There's more to creating episodic content than just diving right in. Any good business strategy requires a certain amount of planning. Episodic content is no different.

Good episodic content requires a shift in mindset and realizing that such content can't be ignored in your business or organization's overall content strategy.

This goes from recalling and revisiting the timeless wisdom from Aristotle's Rhetoric to the various edges and advantages that episodic content will provide to your business, brand or organization. 

Here are the seven reasons why you should consider a video marketing strategy for your business:

1. Your audience wants stories, not boring content
2. We live in a post-Netflix world
3. Easily set yourself apart from the crowd
4. Difficult to replicate
5. Ignite thought leadership
6. Personal branding
7. Stay top of mind

1. Stories over everything

Your customers want you to tell them a story. Engage them, don't just market at them. You probably learned about ethos, pathos, and logos in school. It comes from Aristotle's views on rhetoric, which is the art of persuasion. Every business knows the importance of being able to persuade a consumer or client to take a particular action. It is a crucial element to the art of selling or persuasion. It might help to keep the basic ideas for ethos, pathos, and logos in mind:

Ethos: an appeal to ethics, this is where you can convince your audience through your authority and or credibility. For example, using thought leadership or fame as leverage to convince your audience. 

Pathos: an appeal to emotion, this is where you can convince your audience through storytelling or some other content that will entice an emotional response.

Logos: an appeal to logic, this is where you can convince your audience with facts and figures. Such as graphs, charts or infographics.

Carmine Gallo noted in his book Talk Like Ted, that the best TED Talks utilize ethos, pathos, and logos. In which pathos, in this case, storytelling made up a crucial element of these talks. 

2. Netflix Has An Original Series. Why Not Start One Too?

In truth, Netflix has a lot of original series. So does Hulu, Starz, Apple, and Disney Plus as well as many others. The big media subscription companies are ruthlessly competing with each other to see who can create the most and the best original series. Why not get in on the action? As far as our buyer is concerned, we’re competing for attention with everything in their world; we’re competing for attention with Netflix. 

What can you learn from Netflix and these other companies on how to create a good original series that grabs people's attention and refuses to let go?

3. Think Like A Producer, Not A Marketer

How can you set yourself apart with your content? We already know that creating an original series is certainly an option. If that's the route you wish to go, how are you going to approach it? Well, that requires a mindset shift. You now need to approach your marketing strategy like a producer instead of a marketer. You need to think about equipment, guests, lighting, video and audio editing and possibly donuts for those involved.

What benefits would your business gain from you this mindset shift?

How would sales and marketing improve?

How would the relationships with your customers and team improve? 

How would your overall brand improve?

Creating episodic content and thinking as a producer would likely set you up as a thought leader or improve your status as one. Your content would be more organized, easier to consume and more fun.

4. An Unfair Advantage

Episodic content gives you an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

By creating content that is simple to plan for internally but pretty complex for competitors to replicate due to the compounding of variables in their arsenal. Here's why:

First-to-market

By creating a show in a specific niche you are automatically a contender in your chosen industry. With the right quality and consistency, this creates a true brand asset that holds attention and trust value that’s pretty hard if not impossible to replicate exactly.

Guest relationships and selection

It is difficult to replicate the exact same roster of guests and re-create the exact same conversations and entertainment/education value. With each reputable guest and their Klout score comes an added layer of complexity for competitors to match. 

Multi-format content re-purposing

By taking each episode and re-purposing it for different social channels to create high volume micro-content pieces, brands create an act that’s tough to follow. It also ensures that they have brand assets everywhere that their audience’s attention is spent on. 

5. Thought Leadership

By building their own original series, brands equip themselves with a vehicle that they can use to curate and communicate with their target audiences the conversations, debates, questions, and findings that seek to stimulate and educate them - leading them to a new way forward. 

With this thought leadership that comes from thinking like a producer rather than a marketer adds a certain uniqueness to your brand. You will be able to create and execute content that is both informative and entertaining faster and more efficiently than other brands.

6. Personal Branding

Episodic content provides an easy way to brand yourself and your business. This is also true for any guest you have on your show. The very presence of someone can aid branding tremendously.

When humans at a company “show their faces” in the episodic content they create, it builds trust. 

In many ways, personal branding is the new branding because we trust people like us over faceless corporations. Episodic content is a vehicle for us to build our own personal brands inside the organization as well as lean on the personal brands of others who feature in our productions.

The ease of distribution that comes with thinking as a producer and creating episodic content means that your brand's messages, stories, and information can reach further and have a greater impact.

7. Staying Top Of Mind

One of the most valuable things we can have in today’s world is someone’s attention. With all the re-purposed content brands get from episodic content, they are able to continue staying top of mind by following a systematic way to creating engaging content across multiple channels. 

Not every piece of content will necessarily be seen by everyone, but the abundance of content created will keep your brand and thought leadership top of mind for those with an interest in that topic and the value your company offers.

As promised, here's a series that you can use as a template for your episodic video content strategy. We're calling it Build a Video Series 101.