[Interview] Episodic Marketing - How To Build A Binge-Worthy Show For Your Brand

Obviously, the name itself says it on the team. Episodic marketing means kind of building shows in a series. But do you want to give us a bit of a highlight or another view? What is episodic marketing? And very important, the audience here today are predominantly coming from B2B brands, but also from organizers, event organizers, or companies that have organized events that have produced a lot of virtual events today. So just let us know what is it, what is it about and how, and then we can just basically take the conversation from there.

Yeah, for sure. So basically, the way that we would define episodic marketing is just as it says on the label, marketing that is done in the form of episodes or content that's delivered in the form of episodes. And whether we're running our own events as event organizers or. Or whether we perhaps even are thinking about prerecorded event sessions that we've done before, really, as all of us as marketers, right, it's really up to us to make that decision to almost package something as a show, to package something as a series, whereby every session is not just a session, but rather it's an episode as part of a longer series. And, you know, once you have the first set of episodes, you can almost have your first season done, and then you can go on to the second season, so on and so forth. But ultimately, it's a bit of a mindset shift in terms of thinking of content, not just as, you know, all of these different channels and things that we could possibly doing. Because there's no end, right? There's always new, like platforms and tips and tricks that are popping up, and it could really lead to burnout for all of us as marketers, rather, you know, you know, a much more minimalist but also effective way of doing it is to think of everything in terms of episodes, to think of yourselves as show directors, show producers, because if you think about it, every episode, and we'll definitely be unpacking this together, Ricardo, every episode could help us to get a lot of that content out of it, whether that's written content or smaller video snippets or even audio, as well as image content. So for those of us who love different types of content formats, you can actually get all of that from your episodes anyway. But that's the gist of it anyway.

And I just think that, anyways, most B2B brands currently are running webinars, more B2B brands, and especially within the companies and the people that we serve, they're running events and everything. They will have virtual events and Anyways, a webinar. Am I right saying so a webinar is kind of a part of episodic marketing. It's a tool to do episodic marketing. Right, so in its own right.

Yeah, absolutely. It's funny though, because there's so many webinars these days that some of our favorite brands are, you know, making the decision to package it a little bit differently. A webinar and an episode are pretty much. They're very, very similar. The only difference is one is called a webinar and one is called an episode. And so if people make. Make a decision, a creative decision that, hey, we're not going to refer to these as just on demand webinars, we're actually going to refer to these as. We're going to refer to this as a show. And here's episode seven, episode eight. You know what I mean? It just makes it easier for people to consume that show because. Or consume each episode because, you know, they realize that it's part of an ongoing series and it just makes it so much easier for them to consume that content. Maybe they see something in the middle and then they decide, okay, let me actually go back to the very start of that series and watch it in order to. But it's also so much more than that, Ricardo. I mean, in terms of actually creating something that at the heart of it is very much audience focused as opposed to like company focused. So it's not always about us, but rather it's about the audience. And a lot of us who come from like a content background, inbound background, we get that. But to push it a step further, it's almost about also creating that content in a way that is focused on entertainment first, which might potentially shock a lot of people, that even though we naturally want to educate people and add value to them, one of the best ways to add value to people is actually to entertain them as well. And it doesn't mean that it has to be a comedy show or like a humorous thing. Entertainment could also be inspiring someone, motivating someone, you know, creating content that's thought provoking, that gets them to think about something in a different way. Think of a documentary, for example. I would regard a documentary as something that's entertaining. And if you can build that entertainment value, you're now slowly joining the ranks with all of the Netflixes, the Hulu's, the Disney pluses of the world, as such.

Okay. So I really want to get into the real meat of it and into the detail about it. So, Karim, you have written or you have created a framework so you've got what you call the episodic marketing framework. And then you have also a show strategy. So if at any point in time you want to kind of. You want me to bring that up, just please feel free to let me know to bring it up. But how to me is B2B marketing or B2B brands? Let's say I've got a company on chemical, on the chemical industry. I've got an event or whatever that might be, B2B brands. Sometimes how do you make something like, you see what I'm saying? Fun? Or how do you make it in that sort of way? And because I'm just really curious or like, sometimes they're like very dense topics. And how do you make that entertaining? And can you expand there, unpack that a little bit? And let's just put it into the perspective of again, of an event organizer that's kind of thinking about, okay, how do I make my event more entertaining? Or what do I do this pre event or post event? In other words, we're going to share our framework as well here, we're going to discuss it and we're going to dissect that. But yeah, how do you do that?

