You made it to launch! To make sure it's a success, you'll want to get those marketing plans dialed in. Do you drop your series all at once? Or one episode at a time? Find out what launch plan will work for your series, your team, and your audience.

Dan Mills

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Head of Wistia Studios

Sydney Rutman

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Development Producer

Chris Lavigne

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Head of Production

Jenny Coppola

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Director of Content and Creative

David Cancel

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CEO & Founder

Danielle Bushrow

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Senior Designer

Kibi Anderson

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Digital Content & Strategy Executive

Phil Nottingham

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Brand Marketing Strategist

Adam Day

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Lead Producer

Patrick Campbell

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Founder & CEO

Colin Rosenblum & Samir Chaudry

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Co-Creators

Release

Release Cadence Blog

goodplace2

How to Market Like a Media Company

Launch


NARRATOR: This is it, the moment you and your fans have been waiting for. It's time to launch your show.

ADAM DAY You spent all this time, money, effort. Now you have to have a strategy to match for launch.

DAN MILLS: Launch and distribution of shows is as creative as making them. There are so many creative possibilities of how you can get the stuff out there.

KRISTEN BRYANT: So pop the Prosecco. Open that bag of popcorn. And sit down and enjoy it with your team. You deserve it.

[CHILDREN CHEERING]

DAN MILLS: Chances are you've probably been involved with a product launch at your company. And that's great, because launching is basically an awareness campaign for your newest product which is your show.

NARRATOR: And before you launch, it's time to answer that one big question. Do you drop your series all at once or episode by episode over time? Back again is development producer Sydney Rutman with some thoughts.

SYDNEY RUTMAN: Release cadence is a huge question for most show creators. The reality is there's no one way to launch a show. You need to think about what's going to work for your particular series. If you release your series all at once, you're giving your audience the opportunity to binge it all at once.

It means that your audience is going to be spending a lot of time with your brand in a condensed period. It also means that you're going to have this big launch moment and then a long tail to promote the episodes of the series. If you release your series over time, you're giving your fans and your industry conversation pieces at regular intervals. But that means you're going to have to have the resources and the bandwidth to keep up with a rolling production and promotion schedule.

CHRIS LAVIGNE: When you're thinking about the release cadence for your show, you've got to think about how your audience is going to want to consume it.

NARRATOR: Wistia Head of Production, Chris Lavigne.

CHRIS LAVIGNE: Think about your own behaviors and how you watch or listen to certain types of content. Me? I'm a binger. I like to watch 2, 4, 6, 12 episodes at a time. But there are a lot of other people that will like the weekly cadence of a show or even the daily cadence of a show. That's way more topical and current. Just keep this stuff in mind when you're thinking about your own release cadence.

NARRATOR: Now that your release cadence is set, it's time to get your show in front of your niche audience. To do that, you'll need to focus on two things. Launches are a big deal. So you need to make a big splash with your content. And targeting is key. You've made this show for a specific audience. So now it's time to focus your marketing tactics. Let's talk to Wistia's Director of Content and Creative Jenny Coppola about the big splash.

JENNY COPPOLA: When you launch your series, it's time to flip on all the switches, set the phasors to blast, and go all in on your show. So how are you going to do that? Let's start with your own properties. When someone visits your website, they should know that you're launching a show. Whatever that means, you should give your show top level placement, marquee billing across your website.

Next up is your blog. If you run an active blog, you should be creating posts that go around the launch of your series. So introduce the series on your blog, interview guests, go behind the scenes, and share content, so that you can really initiate a conversation with your audience.

Finally, email. You got to let people know that your show exists. Send an announcement to your email list, and at the same time, build a list of engaged subscribers. You can reach out to them when you have new episodes. But you also want to make sure that you provide value and put a smile on their face with the content that you're sending them.

DAVID CANCEL: People have to hear something over and over and over again before they actually pay attention to it. So don't be afraid to cross promote things.

NARRATOR: Oh, hey! It's Drift CEO David Cancel.

DAVID CANCEL: The way I think about show creation is that it's 80% promotion, 20% creation. 80% of your energy should be focused on how do you promote this thing. The first time, how do you promote it to different audiences? How do you get people to care about it inside your company as well as outside of your company? And how do you keep doing that over time?

NARRATOR: OK. So you're spreading the word to the audience you already have.

But what about audiences beyond your site? Here's Wistia Designer Danielle Bushrow to talk about launching on your social channels.

