How Do You Prioritize Content Over Channels?

Ben: Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Nathan. Nathan, welcome to the show.

Nathan White: Hey Ben, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Ben: You bet. Well, Nathan, I'm really excited. And this conversation has a lot to do with your background, your job experience and everything like that. So let's get to know you. Tell us a little bit about what you do, what you love about marketing and all that good stuff.

Nathan White: Sure thing, yeah. I live in Des Moines, Iowa. I am the Creative Services Director at KCCI TV here in Des Moines. We are a CBS affiliate TV station.

There's a lot of different things that I love about my job. It's one that's probably not very well known outside of the TV industry. But basically, my team, we develop the audience.

So we try to get our programming content in front of people who might potentially watch it. If you're watching TV and you see a commercial come on that's like, tonight at 10 or 11 in the news, we have this thing and this thing and this thing. That's something that my team would create.

We create promos for sports content and all kinds of things like that just to try to get as many people to watch as we can.

Ben: I love that, I love that. And it sounds like with that job, you probably get to wear a lot of hats and get a lot of different experiences. Is that the case?

Nathan White: Yeah, that's probably the best thing about this job. I always recommend it to people who are interested in getting into marketing, but they're not really sure where to start or what they want to do.

Because everybody on my team, we know how to write scripts. We know how to write blog posts. We know how to write press releases. We edit video. We edit graphics. We do media planning. We do strategy. We sometimes dabble in event planning and things like that.

So it's a chance to learn about how to do a whole bunch of different things. And it just really sets you up to kind of see marketing from a holistic lens.

How do people enter the marketing field?

Ben: I love that. So people always get into marketing through different ways. Do you have a lot of journalism majors or random like different areas that kind of enter the field from?

Nathan White: It's a mix. We do get journalism people. I was more on the journalism side. I studied broadcast production and started off in the business on the news side as a news photographer.

So going out on stories and being in the middle of active scenes and that kind of thing, it was really exciting. It was really cool. And eventually I thought, hey, this creative services thing looks pretty fun.

So let me hop over there and give that a shot and kind of build on the skills that I already had. And then there's people on my team who have more of a TV production background.

And then there's people that have more of a marketing background, but they're just interested in being more in the production side. There's one woman on my team who she was working on big commercial productions in the market.

And she was like, you know, I feel like I'm just a small player in this production and I want to be, I want to have full control over what I'm doing. And, you know, our opportunity was able to offer that.

So, yeah, there's just a lot of really neat opportunities within this department. And it exists at most TV stations across the country.

Ben: I love that. I love that. That's a fun call to action. If you're in marketing or want to be in marketing or have no clue what you want to do with your life, this sounds like a really cool pathway. So I think it's worth looking into it. I think that's awesome.

What do you mean by "love your content more than your channel"?

Ben: So today what we're going to talk about, and I love how you phrase this in our conversations before we got on the show, how to love your content more than your channel. What do you mean by that? How do we love our content more than the channels and why do we get it backwards sometimes?

Nathan White: Well, I think let's start with what it sounds like, what it can feel like really when it's backwards. So imagine, you know, you log in for the day or maybe you're working in the office and someone passes you in the hallway and they're like, my goodness, Ben, did you see this new thing, this new platform launched today?

This, our competitor did this thing. We gotta go do that. We gotta go do that right now. And you feel like your hair is on fire and you're just all anxious, you know, just like, my gosh, I got to respond to this thing.

And it's because you've put the channel first. You've put where the content is going to appear first and not the content itself.

So imagine we kind of reverse the process a little bit and you kind of have a really deep understanding of what your content looks like. You understand the purpose of your content.

You understand the narrative of your company or your brand or your client or whatever you're trying to do. You understand the full identity of what you're trying to communicate, what the point of it is.

When you understand that, you can feel far less anxious about the channels and the platforms that you're putting it into because you've already thought about where it can fit in the different places, right? You already understand how to modify it for an elevator pitch, a presentation, a full-blown white paper, or anything like that.

So when something new comes along, you can kind of sit back and say, wait a second, I know how we can fit into this space, or we can't fit into this space. Like, our content and what we're trying to say just doesn't fit this audience, or we just, we don't see how it's gonna fit right now.

Doesn't mean it's never gonna fit, but we gotta take a step back and think about what we actually want to say.

What's your process for analyzing content?

Ben: Yeah, I love that. So when you're looking at the content itself, right, and trying to figure out how to really focus on the content and then how does it fit into the channel? What does that process look like?

How do you sit with the content? How do you analyze it? Like, what's the thought process you go through to really say, okay, I have a really good hold on the right kind of content that needs to come from recent news or opportunities or whatever it may be.

Nathan White: Well, I think, you know, marketing is really just, it's a, it's a person communicating with another person ultimately. Right. So think about what's the most interesting parts of it to you or what you see the people around you, what you see them interacting with the most.

So if the sales team gets really excited about something, about something that they like to share with clients and they feel like clients are receptive to that. And you can feel pretty sure that, you know, Hey, that's going to, that's probably going to reflect on my content that I create as well.

If you see you're talking to a founder of a company and they're kind of lighting up at this particular point where they're talking about their own story or about the story of the company or the thing that they're trying to create, you got to take note of that and think like, okay, that's the kind of thing that I need to be, I might need to amplify about what we're doing here, right?

And then of course, you know, if you're at a bigger place, hopefully you have some audience measurement, you have, you know, There's AB testing that you can do certainly, but you ideally want to be AB testing, not A, B, C, D, E, F testing.