Yeah, for sure. So I'm going to give you guys a very quick example based on what we're. Something that we're doing at the moment. And then we can definitely look at what that would look like for event organizers and B2B companies that are running events. Right. So our company at Stripe Tactics, what we do is we help companies create virtual, or rather create shows and video series, and then we help them to repurpose it so that each episode they can get a bunch of content out of that. So what should our marketing strategy be if you put yourself in our position? So we obviously have to take a bit of our own medicine because we realize it's the most effective thing. So we decided to create a show about other companies who are very successful in creating shows. So it's a little bit like the movie Inception, if you've seen it. And we came up with a concept called Showstoppers. Now, if you're hearing this now, you're probably one of the first to hear this because we're about to announce it soon. But for Showstoppers, we have about seven episodes so far done of that. And in this case, we decided to create a show where we're actually bringing a lot of entertainment value just by the way the show is branded and the packaging of it, the intro, the Outro the types of questions we ask, the different tone that we bring to the show. But in addition to that, you know, we try and focus on really interesting subject matters that are entertaining for that specific, for that specific audience. I'll give you one last example before we go, before we jump right into the framework. But for example, a game of chess. Yesterday I was watching a game of chess and I found it very, very interesting. My wife found it extremely boring. Right. It's the same thing that brings me entertainment value may not necessarily bring someone else that same entertainment value. I'm sure there are topics that she's interested in that you, you know, wouldn't be entertaining for me. So when we think about our own businesses, we really have to think about or realize that entertainment value and creating something that's binge worthy is very subjective to that specific audience. What you will create will by definition be very interesting for some people and very boring for others. And that's okay because ultimately it's all about appealing to a set, a specific target audience as such. So Ricardo, if you want, maybe we can even go through each stage of the episodic framework.

Yeah, I think I've got it now on screen. And please tell me to the chat panel if you can see me in a little thing and then the model there, let's go through that. Can you see it properly?

Yeah, I think it looks good.

Let's just go to it. So talk us through this framework.

Perfect. And Ricardo, please feel free to stop me at any stage because it'd be good for us to have discussion around these for sure. But yeah, basically when we think of creating shows, it can get very fun very quickly. And the purpose of this framework is to make sure that anything that we do create is focused on bottom line results. So it's a four step process. It's basically plan, produce, repurpose and distribute. And within each stage, as you can see, there's a few sub steps, basically. So it all starts with us planning the show right now. Keep in mind, especially because we, you know, if you are a B2B company that's already creating events, you're already a leg up over the competition. If you're an event organizer, you're already a leg up on the competition because you already have some of the makings of something that's very difficult for other companies to even think of, which is content that actually matters. Now all that we need to do is figure out how we can actually package that as a show series. Right. So it starts off with the show strategy and depending on whether this is an event that's going to be coming up in the future, or perhaps a set of recorded sessions that you've recently completed, it really all comes down to positioning and packaging. Could be as simple as deciding. Making a decision to call this a show or call this a series and to start using short terminologies like that. Rather than having sessions, you now have episodes rather than having a set of random videos. It's actually something that's going to be a dedicated show as such. And from there, within the show strategy, we can actually start to look at the specific positioning for that audience as well. So naturally, if we follow the inbound methodology or HubSpot, they talk a lot about Personas, of course, and similarly to the show content that you create, we really have to zoom in on one specific Persona that this show will be created for. And once we figured that out, we then look at what is our goal with that Persona. And broadly speaking, our goal from an events perspective is either brand awareness or it's business development. Or in many cases it could be both as well. So whether it's brand awareness or business development that's actually going to affect what type of topics we end up talking about, if it's something that's going to be in the future, or maybe it's, you know, we're looking at curating a set of specific topics around a certain theme as well as the guests. For to give you a quick example, with brand awareness, we're obviously trying to get the word out there, we're trying to get as much engagement as possible, maybe as much traffic as possible. So in that sense we may decide to focus on topics that are particularly popular from a search perspective. For example, we may also decide to look at, for example, guests and feature guests and conversations with guests that have a certain level of cloud score or certain, you know, network size because we want them to share that content on. So it's very much brand awareness focused. Whereas on the business development side, perhaps we decide, you know what, we're actually going to go after a set of target accounts and co create content with these people. So if I want to do business with a specific set of 20 companies, why don't I find something that these guys have in common and reverse engineer that to create some form of a series of episodes around that?

