Every Company Should Be Experimenting With Entertainment (but avoid this common mistake)

By:
Todd Clouser

I was reflecting on the content strategy we're implementing at AudiencePlus this weekend and it led me down a path of watching a lot of my
old skits.

I was instantly reminded why I loved creating in that style and why it worked so well.

It also got me thinking why more teams don't experiment with entertaining content and the traps they fall into that lead to failure.

So if you're a content marketer that wants to test out some entertaining ideas, the next two-minute read is for you.

Entertainment is
really
good at one very specific thing: Being memorable.

And let's face it, marketing has
one
two jobs, educate the audience on the problem you solve and make sure they remember you when they want to solve it.

So let's talk about how entertainment plays into that.

First, you need to first educate the audience around the thing you solve for before you use entertainment to pour gas on it.

But the good news is, you're probably already focused on that with your current content strategy. And if you're doing it well, entertainment will make that education go so much further.

Here's an example showcase how I've done this in the past:

Back in my days at Refine Labs I was constantly creating entertaining content around our narrative. A few times a week Chris Walker would do an educational video going into detail on a topic for 5-8 minutes.

That content was super educational, but the ideas needed repeated hundreds of times to make them stick. The beauty of entertainment is that it makes those concepts much more memorable and shareable.

I would create one video per week on whatever topic he was talking about to help those ideas go further and stick in the minds of our audience.

Back in early February 2021, Chris did an episode of Demand Gen Live talking about the marketing and sales relationship. More specifically, he was talking about how the current lead scoring model was easily gamed to make marketers look good, while sales constantly missed their quota.

He went into detail on how a more modern approach to demand gen (that we sold) was the solve for aligning sales and marketing.

It was a message that he repeated often and the rest of the team needed to reinforce. And we did. Several others on the team would put out their own takes.

But
posts like this
constantly cut through the noise in a super memorable way because it was super relatable

and was delivered in an entertaining way that made it super shareable.

But this funny video on its own does nothing.

Without the narrative, educational content that the rest of the team created, this video is just a funny skit with a lot of vanity metrics.

Education is the key to making entertaining content work. So if you're not already creating educational content, start there.

And if you're already doing that, but not sure how to get started creating in different content formats and with different creators, check out
Easy Mode for the playbook.

P.S. wanna chat about using entertainment to build out your owned media strategy? Respond to this email or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn and let's setup 30 minutes.