Planning Your Show Strategy

Welcome to the first post in the episodic content framework series. In this article, we are going to learn how to put together a strategy for your business’s video series. In case you haven’t seen the post where we introduced episodic marketing, we recommend that you check it out as we covered the overall episodic marketing framework needed for any business to succeed.

We are going to be discussing these topics: 

1. The Goal 
2. Types of Show
3. Genres
4. Intended Audience
5. Show positioning statement
   
   

The Goal (Your Why)

When it comes down to it, show strategy is pretty straightforward. Ultimately, you're looking to understand the why behind your show which is essentially your goal for creating the show. Broadly speaking, your goal can be divided into two, you could have a brand awareness goal or a business development goal, and based on that, you’d be able to determine the topics you want to go after and of course, what guests want to invite onto the show.

Types of Shows

After you've figured out the goal of your show, you then want to start looking at the different types of shows that you could produce. So, this could be anything from a podcast talk show, a reaction video series, a documentary, or even something that is like a panel discussion. It is very possible for you to create different types of video series using Zoom and these things can be done remotely as well as in-person if you have the option. However, we are going to discuss how to create these videos in a way that would also work remotely especially as we are in this period where everyone is trying as much as possible to limit physical interactions with others.

Genres

Once you have figured out your goal as well as the show type you are interested in, then you start thinking of the genre of your show and this is where you have the chance to leave your creative and your original mark on your videos. You could opt for a show that's a lot more laid back and entertaining or you can go for something that's a bit more educational and insight-driven. A tip from us though would be for you to lean more towards the entertainment side as this will involve you creating something that's a bit more ballsy and engaging. 

Note: Of course, you also have to use good judgment when doing this. For example, if you work In a bank or a highly regulated industry, then you may need to do things in a certain way but you should strive to create something that is both engaging and thought-provoking because that's how you get that entertainment factor. But most importantly, that's how you get people to keep coming back time after time to binge-watch your show which is definitely something that will happen if you are able to pique and retain their interest.

Intended Audience

Next, you can start to look at the specific intended audience for your show. When we say intended audience, what we mean is that even though you may already have multiple personas in your audience, you should keep in mind that creating a show strategy includes picking one persona to focus on at a time. It's the same thing as creating a restaurant. You could own a restaurant that serves pizza, sushi, and some burgers as well but that isn’t as authentic, or purpose-driven as owning just a sushi restaurant that serves one type of food. Basically, the idea here is that you want to pick your most important persona and start off by doing a show for them.

This also gives you a lot of options to see how the show plays out in terms of the success factors. For example, if you find that a particular persona was indeed a winner, then you can continue creating videos following the same strategy that got you that success in the first place. Alternatively, if you feel that the persona you chose didn't really work for you, then you can always take the lessons that you've gotten from that and pivot to a different persona while applying the learnings from your failed attempt.

There are different types of personas available to choose from, especially in the Business-to-Business space. An example would be -creating a show that's targeted towards decision-makers in your industry or targeting end users or people that you know are going to share your content and message inside the organization from bottom to top.

Show Positioning Statement 

So, this is basically a one-liner that explains to everybody, both internally and externally, what your show is all about. Think of it as the synopsis that you read when you want to consider watching a new series. A synopsis is a description of what a show is about and sometimes, you're instantly hooked as soon as you’ve read it but other times, you just know immediately that this show is clearly not for you. 

That is essentially the same thing you are trying to do with your positioning statement. You want to very easily, convey what your show is about, who it's for, and what people can expect from it so keep it short and sweet. A one-liner works best and you can maybe push it to two lines if you really have to but the goal is to keep it concise so that people can quickly tell if your show is for them.

Conclusion

Once you have all these, then you are already well on your way to having a proper one-page show strategy which you can start to communicate with your team. This also gives you the perfect starting point for tackling the rest of the episodic marketing framework. As you can see, this can be done fairly quickly, and it will help you get the ball rolling so that you can make it more sophisticated with time. 

Now that we are done with strategy, we can jump into the process of determining the sort of topics you would want to discuss on your show.