There is no doubt that a quintessential element of success in OTT is an effective content strategy. Enacting one is how you must walk to reach, engage, and build your audience.
Today, as users decide what to watch and when, and the need for on-demand / convenience-based viewing is ever-increasing, OTT providers must adapt accordingly and provide a tailored content strategy to their viewers. In addition, most OTT players are already shifting their business models to align with present and future trends. As a result, the streaming video marketplace is abuzz with new opportunities and more competition.
It is not easy to stand out in this crowd, and it will take more than just having great content to be successful. So that’s still a significant prerequisite but far from the singular one that it was in the past.
Without further ado, let’s see what “ingredients” you’ll need to implement a successful content strategy that enables tailormade content distribution for your customers.
The Requirements for a Successful Content Strategy
There’s one thing on every aspiring OTT player’s mind: how will they rise to the top?
The secret recipe is developing a faultless strategy that synchronizes unique content and audience with the way you distribute, promote, and monetize your content.
What do most large OTT players do to fit the bill?
They invest large sums in creating original content, content libraries, and collections with significant mass appeal. Consequently, they can meet regional preferences and serve a variety of needs from a wider audience.
But what can ambitious, new players do to not only stay afloat in the market but thrive?
- Satisfy both a niche and a mass audience
- Create a good content set
- Broadcast original content
- Create a solid regional content base
- Stream Live Video
The recipe, in general, sounds quick and easy but requires vision, focus, market research, and smart business decisions to succeed.
Besides these six ingredients, you also need to retain two characteristics throughout the entire journey: flexibility and customer-centricity.
With the former, you have to be ready for the pace with which technology, the digital landscape, and your audience will evolve. Survival is not a strategy, and if you don’t adapt, consumers and competitors alike will leave you behind. Longevity requires a mindset that adapts and changes quickly to meet arising challenges.
In the OTT market, long-term, ultimate success lies in building and retaining your audience. Therefore, you should always prioritize your audience and their needs and desires; your content strategy needs to be aligned with this goal.
The key is to keep your audience happy and engaged through the delivery of consistent value. This is what you need to develop long-term relationships and turn them into loyal customers for the long haul. Of course, they’ll pay for your services, but more importantly, they’ll also get their friends and family to join and enjoy your content.
Content Aspect
In a saturated application market, it is essential to position your brand as an authority. Creating quality content is a great way to promote your app and increase brand awareness, requiring a clearly defined vision for content and brand alike.
The best way to go about establishing that definition is to ask—and answer—some simple questions, such as:
“What sets my video business apart from those of others?”
“Is my content focused on a specialized genre?”
“What attracts viewers to my content?”
It takes a bit of time and money to work out the specifics about your unique content, but it is worth the effort, resulting in greater ROI later down the road.
Also, worry not if your content doesn’t appeal to a broad audience. Today, it can be pretty advantageous to operate with content that targets a narrow, particular niche. For example, there’s a high enough chance that even old shows from the ’80s or ’90s could garner the attention of passionate fans who will gladly subscribe for the sake of nostalgia.
Nonetheless, as customers’ appetite for high-quality and original content increases, they sign up for more than just one OTT service. Why? Because original, unique content unavailable elsewhere is the most compelling reason for signing up for an OTT service.
The key takeaway here is to curate a focused library and provide your audience with content they couldn’t possibly find anywhere else.
What’s the purpose of your content strategy?
While defining your content and brand, also dedicate an ample amount of focus to laying down a set of clear objectives for the strategy. Increasing your cashflow is probably—hopefully—part of these goals, but also think of some other objectives that are vital to the success of your mission as an OTT player, such as the expansion of your reach to new platforms and segments, audience building, promoting a cause or message, or driving engagement with viewers.
This is a crucial step even for companies that are not video-based content distributors. Today, quite a few organizations use video as a value-added service to ramp up e-commerce efforts.
Basic Principles
How should you group content in your content library, and what can you do to make it stand out in this saturated market?
In the tables below, you will find the principles that—if followed—will help with this process.
| Premium content | |
| Do you have premium content available only to you? |
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| Global and local content | |
| Video services allow live events, linear and VOD content to be delivered to viewers anywhere in the world, on any device. |
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| Enrich and differentiate | |
| How unique or new-wave is your library? How can you enrich it with some extra content? |
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Last but not least, consider using thematic aggregation. For example, it’s a great way to combine offers based on relevance and even sports and other live events to attract potential subscribers to your non-premium content.
Original Content
You don’t need to produce your own unique content for it to be original!
Partner up with both well-known and yet-to-be-discovered content owners and secure the rights to their original content. Remember, the idea is to stream content to your subscribers that they couldn’t find in your competitors’ services.
For instance, try exploring markets that are often overlooked or sidelined, such as local or regional content produced for expatriates, as well as niche sports content that’s not widely distributed.
As I mentioned earlier, older shows can be digitized and then relaunched to attract long-time fans seeking nostalgia. When you realize this, you will know why it’s worth purchasing the rights to older content as well.
Focus on Fresh Content
Keeping your content library fresh and ever-changing is another step to ensure the success of your content strategy.
Even if you’ve launched with an extensive library, make sure that you regularly refresh it and offer brand new content items as part of your service. It will not only drive user engagement but also helps reduce churn.
If users are exposed to frequent content updates and can encounter new content regularly, they will also be compelled to return and check your services out with predictable frequency.
This, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll need to produce or invest in new content. Instead, promoting older content that has previously been overlooked is a great way to refresh the look and feel of your OTT service without incurring any additional costs.
All in all, whether you are a broadcaster, a content network owner, an independent producer, a YouTube creator, or a multi-media brand, you will need to have a bulletproof content strategy in place to succeed as an OTT player.
Are you looking at options to monetize your content library? Would you be interested to know which strategy will fit your current business requirements or how you could improve the customer life cycle and keep the audience’s attention on your brand?
Blue Guava has been shaping the world of streaming since the concept’s inception, having aided a world-renowned streaming provider is launching its first global content monetization platform. We architected and developed this platform to support 18+ languages across 15 device platforms in 50+ countries and one of the largest streaming events in the pay-TV industry. Learn more about how we pulled that off from our case study!
Through ENT.360, our full-scope OTT solution, you can implement SVOD, TVOD, and AVOD business models, gaining access to a cutting-edge, fault-tolerant feature set that ensures high availability, data protection, monitoring, as well as multi-environment and multi-tenant solutions.