Many modern companies claim to have an in-house media company, but they don’t.
Being a media company is more than expanding content beyond a blog, or even adding a podcast and courses. That’s still just content marketing.
When you build an in-house media company, you’re expanding into different content formats, but more importantly you’re looking at how they all work together. You’re looking to reach multiple demographics with a series of content and then turning that into a franchise.
Ronnie Higgins, Director of Content for Hopin, said it’s akin to taking your content and creating the equivalent of the Marvel universe.
Take something familiar and make it new
There are some companies that have taken on the in-house media company challenge and excelled at it. Ronnie says that ProfitWell is one of those companies.
ProfitWell has been successful because they look beyond marketing content when coming up with media that will engage their audience.
They look at what their competitors are doing, but also at all the other media their audience is consuming and borrow elements from them.
“One of the ways I would approach a show is if I found out my audience loves game shows,” Ronnie said. “Great. Well, instead of doing an interview with a professional, can I do a game show?”
The Hot Ones is a show that combines these elements and becomes something fresher than just an interview show.
The idea is to take something familiar and combine it with something else to create something new. Or you can even take two familiar things and through combining them come up a unique type of content.
Build cross-functional alignment
There are two things you need to do to ensure you can build on these ideas successfully.
One is to have buy-in throughout the company and tie your content to company goals.
“I am working on cross-functional alignment,” Ronnie said. “Not just within marketing, but throughout the org and aligning everything we do to the company OKRs, even if it’s a show. And always being able to articulate that. Because if I can articulate it, my CMO can articulate it to the CEO, who could articulate it to our finance team, and everyone’s a champion of what we’re doing.”
The other thing is to think about what resources you have and the extent of what you can build to reach those goals.
“What can we build?” Ronnie said. “We have a laundry list of ideas of things we can do that go beyond just podcasts and video series. I even threw out the idea of a word game with the popularity of Wordle.”
Once you have that list, you then want to start thinking about how you can produce those things consistently and then build them out into a franchise. Come up with a premise, then a main source format, and then ancillary formats that all work in tandem.
Create sustainable content
Instead of just creating weekly content, think about how you can create content that comes around every year and how your regular content will feed into it.
“How do we create a sustainable program instead of just saying, oh, we’re going to launch a podcast that’s once a week or whatever,” Ronnie said.
Instead of weekly, that could look like several six-episode podcasts that each come around once a year.
“It allows you to create multiple different franchises that have a cadence to it that then people will anticipate and know when that next one’s coming,” he said. “And you can start to build that audience and that scarcity.”
This can also apply to written content. If you create a cornerstone piece of content like the 2022 guide to event sponsorship, then you’d want to spend the next year covering that topic to feed into next year’s version.
“So when it comes time to refresh that piece of content, I have new material, new stories to inject into it and to atomize from it,” he said.
Find your way to other people’s property
To grow your in-house media company, you need to make sure that it’s pulling in a growing audience that ultimately checks out your product.
You want to expand your sphere of influence so that experts will share your content on their channels.
Think of your product portfolio as the map and your content as the breadcrumbs that bring people to it. To spread those breadcrumbs over a wider area, you need to expand beyond your own channels and into those of experts in their field.
“It’s not just publishing on our own platform, but creating content in a way that can be chopped up so it’s easily distributed and shared, not just on our own channels like social media and so forth, but other people’s property,” Ronnie said.
It’s similar to an enterprise strategy where you don’t want to just target the buyer, but the person who’s below and above them on the ladder to create a web of influence around the potential buyers.
“It’s that same strategy, but on a much broader level where you want to influence the people who might not buy the product, but when someone asks them for a recommendation, you’re top of mind,” he said.
Work with subject matter experts
It’s not enough to just quote subject matter experts in your content. That will look like what everyone else is doing on their blogs and it won’t inspire the experts to share your content to their audiences.
Find a way to include the experts in the creation of the content.
“Instead of just writing about them, how do you work with them to feature them and get some of their newest insight?” Ronnie asked.
If the experts have written a book, tap them to provide insights into what they’ve learned since publishing it.
“That is a tactic where I know that I’ll get fresh insight that no one can sort of replicate,” he said. “But also too, they would have incentive to sort of help us promote it because it then helps them because people will go buy their book.”
Create a win-win situation and your content will have a greater chance of landing on influential channels beyond your own.
