Consistency is the golden rule of social media growth. To maintain that consistency, most business owners rely on batching. They sit down in a chair, turn on the ring light, and record ten educational videos in the exact same talking head format.
While this is incredibly efficient for your calendar, it is a dangerous game for your engagement. If every single video looks exactly the same, your audience will quickly develop "ad blindness" to your face. They will assume they know what you are going to say before you say it, and they will keep scrolling.
If you want to capture and hold attention, you have to constantly introduce new formats. And the best place to find those formats is completely outside of your own industry.
Stop Looking at Your Competitors
When a creator wants to improve their content, their first instinct is to study their competition. If you are a plumber, you look at other plumbers. If you are a marketer, you look at other marketers.
This is a trap. If you only study your competitors, you will only ever produce a slightly different version of what already exists in your space. This leads to a sea of identical, boring content.
If you want to stand out, you need to look at completely unrelated niches. The educational space is notoriously difficult to grow in. Instead of studying educators, study entertainers. Look at what comedians, fashion vloggers, or fitness influencers are doing to keep their audiences hooked.
How to Find Outlier Videos
Your goal is not to copy another creator's exact video. Your goal is to find their outliers.
Go to a popular creator's page in an unrelated niche and scroll through their feed. If they average 10,000 views a video, but you suddenly spot a video with 500,000 views, you have found an outlier.
Do not focus on the topic of the video. Focus on the format.
Did they use a unique camera angle?
Was the video a fast-paced vlog instead of a talking head?
Did they use a specific visual pattern interrupt?
Was it an interview format?
Steal the Format, Write Your Own Script
This is what it means to steal like an artist. You take a highly successful, proven format from the entertainment space and you adapt it to fit your educational message.
If you take a comedic vlog format and use it to explain a complex marketing strategy or a real estate tip, you instantly become the most unique creator in your niche. You capture the high engagement of entertainment while still delivering the value of education.
Stop putting your audience to sleep with the same predictable videos. Look outside your industry, find the outliers, and start stealing tastefully.