That's pretty cool. And I think, let me just kind of unpack that because I think that's fundamental. So for the audience out there, please let us know if. Proceed. I'm going in the wrong Direction, and I'm very happy to put it back on track. But for event organizers or event promotion type of scenario, the plan stage, everybody you guys have already have a strategy because you're going to basically you very likely are going to have an event taking place. So your main goal is going to drive awareness, is going to be to generate registrations and to do all that stuff. Very likely you will have topics because your conference or your virtual event is going to have topics already in place and very likely you're going to have some guests that are going to be. So is it fair to say, Karim, that in the angle and the side of event organizers, media businesses and companies that are running virtual events, the plan stage is kind of already done? And I think it's just more of a matter of framing that accordingly and positioning that in the way that it is. Like for instance, we did our, or this is the last episode, so to speak, of the digital Pivot series in our series of webinars. And I think it just makes it very easy to market, it makes it very easy to promote. And the other aspect that I think it's very, very, very important is that, so the value proposition is, okay, what are you going to, what are you aiming to generate out of this? And of course there's going to be brand awareness. You want to make that, you want to make sure that your event, this is, if this is pre event, by the way, you want to make sure that your event gets seen by a lot of people and ultimately they registered to attend the event. And so in that side of things, and then you can either involve sponsors and that's going to basically help to drive value. You can get obviously your speakers, you might be able to get your rejects of people that said, oh, sorry, I'm not going to be able to join your, your live event, but I really had an interesting story to tell. And then that's kind of a way for you just to add value. Does that make, does that make sense, Karim? Right. In the framework that we're talking about, 100%.

And I completely agree with you that people who are already in the game, in the events game, right. They definitely have a leg up on the competition, as I mentioned earlier, because the plan stage and perhaps some elements of the produce stage as well, you know, are naturally inherent, they're naturally part of the job. But I completely agree with you, Ricardo, like, you know, on the importance of just reframing it or packaging it, they are very, very similar. But you know, all good marketing is ultimately packaging and that Kind of story that you tell.

Totally. Yeah, yeah, totally. And then I just kind of wanted to add one thing there and the fact that online communities is becoming extremely, extremely important and extremely, extremely topical episodic marketing comes to. I personally see it as a savior for marketeers and companies out there. Because there's generally a question is how can we engage our online community further? How can we. And then these kind of slicing and dice in this content beforehand before the event takes place helps to drive that engagement within that community, helps to drive that engagement within social media. And then it's actually giving you a taster of what's going to look like. Is that right?

Absolutely.

And this is kind of a part of. I just going to really want to make sure that I am linking everything, all these. How episodic marketing will fit in into the online community strategy and how it will fit in with your pre event promotion. So and I would just kind of probably thinking about this on the, on the planning stage. What are the types of. Okay, let me just give you an example and I'm gonna probably put you on the spot here, Karim, please do. I've got an event, right? So 25 different sessions, probably more. Eight, whatever number of sessions, let's say I've got eight between eight and 25 sessions that are going to be either pre recorded or live. And I'm specifically thinking about pre event. What are the most common or what you see the successful types of episodic marketing than an event organizer could do, if at all.

Okay, so there's a lot of stuff that could be done. One of our favorite examples that we see is. And it's very, very smart, right? It's actually leveraging the opportunity of creating shows as something that you can actually sell to sponsors, right? So actually finding a way to create sponsorship packages and to maybe extend existing sponsorship packages even to looking at. Okay, a company can now sponsor one episode, right? Or they can sponsor a set of episodes, or they can even sponsor a whole season. And you get to define what a season is. A season could be 10 of those 20, 25 that you mentioned, so on and so forth. So there's a lot of value that, that that company would be creating for the sponsors if they actually include that as part of their sponsorship packages. Not to mention once we actually talk about repurposing in a short while, you know, you know, the sponsors are not just paying for attention obviously during the event, but actually mostly after the event as well because of all the repurposed content that they get to have their name on as well. Depending on, you know, the way that that would make sense. But that's definitely something that we found a great way to be value adding to the sponsors that are involved, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I just really wanted to highlight on that so that we can kind of move on and kind of with the framework so to be clear to all the audience and to whoever is going to be watching this. So episodic marketing is great for pre event promotion, but it's absolutely brilliant for post event promotion. Right. And then we'll delve into that. Well, so, and understandably, you know, pre event, you might have, let's say You Might have 10 Weeks before your, your event takes place. So you might want to be able to do. You don't really need to feature all of your speakers. You don't really need to feature all of your sponsors. You might just want to pick eight or you might just want to pick seven, or you might want to pick six. But what that allows you to do is just to have. And I think, is it fair to say, Karim, that like on the frequency and especially within the events perspective, ideally you want to do it every week. Yeah, every week. And then so that you can then start having all these and building that momentum. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. As long as we're. As long as, you know, the company in question is able to stick to, consistently stick to whatever cadence they pick, it's ultimately about that consistency. Yeah, 100%.