There's just so many messages, you're not even sure what's hitting. That's where I think you can start to kind of sit back and think, okay, if somebody came to me and said, hey, I heard you're working at this new place or I heard you're working with this new person, what's cool and interesting about them?

What are you excited about this opportunity to work with them. And you can just kind of start there.

How do you measure success and use it to inform future decisions?

Ben: I love that. So you mentioned towards the end, you know, the A-B testing and some of that ways to kind of measure. So after you've kind of really fallen in love with the content found, you know, exactly the message and maybe two messages to test specifically, and you can talk about your experience specifically, how do you measure the success of sharing those messages?

And then how does the measurement kind of come full circle to help you the next time and the next go around and inform you about your audience?

Nathan White:  I don't get a lot of good data coming back.

So I got to rely on, you know, Nielsen ratings to an extent. I've got to rely on web data to an extent, but not, you know, it's not the same. Like we don't get web and click data on our promotion. We get it on the content itself.

So, you know, it's a lot of like, how do we feel about it? How do we feel like the community responded to it? It's not as much of like a pure A-B test where it's like, well, we put this up and we got so many clicks and this one got way more clicks or anything like that. Does that make sense?

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that's perfect because a lot of the times when it comes to content, you know, everyone wants to say they can track everything perfectly. And we all like in your business, you're limited by because of the channels and the mediums of what you can track, right?

And everyone in the space is, but it doesn't matter what business you're in. You are limited by that. So it's interesting because there are different ways to really internally say, Did this work? Yes or no. And I'm curious, like even with limited tracking, like how do you feel like, we nailed that or we should improve in this way, even based off of limited information. Like I'm curious how you guys focus and think about that.

Nathan White: Sure, I mean we watch, so our station is, we're owned by Hearst Television, which is a company that owns about 30 plus TV stations across the country. And, you know, we watch each other's stuff.

You know, it's not the same as watching competition. It's, you know, you're watching a station with, you know, the same kinds of resources, the same kinds of values, you know, sometimes the same kinds of market or in a different market.

And you're able to kind of sit back and go, I see how they covered the same thing we did, but they did it in a little bit better way. They seemed to make a better connection to their community or, the way they shot that was a little bit more interesting or the way they edited that just kind of put a finer point on it.

So that's the kind of ways that we tend to push each other. And then there's community reaction as well. Like we've got a phone bank coming up next week for the Red Cross and we're gonna see what the donations come in for that.

And we can compare it to the last time we did a phone bank for the Red Cross. We can think about what the engagement is and hopefully, sometimes the audience will call in and say, hey, I saw that thing and it motivated me and it made me feel special. But unfortunately, that's pretty rare.

Ben: Yeah, we all wish we could have that to be honest, that would be amazing. But I love that. I think that that's such a clever way to really look at the peers and you're, you know, it's not necessarily you trying to steal from your competition.

I love how you're, you're collaborating with people under the same umbrella, but I think that's universally applicable is, is how do we see what's out there? What are the consumers seeing? And how do we just continue to improve to provide them a better experience based off of the experiences they're already having in the marketplace.

And I think that that's so impactful and so viable and things like that.

How do you prioritize content creation and distribution?

Ben: One other question I have when it comes to the content, I'm guessing in your job, and I think this is interesting universally, prioritizing, I'm guessing there's a million different things that you can do. How do you pick? You know, everyone has a million opportunities to create and distribute and use content. How do you look at what you should say yes to and what you should say no to.

Nathan White: Well, there are a lot of priorities with a TV station because you think about, you know, we have 24 hours of programming. We happen to have a couple of multicast channels, which, you know, if you watch on TV through your antenna, those are the like channel dot two, channel dot three.

So there's programming there. You know, then you add in your websites, app. If you have any kind of a streaming platform, which we do, then there's promotion that's needed for that.

So, you know, it's a lot to balance and it's a lot to think through. So you kind of look for me, I like to look for intersection points where maybe in the same message I can hit on a couple of different things.

So, you know, if it's a newscast, Like if we're promoting a specific newscast, I want to make sure that we have our anchors in it because that I know helps build people up and you know that those personalities help bring viewers in.

So we might be talking about a particular story or we might be talking about that newscast in general and kind of a general campaign. But I want to incorporate specific things in there that I know are going to bring attention to other things as well.

And then just in terms of setting priorities, if something is happening under a shorter period of time, then I try to run it more often. Obviously, if it's happening in a longer period of time, we might not run it as much, but we might be strategic about replacing it over a month versus just trying to get it as many places as we can over a weekend.

And there's different tricks that you learn along the way about where to create efficiencies and where to push something to make it extra special. Over time, you can start to pick up on those things.

Ben: I love that. I love that. I love your touching on multiple points. I think that's so cool to say, okay, we got a lot of opportunities. Can we combine some of those and accomplish several things at the same time? I think that's a really cool framework for looking at how to prioritize. So I love it.

Well, Nathan has promised these episodes go by quick and that was amazing. I love how you look at content and then focus on the channel. Really put the quality of the material, you know, ahead of the KPI and all that kind of stuff. We had talked about, you know, KPIs come second. Love it.

How can people connect with you?

Ben: So if anyone wants to reach out and connect with you online and maybe learn about this space, how can they find you and where can they go?

Nathan White: I'm sure LinkedIn is the absolute best place. I'm there every few days and I love connecting with people there.

Ben: Love it, love it. And we'll link to your profile in the show notes and make sure people can find you. Nathan, again, thanks for the insights and all the updates. I learned a ton today. This is a whole area I knew nothing about before and it's really cool. So I really loved it. Thanks for sharing.

Nathan White: Thanks, Ben.

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