
Nora Ephron, the Hollywood screenwriter, journalist, essayist, and filmmaker, used that phrase to describe the way she approached the world. It’s a useful idea for content creators, too: everything is material.
And we’re deliberately borrowing that idea from a writer, not a marketing expert.
Because some of the best content ideas aren’t going to come from another article about content marketing. They’re going to come from paying attention to the world around you.
“If you truly want to have your own voice, you have to read lots of other voices,” Niemiec says. “Read criticism, poetry, pieces on topics you have little understanding of. Read things that are being published now, but also go back to essays or books you read 25 years ago…You already know your subject. Give it something unexpected to bump into.”
That’s part of the thinking behind our monthly What’s Shaping Our Thinking? series. We deliberately ask our team to bring us something that has caught their attention outside the usual higher-ed and marketing conversation. A TV show. A book. A trend on TikTok. Something they overheard. Anything that makes them stop and think.
Last month, for example, The Parish Group’s AVP of Marketing and Content Creation, Julia Watson Dozier connected Love Island and #RushTok to a question about how students think about prestige, belonging, and digital influence. Neither is an obvious source of enrollment strategy. That’s precisely why the connection was interesting.
The next good idea for your work might not come from another marketing blog, industry report, or competitor’s website. It might come from something that has absolutely nothing to do with your job—until you figure out why it does.
Focus More on the Collective Narrative
One of the easiest ways to make content feel forced is to expect every piece to prove something.
Every post has to perform. Every article has to demonstrate expertise. Every campaign needs to be a success. Every mistake needs to become a perfectly packaged lesson.
Niemiec calls this trying to be “the shiniest penny in the room.” Instead, she argues you should think of your work as a body of work. Some things will travel immediately. Some will reach 14 people. Something you thought disappeared might find exactly the right person 6 months later.
As she puts it, “People learn what you stand for through the body of work. You have to give them enough of one to find out.”
Your reputation isn’t built by one brilliant post. It’s built over time, through what you consistently notice, explore, question, and believe.
Don’t Sand Down Your POV
Niemiec describes the quality she looks for in good writing as “aliveness”—she wants to feel like “somebody was here.”
In other words, don’t smooth away everything that makes your perspective recognizable. The specific observation. The strange detail. The strong opinion. The contradiction. The sentence that sounds a little more like you than something a brand would say.
That’s particularly relevant in higher ed, where content often passes through so many layers of review that a strong point of view can get softened into something everyone can agree with—and therefore no one particularly remembers.
The test is simple: Could this have been written by any college or university?
If so, you may have polished the point of view right out of it.
Distinctive content isn’t necessarily less polished. It just leaves some evidence of the person—or institution—behind.
Distinction Isn’t Another Formula
It’s tempting to turn a list like this into another checklist. But the moment we turn distinctiveness into a formula, we’re back where we started. The goal isn’t to make content look different. It’s to develop a point of view, trust yourself enough to follow it, and give it enough room to become recognizable.
That takes time, attention, and a willingness to make choices that a benchmark, a best practice, or a formula can’t always justify. In a landscape where so much content is starting to look and sound the same, that may be the most distinctive choice you can make.