And I think the important element is the consistency. And what would be the length of that episode? And I think that would be the question that many people would be having. What would be that particular length? Is it best to do it 10 minutes an hour? What works best?

Yeah. So think about it this way. It's almost like saying, hey, what's the best length for a Netflix episode? And as we can all agree, like, it really does vary. However, there tends to be some form of an average or a median. And usually it's anywhere from 20 minutes to 40 minutes. I'm reflecting on our own show right now that we're currently running. That's anywhere from like, yeah, like 30 to 45 minutes sometimes traditionally, you know, like podcast episodes, like audio only podcast episodes to provide a comparison. Sometimes these would go up to like 50, 60 minutes. Sometimes. Some people like to do two birds with one stone and say, you know what, one of the things we're going to be repurposing from our event is we want to also get audio podcasts, for example. And so they they decide to create longer videos as, as a result of that because they have a vision and they're planning to get a lot of different things out of it. So to tell you the truth, it's really up to each show and each audience and what makes the most sense. But if we're starting from scratch, I would say anywhere from, yeah, 20 to 40 minutes as such.

And by the way, I've seen many people in the event industry doing what they call these shows and they do it like very short. It's just 10 minutes or 15 minutes. And I think this works very well as well for social media and brand awareness. But do not be scared to, if you have one big important person that you have on your show to extend it, because that's kind of where the beauty of repurposing comes through. And then probably then is a kind of a good way to kind of come back to the framework. So don't be scared to make it longer because if the conversation is good, if the conversation is hot, if the conversation is topical, then you're going to have amazing opportunities to chop and slice and dice that moving forward. Let me just kind of, again, kind of, let's go back into the framework here so that you were able to expand on the other stages.

Perfect. By the way, Ricardo, I have to say I love the animations. They're very effective.

I'm loving it too. I'm really located at Katniss Shop.

You're giving us a lot of ideas now, but yeah, basically going on to the second stage with produce, we're not going to spend too much time on that because I feel like we are speaking to, you know, people who, of course, you know, you know, who have a lot of experience with this. But. So I'm going to skip the produce stage. But to summarize that quickly, you know, it's, it's everything that goes into preparing and recording these sessions, whether they're done obviously, like virtually or if they are done, you know, in person, obviously. These days most events are naturally running virtually, so producers is what you think produces. So I'm going to skip that for the sake of time.

And also, by the way, just a note, we released last week a blog post as part of the promotion part of this event on how you would actually produce the nice video recording for your show or for your event. So Caroline will probably share the link to that blog in the chat panel. So you guys have that reference. But anyways, event organizers or if you've ever produced an event, you can, you will know exactly what you need to do. The only difference is that you now have video. But the same process works. Okay, Karim, go ahead.

Perfect. Yeah. So, yeah, carrying off the back of that, sort of the next step then would be repurposing. And you know, we can talk at length of that, but in essence, it's all about how do we take these episodes and really extract the most value out of them. So whether that is repurposing that content into video or audio, or image or written. So I want you to really remember, like these four formats, video, audio, image, and written. Because these episodes really could serve more than just the long form videos of them. And let's be honest, statistically most people may not necessarily have the time to go through these long videos in detail. Sometimes all they need, or sometimes they need a motivation. Sometimes all they need is that smaller teaser clip that was a video or that social card which was like a quote, maybe that was of something that was mentioned in the video. Sometimes they need that little motivation to go back to the original piece. And let's be honest, once again, sometimes they may never even see the full episode. But you know, that doesn't stop us from still having that conversation with them. Maybe they just want to read, you know, the highlights or the greatest hits, so on and so forth. So basically for repurpose, we have three stages there, which is formats, channels and use cases. So these four things that I've talked about, video, audio, image, written, these would be the different formats. Right? And now the next layer, to make it a bit more, a bit more contextual, are the different channels. So depending on what events and what industries you guys are creating, you know, you may decide to prioritize certain channels over others. Right. So LinkedIn will naturally be very, very relevant to anyone who is in B2B. But in addition to LinkedIn, you may have a case for using Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, so on and so forth. And so creating content formats that are actually contextual to these specific channels is something that really, really goes the distance so that we're not just copy pasting the same content across the different clips.

