Memo: 90-day positioning recommendation for Brandyn Buchanan
From: Marcus Ellery, positioning strategist — I've spent 12 years working with service businesses that got too good at explaining what they do and forgot to decide who they're for.
Date: 2026-05-21
The thing you're not saying out loud
You are running two businesses with opposite customers and pretending it's one coherent brand. Ghost Coast Video sells video production to Savannah bars and venues. The LinkedIn drafts in stage1-vidiq-grounded/ — the pricing ladder, the packaging framework, the freelance-to-consulting arc — are selling to videographers and creative freelancers. These are not the same person. The bar owner wants proof their Tuesday night looked alive. The videographer wants a business model. Right now you're speaking to both audiences in the same voice from the same channel, with a Postiz queue (schedule_log.json, 23 posts through June 9) that is 100% venue-client proof and a set of new drafts that are 100% videographer-coaching. One of those directions is a positioning choice. The other is noise for that audience. You haven't made the call, which means neither group fully trusts you yet.
What I'd do in the next 90 days
1. Split the audiences into two distinct content tracks — publicly.
Not two channels. Two explicit content modes, labeled as such. One post says "This is for business owners in Savannah." One says "This is for videographers trying to build a real business." Stop making the audience figure out which one they are. The obi-wan-not-luke-marketing-frame.md draft is a client-facing post. The freelance-to-consulting-ladder.md draft is a peer post. They are both good. They are not for the same person. Label them.
Reasoning: The VidIQ data shows two distinct high-demand search clusters: "small business marketing" (38,133 searches/month, your venue clients) and "videography business" (12,084 searches/month, 11.6 competition — lowest of all tracked keywords). That low competition number is an open door. Someone is walking through it. The Filmologist grew 94.56% in 30 days (breakout_channels.json). Either you walk through it deliberately or you don't.
Risk if wrong: Splitting audiences makes the brand feel smaller in the short term. If you're raising a Series A, this is the wrong move. You're not.
2. Make one piece of long-form teaching content aimed at videographers in the next 30 days.
Not a LinkedIn post. A video, a guide, something with depth. The transcript from ghost_coast_video_flFdpP51OPI.txt — "package what you know and sell it to anyone" — is the seed. It already exists. Expand it. The search demand is there, the competition is not, and you have the earned authority from having actually done it. "Read five books on a subject and you know more than most" is your thesis. Prove it.
Reasoning: Two channels under 500 subscribers are growing explosively in this exact niche. They are not smarter than you. They are just publishing.
Risk if wrong: You build an audience of videographers who want to learn from you but can't afford to hire you. That's a real risk. Monetize it with a course or a cohort or don't do it at all — but decide before you start.
3. Name your geographic anchor and make it a feature, not a footnote. (Uncomfortable one.)
Savannah is not in any of your LinkedIn drafts. The Atlanta Little Five Points parking story appears in small-business-marketing-real-problem.md as a cautionary tale — but it's talking about Atlanta. Your actual market is Savannah. The venue owners, the bar clients, the event work — that's a Savannah story. None of your 23 scheduled posts name the city. Being "the video person for Savannah hospitality" is a defensible position that a 177%-growth agency in Los Angeles cannot take from you. You are currently writing as if you're competing nationally when your actual moat is local and specific.
Reasoning: Nobody else can say "I've shot every bar on River Street." You can. That sentence doesn't appear anywhere in the corpus.
Risk if wrong: Geographic positioning limits scalability. True. But you're not scaling yet — you're positioning. Do it in the place you actually work.
What I'd stop doing
1. The "before and after" venue proof posts in the Postiz queue.
schedule_log.json has five variations of the same post: "before and after: what happens when a venue gets real video," "the bar that sold out a Tuesday night," "the event nobody came to before the video." This is the same claim repeated. One strong version of this post is a portfolio piece. Five versions is wallpaper. Kill four of them and use the freed calendar slots for something that advances the teaching track.
2. Writing for an imagined national audience.
The Atlanta reference in small-business-marketing-real-problem.md is the tell. You're using a city you don't operate in as the example. That's a sign you're unconsciously writing for the internet instead of for the client in front of you. The internet will find you if you're specific. Specificity is the thing that travels.
What I'd bet money on
The short-form educational video market for "how to build a real videography business" is about to get crowded — The Filmologist and Elevate9INC are canaries. Whoever builds the clearest framework and puts it on video in the next 6 months owns the category for the next 3 years. The videography-business-pricing-ladder.md draft describes exactly that framework. It's sitting in a draft folder.
The play: Turn that pricing ladder into a 4-part short video series. Post it. Link from LinkedIn. The keyword has 12,084 monthly searches and 11.6 competition — that is not a coincidence, it's a gap. Fill it or watch someone else fill it with a worse framework than yours.
Where I might be wrong
I don't know the revenue split between the venue work and anything else. If GCV client work is 90% of revenue and the videographer coaching angle is exploration, this memo is too aggressive about the split. Also, "Savannah as a feature" assumes local specificity helps you rather than limiting your ability to raise rates with non-local clients. If your highest-value future clients are agencies or regional chains — not individual venue owners — geographic anchoring is the wrong move and I've misread the trajectory.
I also can't see what's in the lilith-grove writing work or the sunmoonlight business. If those have their own positioning logic, this memo may be missing a unifying idea that's already in progress.