EP 5: Building Your Team

NARRATOR: If you're going to start making shows to build brand affinity, it's going to mean some new roles and responsibilities for your team. So let's talk about who to hire, when to outsource, and how to set your team up for success. JENNY COPPOLA: You basically have three ways you can get started producing shows for your business. You can build, borrow, or buy. Build is all about hiring and building an in-house team to produce your shows. Borrow is when you work with freelancers or agencies to get your content spun up. And then buy is when you license content that might already exist in the world that feels super aligned with your brand. NARRATOR: OK, let's start by talking about building an in-house team. PHIL NOTTINGHAM: The main difference between your marketing team today and a brand affinity marketing team is that most marketing teams are focused primarily on conversion, but when you're building brand affinity, you instead need to focus on consumption and engagement. NARRATOR: That's brand marketing strategist Phil Nottingham. PHIL NOTTINGHAM: When you're focused on conversion, your team tries to drive traffic to your website and capture leads. But if you don't convert those people, then often you lose them as potential customers, and the money that you spend trying to drive them to your website in the first place. With episodic shows, you're inviting your audience to consume your content and engage with you again and again. They may not be your customers today or tomorrow, but they'll become the best advocates for your brand. NARRATOR: Let's talk to Dan Mills, head of Wistia Studios, about what this means for your team. DAN MILLS: A brand affinity marketing team is in charge of making and distributing content that drives the most engagement from your audience. And while every team is at a different starting point, you can build a brand affinity marketing team with just a few key roles. The first role you'll want to add to your team is a brand affinity marketing content creator. Now, you might already have content specialists working at your business who are writing blog posts and emails and ebooks. Now you'll need someone focused entirely on writing and creating video series and podcasts. KIBI ANDERSON: If you only have one person to hire, make sure it's somebody who's a jack of all trades. NARRATOR: Emmy-award winning producer Kibi Anderson knows a thing or two about building creative teams. KIBI ANDERSON: Hey, everyone. You need to hire creative people. And when I say creative, it's not just creative in terms of storytelling and coming up with cool ideas, but it's a creative problem-solver. If you are up against a scenario where you're not quite sure how to handle a location or you're struggling with finding a good actor, you want someone who can go into their network, who can tap into their relationships, and who can just think outside of the box about how to solve that problem. PATRICK CAMPBELL: You don't want to find someone who's necessarily amazing at any one thing-- although, if you can find them, that's awesome. Instead, you want to find someone who is at least OK, if not above average, at all of the pillars of show creation. That person should be able to write. That person should be able to handle the audio and video. That person should be able to handle graphic work, maybe even get in front of the camera if they need to. But that person should be able to do everything from the beginning of a show all the way to the end, without having to involve a whole bunch of external people with a bunch of different expertise. DAN MILLS: But making a show can be a lot for one person to manage, so the next key hire for your team is a producer. A producer can manage all the logistics around show creation. A great producer is going to help keep your content creator on track, and will probably also have the bandwidth to be thinking about the next project that's coming down the pike. SYDNEY RUTMAN: I'm always thinking about two things-- making sure that our current shows get done, but also that there's not too much downtime between productions. NARRATOR: This is Sydney Rutman, development producer here at Wistia. SYDNEY RUTMAN: With our current shows, I'm working with production to make sure that we're on budget, on schedule, and hitting the vision that we came up with in development. And at the same time, I am meeting with key stakeholders at the business to make sure that the next show is going to be the best one yet. LIZ COHEN: Everything is so collaborative. And a producer is going to be the top of that food chain in terms of assisting the creative, making sure they have everything they need to tell the story, and help, ultimately, support the vision. CREW: Great. LIZ COHEN: Yeah! DAN MILLS: Last, you need someone who knows how to strategically distribute content in order to build an audience. You need a director of audience development. CHRIS SAVAGE: Look-- it's not enough just to have a great show. You want people to watch it. You want people to see it. You need someone focused on figuring out where your potential audience is, and how you're going to bring them in. You need someone talking to super fans, and engaging them, and understanding what they want. Really, what you need is someone learning and