If there’s one thing Wistia is passionate about, it’s building brand affinity. In fact, they created a whole video series called Brandwagon to spread the message.
Brand affinity marketing is all about turning your audience into full-blown fans of your brand. And it’s more than just a platform for Wistia. It’s the how behind everything they do—including their content and promotion strategy for Brandwagon.
We sat down with Wistia’s Head of Production Chris Lavigne and Strategic Partnerships Manager Kristen Bryant to learn more in What’s the Plan—a video series where we talk to leading brands and influencers about how they plan, build, and launch their best projects.
Here’s how to keep your audience coming back to your content again and again.
Episodic content gives you a unique opportunity to establish ongoing touchpoints with your audience. But if you want them to keep coming back for every episode, you have to make it worth their time.
Here are a few ways Wistia did that for Brandwagon:
The fact that teams have watched Brandwagon and been inspired to go make their own shows is proof Wistia got the content right.
See how Wistia used audience feedback to improve future project planning.
Lay a clear path to success with a visual plan that’s easy to understand, and keep everyone in sync with flexible workflows and team collaboration.
Brand affinity starts with meaningful content. But Wistia didn’t stop there. They’ve been just as intentional about how they handle their subscriber list.
“If you subscribe to Brandwagon, we’re going to give you content that’s about Brandwagon or overlapping information that’s only about content,” Kristen explains. “These people are not our marketing qualified leads. They are subscribers for our content, and we are very intentional about that.”
And it works. Some of the best feedback Wistia got about Brandwagon was from people who had forgotten about Wistia and came back because of the show.
“The best thing we could have asked for is that we’re on people’s radar again—not because of our product. They may never need our product again, but we’re giving them value in another way,” Kristen adds. “It’s what we believe in.”
“If you think about an episode of some show you might be watching now, there are so many assets people are creating to promote that single episode,” Kristen says.
That’s why Wistia decided to set the traditional SaaS launch playbook aside and looked to media networks like Netflix to guide their promotional strategy.
You don’t have to wait until production wraps to build buzz for your show. Wistia created a series trailer early on to generate subscribers for Brandwagon—and they did it without any actual footage of the show.
“After we launched the first episode, then every episode subsequently had its own trailer,” Chris says. The individual episode trailers teased out what viewers would see and learn from each guest.
Once the show wrapped and Wistia’s Brandwagon team had some breathing room, they created a new post-launch trailer that captures the series as a whole even better so they can use it for ongoing promotion.
This example from the free show planning template we created based on Wistia’s process shows you how you might break pre- vs. post-launch marketing tasks down in your own plan.
While email served as the primary tool Wistia used to announce episode releases for Brandwagon, it wasn’t the only channel they used to drive traffic and views.
“For each individual episode we had a promotion plan. We knew we were going to launch it on Tuesdays. We knew that email was going to be sent out, but we also had ad assets that were going online that were specific to the episode,” Kristen says.
These additional assets might include mini-segments for Instagram TV or other social channels or paid ads on Facebook and YouTube.
And Wistia didn’t rely solely on their marketers to get word out about Brandwagon. They created promo kits with sample tweets and posts that made it easy for their entire team—as well as show guests—to share on their own social channels.
Discover the right time to bring your marketing team into the video production process.
Want to make your projects more memorable? Watch the first 3 episodes of What’s the Plan? to discover:
We’ll also show you how to apply the lessons we learned from Wistia to a real project plan and share a free template you can use to plan your own video projects.