Content as focus of a young entrepreneur’s career

An introduction of a leading community of content marketing recently born

Rinascita Digitale is an Italian community focus on content marketing.

Let’s meet Michele Saladino from Rinascita Digitale, a primary content marketing community in Italy!

Interview with Michele Saladino, Co-Founder of Rinascita Digitale and Content producer of Mashub srl. From one community to another. An example of an intense career path both in Italy and abroad, always centered on communication.
He opened his first website at 17 years old and launched the second one ice year after, posting self-produced content. He created an international community and translated the website into 13 languages, with the help of some collaborators. Since then, he begun to work in the area of Digital Marketing and communications, and he created 4 different online projects reaching ten of thousands of users.

Good morning Michele, can you tell us something about you, about your short but intense professional experience? How did you approached and get interested in digital issues and how did you manage to turn your passion into your job?

It all started at middle school when I got fond in web and digital matters, also thanks to my father, Stefano. I tested first CSS and HTML code, then I continued studying technology, discovering my passion for the photography at the secondary school. I begun with my father’s camera then I bought a GoPro to realize videos, clips and fittings, while it became always more interesting for me to share my contents. It’s been seven years since I created my Instagram profile that was quite successful. Later I launched a professional website where I wrote about myself and about my passion for the photography. Acting as if I was a photographer, I tried to earn money to invest in photographic equipment. After a while, during the secondary school, I decided to spend a year in Scotland and I thought to share my experience on social media and other platforms, including the difficulties I had to face and how I overcame
them. I joined another guy who was leaving for the States, he was fond in photography as well. We started to tell our stories as “exchange students” on Instagram and other four girls from all over the world joined us. As a result, we created a community of people who lived abroad. Then I opened a blog that flourished very fast in a very short time, bringing together about sixty people who collaborated to the project with their stories. So, we went international, because students came from all over the world, not only from Italy. That’s how it started my first experience as community manager and creator: later it became my job because we were sponsored by STS Education, at which I worked as public speaker. Everything was great for me! This stage of life gave me many skills and experiences, but I wanted more…
Coincidentally, at that time, Stefano was launching Mashub and my skills and experiences might be helpful, so that he asked me to cooperate with him. I finished high school and I took a year off. I begun to work for Mashub, producing contents for the Contentware Summit, that should have been taken place in 2020. Due to the pandemic, it has been cancelled and from that moment we started with the project of Rinascita Digitale, and it was me who talked to the public, created the website and contents for the web.

How much do you bring about yourself in the content marketing community of “Rinascita Digitale”? Can you tell us about your job, areas of responsibilities, and about the soft skills that are necessary to fulfill this task perfectly?

It’s difficult to say how much there is of me in “Rinascita Digitale” because the project has been co-created. So many authors and upholders participated to this initiative and so many people came up with their ideas, which Stefano and I reorganized and put together to make them reality. There is both a lot and nearly nothing about me in Rinascita Digitale. There are collaboration ad values that Stefano and I shared from the realization of the project up to now.

My job consists in coordinating the production of contents. During this period of development of Rinascita Digitale I’m taking the role of chief editor. I manage all contents and make sure to produce and share them in the most effettivet way, so that we can reach the widest possible public. At the beginning, when it was only Stefano and me, I took charge of the realization of Rinascita Digitale, and of the public engagement. Besides, I managed, planned and created a number of initiatives with Rinascita Digitale. Defining a very specific role is difficult because every one of us has played different roles. Anyway, it’s great to consider ourselves as the creators of this initiative that spread its wings and walked by itself.
It’s important to be open-minded and to collaborate. We are always in touch with many people which were to some extent our competitors. It was really significant to co-operate, share and work in team. The most important aspect was to have values that were more relevant than economic intention and success.
We aimed at spreading messages and initiatives in order to help people.

Today “Rinascita Digitale” is a solid editorial project that reached success over the last year. So, we would like to know the secret of this success in a competitive context such as the world of publishing. Who do you consider to be the most fearsome competitors for “Rinascita Digitale” and why? How do you differ from them?