iterating about the process of building an audience for your show. A good director of audience development is going to come in, they're going to help you figure out what kinds of promotional assets you can make, what channels are going to work. Honestly, they're going to really help you build an audience for a show. NARRATOR: Let's take a look at how this works at Wistia. Wistia Studios is its own team that collaborates closely with our design and marketing departments. The Wistia Studios team has producers that focus on developing future shows, producers that are focused on the creative direction of our current projects, and of course, a production team that brings it all to life. Studios works alongside our design team, which helps develop brands for our shows. On the marketing team, the product marketers and audience development specialists develop the messaging and promotion strategy for each show. They work closely to understand our audiences and make sure we're adding even more value for those people through our products. Meanwhile, the content and creative team makes all the supporting assets needed to build the hype around the show. DAN MILLS: Yeah, you could say we're pretty serious about this brand affinity marketing thing here at Wistia-- and that's it for me. NARRATOR: Bye, Dan. Now, if you don't have the room or the budget for a larger team, no sweat. You can create binge-worthy content with a pretty small team. Just ask Jeff Ayers from Deathwish Coffee. Hey, Jeff, who dreams up and writes your shows? JEFF AYERS: Me. NARRATOR: Who produces them? JEFF AYERS: Me. NARRATOR: But who stars in them? JEFF AYERS: Mostly me. When I can, I try to bring in some other people from the company, but in a pinch, just me. NARRATOR: What about editing? JEFF AYERS: Me. NARRATOR: Or lighting? JEFF AYERS: Me. NARRATOR: Coloring? Who handles file management? What about promotion and audience development? JEFF AYERS: To start investing in brand affinity marketing, Deathwish Coffee made one hire, and you're looking at him. NARRATOR: It's no secret that producing shows is hard work. And it can require a big commitment from your business. So collaborating with external teams and borrowing talent can be a great way to start making shows and building brand affinity. Just ask some of these wonderfully creative agencies. GRAHAM BURNS: Hey, we're The Brothers Buoy. JACKSON COOK: We're a creative agency based in Brooklyn, New York. ADAM LISAGOR: Hey, everybody, we're Sandwich from Los Angeles, California. MICHELLE KHOURI: Hi, I'm Michelle from FRQNCY Media, a damn good podcast production company based in Atlanta, Georgia. NATE NICHOLS: Yo. Nate Nichols here, founder of Palette Group. We are a creative agency and production house in Brooklyn, New York City. DAN RIORDAN: Hello, we're Gnarly Bay. DANA SAINT: We're a full service production company based out of Westerly, Rhode Island. DAN RIORDAN: It's true. DANA SAINT: Bringing in outside help is going to do one of two things. If you've never done it before, they're going to basically be somebody that holds your hand throughout the whole process, but they're also going to help elevate the whole execution of your project. MICHELLE KHOURI: The reality is your team is probably already slammed, so partnering with a production company gives you all of the benefits of having a shiny new show to be super proud of without all the obstacles of trying to figure out who has bandwidth to make this. NATE NICHOLS: They are your chief creative officer here on out. You have the opportunity to hire an organization that has a bunch of different life experiences, that can see your brand from angles that you would never be able to see. GRAHAM BURNS: We'll basically work with you to develop the idea, brainstorm, and execute the production from start to finish. ADAM LISAGOR: If your company needs to build an office, you don't need to hire a full time architect. Bring in freelancers or independent contractors to come in, exercise their years of experience and their expertise and their creativity to help you build an infrastructure on which years of great content can sit. NARRATOR: Using outside agencies or talent is the peanut butter to your sweet marshmallow fluff. You bring the brand affinity marketing strategy and an agency can help you produce your show and deliver it on a silver platter. OK, the last way your brand can start producing episodic content is to license or buy content that already exists. SYDNEY RUTMAN: Buying or licensing content is a great way for you to build up your content library in a short amount of time. It's a great way to get high production value, and then you can start sharing that content and those stories right away with your audience. PATRICK CAMPBELL: There are a ton of creators that just want to create, and they're looking for homes for their content and you could be that home. Now, if you're a B2B software company, you probably don't want to go out and buy another Game of Thrones. But there's plenty of content that you could go purchase that aligns with your customers and allow them to fall in love with not only the content, but also you. NARRATOR: However you get started with brand affinity marketing, you need to evolve your existing team in a way that makes sense for your business. That's all for now.