BrightTALK allows users to create episodic Series and playlists that keep audiences coming back. Creating an always-on Series is a great way to increase registration and drive re-engagement with your content.
What is a Series?
A Series is a set of connected webinars that engages your target audience over time on a dedicated registration page. Creating a Series delivers some tangible benefits to your brand, allowing you to:
- Re-engage audiences with automated reminder emails to new episodes
- Optimize promotions with a dedicated registration page and one-time, Series-level registration
- Categorize webinars and videos at the source by vertical, topic, product or region
- Reuse existing content to extend webinar and video shelf-life
What do top-performing Series do right?
The most successful Series tend to have several factors in common.
1. Clear Thematic Continuity
Having a consistent narrative across episodes is essential to the success of your Series. Whether you choose to focus on a popular topic or another form of categorization, the theme of your Series should clearly tie the episodes together. Here are some ideas:
2. Consistent Content Cadence
Regularity is the key to a coherent content schedule – after all, it’s difficult for users to connect with your content if episodes 1 and 2 are separated by a day, and episodes 2 and 3 by a year. Ensure episodes go live on a consistent cadence throughout the duration of your Series. If you’re looking for more guidance around what a strong cadence looks like, check out these data points:
- Most series contain between 3 and 12 episodes
- The average number of episodes in a Series is 5
3. Strategic Visuals
If episodes look radically different from one another, it can lead users to wonder if they’re even connected. Using similar graphics and sticking to the same color scheme visually tie together webinars on your Series homepage.
How do I craft a winning a Series description?
Your description refers to text on the Series’ homepage intended to inform users as to what your Series is about. These are our 3 recommended best practices:
- Description scope: Create a description that’s neither too vague nor too in-depth. Your description should pique the audience’s interest enough to engage, but only tease insights (thus giving users a reason to watch).
- Know your audience: Remember that descriptions are for the audience, so write your description with their pain points in mind. Focus on the theme that ties all the episodes together, while alluding to any specific callouts (like expert speakers) that show the value of engaging with every episode.
- Description length: Overly short descriptions (say, a single sentence) do not provide enough information; overly long descriptions (3+ paragraphs) present an overwhelming amount of text. Find a happy medium.
How do I title my Series?
The strongest titles use eye-catching and topical keywords that effectively summarize the main theme of your Series. A compelling title focuses on audience-driven messaging that speaks to pain points or a prevalent market trend to catch user attention.
Here are some additional considerations for crafting a winning title:
- Timeliness: Calling out years/dates/seasons can be impactful for a Series centered around a timely topic or event, but keep in mind they will have a shorter shelf life (e.g., “2024 roadmap”)
- Alluding to the multi-webinar setup: Use terms that speak to the unique nature of the Series page in that it offers multiple related webinars – language such as plurals (e.g. “techniques”, “strategies”, etc.) or descriptive words (e.g. “Series”, “digital forum”, “tech talks”, etc.) can help play up the unique value prop to the audience
- Length: Ensure the topic of your Series is clear from the title, but avoid titles that are too long and don’t pack a punch – 60 characters or fewer is the ideal length
How do I title the individual episodes that make up my Series?
Crafting a title that creates personal connections at scale is not always easy to do. Fortunately, the same tactics that frequently see success for webinars published to your Channel also apply to the individual episodes that make up your Series. Our article How Do I Write an Effective Webinar Title? provides a more in-depth look at webinar title best practices.
Webinar title real estate
- Concise, keyword-driven titles maintain a visually appealing Series homepage
- Because webinar titles often double as email subject lines, and mobile devices typically only show the first 25-30 characters of a subject line, include important keywords within this threshold
- 60 characters or fewer is the ideal length
Tactical messaging advice
- While Series episodes can build on one another, avoid titles that cannot stand alone – titling episodes as if they’re unique experiences enables users to seek out your webinars based on their interest in the topic
- The following tactics tend to produce strong performance and user engagement:
- How-tos
- Numbers & listicles
- Questions
- Vs. and comparison angles
- Statistics
- Playing up fear, uncertainty, & doubt (FUD)