We have tons of competitors but we also have none. We have lots of them because everyone who offers online courses and online consulting is considered a competitor. At the same time, we have not any competitor because we propose our contents with different preconcepts and will. We offered our contents
and competences in a different way compared with what business was used to. In the same way, we provided contents that as a consumer I could never had the possibility to benefit online. We are very proud of it, because our rules were always based on quality and variety. We reckon we can improve very much on quality. It all happened very fast, neither we nor the public were ready for such an evolution in a single year. We can still increase our contents, but first we are planning a video quality and sound improvement, in such a way that the user can access them without any difficulties.
In any case, it’s difficult to deal with the publishing world. Many people produce contents but only few of them manage to succeed in the long term, and they do not even manage to produce as much as we did so quickly. We introduced new values and the craving for change. One of our first slogans was “I am part of the change, and you?”, not to make snide remarks go viral on social media, but because it was a genuine idea.
We were looking forward to initiating the change, to make things evolve, also rapidly, in order not stop in front of the pandemic that forced us to stay at home.

Which strategy did you choose to make “Rinascita Digitale” expand so fast? Can you reveal us more about funnel marketing, lead generation and personal branding?

We have never set any goal, all we made has been shared intentionally from people. Everyone who joined us as a speaker or a spectator had the pleasure of sharing on social media that they took part of this initiative. All this happened because we have created a real community, people wanted to participate to it and share that they were part of it.
We did not have many plans about funnel marketing, lead generation and personal branding, because we considered our contents and the desire to share them as the priority. We exposed ourselves, and the audience did the same, sharing on social media, making reviews, joining live events: people were part of this community who support them in such a difficult time as the lockdown.
Obviously, we did strategies to make the user reach our live easily, reducing the number of clicks and also to make contents with a strong impact. The e-mail address was one of the limited information necessary to access the live, also useful to build costumer loyalty, in such a way that people were not only a one-shot appearance. But now we have removed this barrier.
We had to show face because it was necessary for Rinascita Digitale to have someone to take not only merits but also responsibilities. It was the only personal branding strategy we used. To run this project, you need to have a smiling attitude and make people feel at ease. For a few months we did “breakfast with Rinascita”, a moment in the morning during which the most loyal users could have a little talk before starting their day. It was relaxing for us and our followers. Every strategy is introduced in order to have the best result possible on people.

If you had to provide some tips to our startupper readers to help them creating and increasing a multichannel marketing strategy, and first of all regarding education, where do you suggest them to begin from? Can you recommend us some “Rinascita Digitale” webinars about these topics?

Firstly, I suggest to be coherent. I insist on values because they are always important. The best multichannel strategy is to convey correctly our message, clarifying who we are and why we sell our product. To set an example, I would sell headphones not to earn money but to make people experience a
new way of listening to music. This aim has always to be clear, also in communication. We have to show it to our potential customers and, above all, remember that they are readers, listeners, and user of what we produce. Content marketing is very useful to fulfill this task, because if you share contents on your platforms, you provide your followers with information, entertainment, free education, even before they decide to buy. It’s important to establish the value of your product or service, especially for a startup.
On the web there are several platforms and examples like Rinascita Digitale that offer lot of contents, often underestimated. Let’s learn to use the net, get informed and take inspiration from our competitors, to understand how they act, how we can improve and make our users buy. It is not an imitation, it’s about to take inspiration in order to improve. We try to understand what works well and what not. It is a good thing to test, to do, to take inspiration, to look around, to take advantage of online free resources. Once we understand our limits, if we want to learn more about some topics, we can look for books, online courses and go to the next step.
Regarding the webinars, I suggest you to visit Rinascita Digitale website, on our YouTube channel, and get inspired by all the contents. You can really find many opportunities!

If you are interested in Rinascita Digitale, please read more on: Content marketing community leading digital renaissance and Content at center of a successful editorial project

If you are interested in Content Marketing, please read more on: Content Marketing: attract, engage, and retain your target. Content Marketing platforms: the best 10 tools for us and Content Marketing, Storytelling and Copywriting