• By michelle
• In Content Marketing

Content Marketing Success: Mirror the Latest TV Revival Trends

“Whatever happened to predictability. The milkman, the paperboy, evening tv?”

If you didn’t just sing that sentence to the tune of the infamous Full House theme song, you clearly missed out on some quality 90’s television. Not to worry. The show is back and running, and as long as you have a Netflix account, you can get caught up in a jiffy!

Before you do that though, I hope you’ll hang tight with me for just a bit. I’m about to make a connection between your content marketing strategy and the success of TV revival series–a trend hotter than John Stamos in every episode in all 9 seasons of Full House combined.

Put down the remote, and I promise that by then end of this post you’ll have the knowledge you need to create content that is memorable, drives traffic to your website, and increases your sales.

Keep reading to discover what successful TV producers are doing with your favorite TV shows, and why it’s advantageous to mirror the latest TV revival trends with your marketing content.

The TV Revival Series Trend

If you’re a TV watcher, you’ve probably noticed a sudden increase in old TV shows being revived. Shows such as Arrested Development, Dr. Who, Full House, Boy Meets World, Gilmore Girls, and the X-Files are just a few that made new television debuts in the last few years.

We’re not talking about syndicated re-runs.

We’re talking about complete revivals.

Revivals with new storylines, characters, and settings. Some of these shows have even been re-written for different audiences (we’ll talk about that a little later).

This trend is important, and relevant to your business because, as a business owner, you need to make sure your team produces content that promotes your product/service, drives traffic to your online properties, and that ultimately helps you make sales.

The same is true for a screenwriter and network producer. Each Spring, staffing season occurs for hopeful writers in the entertainment industry. During this season, writers bring their best content to the table in hopes of landing writing jobs for popular TV series.

Once hired, these writers churn out the best material they can to improve TV ratings, drive traffic to the network, and hopefully keep whatever TV show they are working on on air.

You do the same thing.

Throughout the year, you,or someone on your team, holds strategy meetings in an effort to design content that will drive buyers to your product or service, engage your target audience, create trust for your brand, and ultimately, increase your sales.

Here’s where the revival series trend kicks in, so pay attention.

You may try hundreds of different content strategies and find success with 50% of your marketing efforts.

Television producers have an even lower success rate when it comes to testing out new TV shows on different networks. About 92% of new pilot series fail every year.

Yikes.

If you only had an 8% success rate, your business wouldn’t be doing too well.

This 92% failure rate is part of what led television producers to the idea of recycling old TV shows. If they were a hit in the past, there’s a good chance they will also be a hit in the future.

And by golly it worked.

If it worked for Hollywood, it can work for you too…especially if you’re already producing content that performs well for your business.

If you already recycle content from time to time, good for you. If not, check out the examples below for ideas on how to revamp your content in ways you may  have never thought of before.

Revive Marketing Content to Speak to a New Audience

In 1993, a show called Boy Meets World premiered on ABC. This show continued to run through the year 2000, making it, in production standards, a huge success.

This show followed the life of young Corey Matthews as he navigated life through middle school and high school. The meat of the show was based on exploring teachable life lessons–lessons a teenager at the time could relate to.

Fast forward 14 years later to 2014 and a revival series, Girl Meets World hits the air.

This new show featured Boy Meets World Cast originals (Corey, Topanga, Shawn)  in present time. Corey is now married to Topanga (how the Boy World series ended), he is now a teacher, and has a family of his own.

Surely Boy Meets World fans around the world went crazy for the revival series, right?

Not exactly.

The Girl Meets World revival series was written to cater to a completely new audience.

The new target audience: elementary school kids who enjoy watching Disney Channel.

This strategic move brought in a whole new fan base for the show, and as of now has proven to be successful as the series has had a standard Disney 4 season run.

The same concept can be applied to your marketing content.

Many products or services have different target audiences. Once example is children’s breakfast cereals.

At first glance, the main target audience for children’s cereals appears to be children. But you also have the parent market–the actual buyer– to target as well.

Knowing this, you might take a successful content marketing campaign you ran for children and tweak it to speak directly to parents.

Here’s a great example of how Fruit Loops uses their content to speak to two completely different audiences…

For Parents:

Notice how the emphasis is on the health benefits.

For Children:

Notice how the emphasis is on the cool toy you can get from eating this cereal.

Revive Marketing Content to Capitalize on Nostalgia

Most of us have at least one television show that brings back heartwarming memories whenever we watch it.

In 2000, Amy Sherman-Palladino worked alongside a production team to bring the beautiful, and more often than not hilarious, story of the Gilmore Girls to TV. This family-friendly show captured the hearts and minds of people aged 5 to 95.

7 seasons later, fans were heartbroken as the show went off air.

To the excitement of many fans, the show made another appearance in the Fall of 2016. Fans all over the world felt so nostalgic about the series airing brand new episodes once more that a movement began.

In preparation for the big premiere, coffee shops turned their businesses into Luke’s Diner and other various locations transformed into mini movie theaters to stream the brand new show.

If there’s anything business owners can learn from the success of this revival, it’s that nostalgia is a powerful force.

If you once had a powerful piece of content that tugged at heartstrings, and that moved people to feel nostalgic about a certain time of year or event, it’s time to revive that sucker!

Let’s look at a popular example of how Coca-Cola uses Nostalgia to promote their product.

Coca-Cola Holiday Ads

I know we are getting close to the holiday season when I see the first ad on TV of St. Nick drinking an ice-cold Coca-Cola.  Check out this vintage print ad alongside a contemporary print ad.

Not only do these nostalgic ads drive sales, but also help people form a subconscious connection between the Coca-Cola product and the feeling of the holiday season.

Want to get into the holiday spirit and feel the magic and joy of the season? Have a Coke.

Well played, Coca-Cola… Well played.

Revive Your Marketing Content to Tell More of Your Story

The X-Files, one of history’s longest running sci-fi TV shows, recently made its TV revival debt in 2016.

Fans of this show were ecstatic partly because of their love for the show, but mostly because the original series left so many important questions unanswered.

Questions such as…

What is the music in “Orison” that Scully keeps hearing and what significance does it have for the proceedings of the episode?

What was the true nature of “a world without history” hinted at only briefly by future Jason in “Synchrony?”

And, of course, How does Alex (Ratboy) Krycek get uninfected from the so-called black oil?

We don’t want to spoil the show for you, and besides we’re here to talk about your content marketing strategy, so I’ll let you watch it and find out for yourself.

This example brings up an important idea in why revival series, or reviving your marketing content, can be so effective.

The reason: People always want more of your story.

No matter what industry you in or what product/service you sell, people are always going to want more information about you.

To illustrate this idea, pretend that you are an eco-friendly clothing designer.

For this company, you may have written a blog post on the importance of designing eco-friendly clothing lines. In this content piece, you hinted toward the idea that certain life experiences fuel your passion for eco-friendly products.

That’s wonderful, but there’s a good chance people are going to want to know the “why” behind your passion.

This is a great opportunity to revive this piece of content and share more of your story.

You’d do this by addressing your original piece of content, pulling excerpts from it, and then elaborating on it.

You may weave in a story of how you traveled to a certain region of the world as a college student and was appalled at communities of people living in piles of non-biodegradable trash.

Or maybe you were involved in a research study that showcased the number of animal deaths that occurred due to non-biodegradable trash.

Simply put, people are nosey, and always want to know more or have their questions answered.

If you can dig up old content that you can reformat and use to tell more of your story, you have a great content revival opportunity.

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