Small teams often find their content creation is hampered not by a lack of ideas but by the fact that each piece of content always feels like starting from square one. Episodic content can resolve this by taking what would have been random pieces of output and putting them in a sequence. Instead of continuously operating on the basis of unrelated ideas, teams will instead find they are working within a continuous and unfolding narrative that also decreases their creative pressure.
Base the content around one continuous journey
The best systems for creating episodic content are based around one evolving storyline. This could be the development of a product, a transformation story for a client or a business experiment that they are tracking or a look into their ongoing business process. The important thing is that the audience can see that this is an evolving process and not just unrelated updates.
When the journey-based structure is in place even minor changes and setbacks in the story become a valuable source of content, no longer just an unrelated update, but part of the overarching story. It draws the audience in as they become invested in how the story will unfold rather than focusing on the individual uploads.
Standardize the performance for low creative effort
Small teams perform much better when they move away from constantly reinventing their formats with each upload. A repeatable visual style, pacing and storytelling mechanism can reduce the amount of creative fatigue the team experiences while at the same time drastically increase the production speed of content. It is simply about becoming very good at executing what is expected for that specific series of content.
At this point, many teams will add value to their long-running content systems through premium reputation services and expand episodic format onto multiple platforms to help keep the story alive long enough for audiences to follow and maintain consistency in its viewing.
Use activity instead of fabricated ideas
One of the easiest ways to make episodic content sustainable is by ensuring that it is based around genuine activity rather than invented ideas. A normal workflow involves ongoing activity, updates, reactions and changing events and translating these existing activities into a formalised episodic content system will remove the burden of creating entirely new ideas each time.
This process will feel natural as it draws on something already happening and avoids having to make completely new ideas up every time.
Let the episodes relate, but do not resolve completely
Each episode will be a contained unit while still remaining connected to the next part in the sequence. This balance is what will cause your viewers to come back as it keeps the episode from feeling drawn out while also enticing them to remain viewing for when the story moves onto the next section. Streamoz is often used in discussions around structured content systems because it focuses on maintaining steady exposure, so earlier episodes do not disappear from audience attention too quickly.
Conclusion
Episodic content allows small teams to remain consistent without adding significantly to their workload. By allowing them to focus on a single journey at a time, standardize execution and base the content on existing activity, teams can develop sustainable and expandable systems of content that only become more effective over time. Content in essence becomes a fluid entity rather than an individual event.