Yeah, and I just really wanted to kind of highlight this, that the magic really with episodic marketing is the repurposed part, because you are doing absolutely no good to your event if you're not repurposing the content that you produce. And I just really wanted to take this opportunity to highlight something from Helen Disney on the chat panel that she was asking that she's planning on producing a bi weekly chat show which is Great. By the way, Helen. And the question is whether we have a view or if it's better to make it a live event and then release the recordings after as well as clips or just pre record so that you can edit them and make it more slick. What's your view on that? I have a view on that, but I'll give you the option to the opportunity to answer that. Karim?

Yeah, Ricardo, why don't you go first? Okay.

So Helen, I think that my view is a personal view, is that within events in particular, we want to be generating leads, we want to be generating engagement. So I almost always favor, favor the live environment because the live environment, number one, allows you to create and build some momentum leading to that particular live episode. And also it allows you to, if you want to generate leads. So for instance, these webinar series, I like to just get people registered because I like to have the opportunity to have that live interaction with someone like you being able to answer the questions live. And I like to generate leads, of course, as we all are here trying to make a living generating list and sell our services. But so I like the live environment because that's kind of what it gives me the opportunity to do and then post. And by the way, I don't mind the number of registrations I get because I know that statistically I can receive three times as much registrations post event than the ones that I will receive pre event. But I've always favor the lead generation aspect and the live element because that's kind of part of the community. I hope that I've answered that question, Helen. Anything you need to add there, Karim?

Yeah, for sure. So one of the, just to give a real life example, so one of the brands that we work with at the moment, they're called Learn Upon. I'm sure they won't mind me sharing this because I'm promoting them, but basically it's a company called Learn upon and they had the exact same question as you, Helen. And because they had some really high profile guests on their chat show. For example, episode one, which we produced with them, had the chief learning officer of NASA. Right after that they had a C level person from McDonald's, then General Electric. The list keeps on going, but you get the idea. It took them ages to even land these guests. So of course they wanted to make it look as slick as possible, to your point, but they didn't want to miss out on all the benefits that Ricardo was talking about. So what do we do? They ended up doing something really cool where basically they would pre record the event. We post, produce it, share it back with them. But basically the live event is a screening of what they have produced. So. So there's still a Q and A, there's still the live and engage live component and all the benefits of that. Ricardo, as you were saying. But it looks, I mean, it looks, you know, it gives us, or if, you know, if a team wanted to do it by themselves, you know, it gives the opportunity to breathe and to actually, like, produce, have a look at the content, make sure it's proper before it finally goes live. And still people will be able to have conversations around that. So that could be a good middle option as well, I would say. But in all cases, once you get to that recorded stage, whether it was like live and then clips later, or prerecorded and then live and then the clips later, it's always about creating these repurposed clips afterwards. For sure.

Exactly. And I'm actually going to share the way we do it for all these shows. So if you have seen the way that we promote, I like to share as much as possible in the way that we do our processes, because that's exactly the way we do it for our clients. So there was another. Helen, I hope that we've answered the question now. This one's Catherine. Catherine asked the question about what would be. Karim, what would be your three favorite ingredients that changes a webinar? And by the way, everyone is bored with the webinars. Everyone is like, so.

Webinar fatigue.

Webinar fatigue. What would be the three key ingredients that could change a webinar, a boring webinar into show? And then if you can just basically kind of share some example or how a standard boring has been transformed, if at all.

Yeah, absolutely. So, okay. So, yeah, thank you for the question. I guess the first thing would be making a decision, once again, making a creative decision to call it a show. You know, and this may be a conversation that would be had with the leadership team, or maybe the team is autonomous to decide on that. But to basically give that a show and come up with a name for that show, that would be the first thing. The second thing is to really brand it as such. So if you think of some of our favorite shows, there's always like a hook and then like, there's like an intro sequence. There might be some like a quick, like, you know, music jingle or something like that. And this really helps to create it, to really help that packaging piece as well. So the second thing would be creating a dedicated show. Intro and outro that really helps to bookend the content as such. And then last but not least is to really. And this is the hardest one. I left the hardest one for last but really think about how you can actually make that content as binge worthy as possible.