DANIELLE BUSHROW: On launch day, your social media channels need to be all about your series. Share an episode trailer or other supporting content, and tell your audience to go watch your show. It's pretty much no wrong moves here. Pin posts to the top of your feed. Put the link to the show in your bio. And if you have a special guest, make a launch kit to send to them, so that they can share on their social channels with their audience.

KIBI ANDERSON: Promotion is going to be key. So whether that's social channels, whether that's influencers that you know of, if you're doing something niche, the goal is to get as much hype and awareness about your show, so you can maximize the reach of that launch as much as possible.

NARRATOR: When you're making the big splash, you need to point the way to your show.

PHIL NOTTINGHAM: The way to get the best of both worlds and really leverage your social media accounts is to use platforms like YouTube and Instagram for your clips and trailers, and then drive your audience to a website where your main asset lives.

NARRATOR: There's brand affinity marketing superstar Phil Nottingham.

PHIL NOTTINGHAM: Hello. How's it going? This way, the shorter content, your clips and trailers, do all the hard work for you. By not requiring a huge attention span on social media, you're not losing audiences who might otherwise drop off. But you're getting the full value of a long engagement in an environment that you control on your website.

A brand that does this really well is Netflix. You can go to YouTube to watch the trailers or clips. But to watch the full content, you need to go to Netflix.com and be a subscriber. Now sure that's their business model. But as a marketer, you can play exactly the same strategy for your business and your brand's content.

ADAM DAY: When it comes to podcasts, it's a bit of a different story than sharing a video series.

NARRATOR: There's Adam Day again.

ADAM DAY: I'm back, baby. Podcasts are distributed via RSS feeds, and that is a format that's made to be syndicated across multiple platforms. When you launch your show, put it on your website. But make it available on all the major platforms.

Let listeners know that it's available wherever they listen to podcasts. But encourage them to visit your show on your site where you can offer them an awesome listening experience, photography, behind the scenes content, show notes, and bonus recordings, and other extras that your fans can dig into.

NARRATOR: Now that the floodgates are open, it's time to do some targeted promotion to make sure your niche audience finds your show.

PATRICK CAMPBELL: One of the best ways to do this is through display ads that are hyper targeted to the folks that you're trying to get to watch your show. And you can even do this through boosting different social posts that you're putting out there.

NARRATOR: Welcome back, Patrick Campbell, CEO of Profitwell.

PATRICK CAMPBELL: We did this when we developed our show "RevOps and Hops," whose audience we didn't really have readily available in our email database. And so through using display ads as well as boosting different social posts, we were able to track that audience to that piece of content and basically start targeting a particular vertical that our business wasn't in previously.

As a result of these efforts, we were able to basically pick up an entirely new audience that we could sell our products to, but also who could consume our content. And we never would have been able to do that without a show that was specifically targeted for them.

NARRATOR: Organic search is another way you can target your future super fans.

JENNY COPPOLA: You've made your show for a niche audience. So odds are you probably have some pretty searchable content in those episodes. When you launch your show, be intentional about the show notes and episode descriptions you put with each episode. You want to give your content the best chance of being discovered on places like Google. So make sure you're incorporating the right keywords and keeping the content super clear.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: If you have a podcast or a video series, transcribe it and turn it into text. And that can live as a blog post, as a newsletter. You can cut it up into short form copy for Twitter or Instagram.

COLIN ROSENBLUM: Text is really important, because as far as search goes, it still reigns supreme.

SAMIR CHAUDRY: Like if you make an episode about basketball, the internet's not going to know that the video clip is basketball. But if you have a written piece on a blog that is about basketball, you could search that. And then that could lead you to the video.

DAN MILLS: And your release cadence will also dictate how you advertise. If you're going to be launching your entire series at once for people to binge, then you're going to want to advertise the entire series. Think of the broadest message of what you'll be talking about. And get people excited to watch all of it.

If you are going to be doing a release cadence that's weekly or biweekly or something of that nature, then you're going to want to be promoting not only the series, but also the specific episode that's available now, while also teasing what's coming next.

NARRATOR: All right, folks. Get your chess boards, because you're going to need to be strategic about putting your content out there.

Determine your release cadence. Make a big splash with your launch. And use targeted promotion to create awareness for your series. If you're engaging your fans, you're on your way to building brand affinity. To bring it all in for a landing, watch the next episode of "Show Business" to learn what to do after you launch your show.
