Last time, we have discussed how an airtight content strategy—coupled with unique, original content—is the key to success in the streaming media market.
Success is great, but it’s also important to measure that in financial terms and see how much revenue that means for your company.
So, you’ve got the content locked in; now it’s time to see how you can market and distribute it for significant bottom-line figures!
At the end of this blog post, you’ll find a Cost and Time Calculation sheet. So if you take that form, fill it in and send it to us, we can give you an estimation on how much you’ll need to invest and how that can be turned into positive ROI.
Marketing
Marketing your content the right way will be one of the most important elements for ensuring success and driving revenue. Even as you create and distribute amazing content that the people love, it won’t matter if they are not watching it.
The best thing you can do is learn and understand the audience you want to engage with your content and leverage available promotion channels simultaneously. Then, if marketing is done well, you will build your audience, promote new content, and drive brand awareness in no time.
Defining the target audience
Before jumping into any marketing activity for promoting your content and platform, the first step is to learn who your audience is. The more you know about them, the more apparent the overall content strategy will be, and your marketing will be more successful. After all, you can only gain more viewers and achieve increased engagement if you know your audience by heart.
For the most punctual definition of your target audience, you need to answer the following questions:
- Who is your target audience? Where do they watch your content? And why?
- What are they passionate about?
- What’s the total addressable market?
- Where does your audience watch your content (broadcast, YouTube, social)?
- Why do they watch? Entertainment, education, inspiration—something else?
- Are there audience segments that are more engaged than others?
What Type of Content Should You Use for Promotion?
Your content library is usually a vast mix of different quality content. But you don’t need to worry about going through each piece to identify those you should use for promotion.
Categorize content into two groups; sellable and non-sellable (or free) content, while keeping in mind that not all content is monetizable in the same way.
Examples of non-sellable/free content are trailers, short-form videos, behind-the-scenes reels, interviews, influencer marketing content, and extras.
This type of content is suitable for promotion as it provides continuous, fresh, and freely accessible content for your OTT service.
Channels to Use in Content Promotion
The #1 rule here is to make your content easily discoverable and shareable. If you find the channels to help achieve these goals, you are already on the right path.
Why? Because regardless of the quality of your content offerings, your content will still be low on viewership if it’s difficult to find. To get a good return on your content investment, you’ll need to carefully consider how and where to advertise it, both in and out of your service.
Within the service, make sure you advertise new and old content alike, highlighting featured content in most content categories.
Nonetheless, promoting content outside the service is just as important. Creating an attractive communication strategy is key to maximizing the leverage gained from using your marketing channels.
Entertainment-based videos are perfect for quick promotions; however, some videos are difficult to advertise. You’ll need to support them with a good content marketing strategy to generate tangible results in such cases.
We have collected some of the most popular ways for effective content promotion:
- Email newsletters: Update subscribers on new videos, direct them to watch your OTT app, share subscription offers/deals, etc.
- Social media: Build a tribe of loyal followers, give them exclusive content and tell them when new content is available. Package clips to encourage sharing your content with their network. Make users/viewers feel more connected.
- Native advertising: Stream content via promoted tweets (Twitter), sponsored stories (Facebook), featured videos (YouTube), and more. These ads will engage viewers and lead to your subscription content, service, or product.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Video content helps your website rank high in search result pages, directing viewers to your OTT apps. Pay extra attention to your video sitemap, video metadata optimization, keyword tagging (title tags, description tags, and video tags), and building links from other videos on your website.
- Push notifications: Push notifications drive engagement, retention, and revenue because they’re a direct line of one-on-one communication with your audience. Once a user opts in, you can send targeted messages that get them to take action based on their demographic info, in-app behavior, customer lifecycle stage, and more.
Keep your users engaged with any new content uploaded to your OTT catalog. When you send users fresh content notifications to their mostly phones or email format, you can quickly drag them back into the app to see what’s been added, increasing engagement with your users.
Distribution Channels and Monetization
Selecting Distribution Channels
Although Video Everywhere is the rage today, distributing content across every platform and device is not always practicable, especially at the beginning of your OTT service. So what matters is to find out which platforms and channels your audience is active on and then distribute your content there at the right time.
Here’s another set of questions that can help you in this process:
- How do you direct viewers to your content?
- How will you get them to check out new platforms?
- Will your content be linear, on-demand, or live?
- How do your viewers prefer content consumption? Binge-watching on the couch or during travel to work and back?
This mix of what you have, what is working right now, and which directions you can take to set up a new distribution channel.
However, you’ll have to make sure that your audience can watch your content on all screens. Achieve this by:
- Streaming content on your website
- Pushing content onto relevant social media channels (YouTube, Facebook, etc.)
- Publishing content to your app on OTT marketplaces (Roku, Amazon Fire TV, or Apple TV)
How Will You Make Money?
One of the great things about OTT is how flexible your possibilities for monetization are. In a way, the two significant factors that determine how much you will earn are content and audience–and how well you match these two.
Current revenue models include the following VOD or on-demand services:
- AVOD or Advertising VOD, where free content is easily accessible to the public and monetized through video ads baked into the content.
- SVOD or subscription VOD, where the viewer has unlimited access to all programs broadcast by the OTT platform but has to pay a monthly fee.
- TVOD or transactional VOD on Indian OTT platforms uses the concept of pay-per-view, where the audience buys special content for viewing.
The best way to generate a return is if the accepted content strategy perfectly fits the chosen monetization model. Consequently, please branch out and use a mix of all three and other revenue-generating methods to expand your business and customer base.
As for the frequency of billing, you can adjust it as you see fit, but most OTT players use one of the billing intervals listed below:
- 24-hour day passes
- Three-day passes
- Monthly subscriptions
- Annual subscriptions
- Flexible subscription for any time interval
Monetizing OTT content is also one of the best ways to realize cash flow immediately; you get instant access to your revenue as payments are transferred directly from the payment provider to your account. Just make sure you license your content (either locally or globally) before any transaction occurs!
Cost and Time Calculation Sheet
Would you like to know how much time and money the setup and release of your content library cost would cost? Fill in our Calculation Sheet and send it to info@guava.blue –we’ll crunch those numbers for you.
| Content Catalog |
| How many hours of newer content (less than six months old) could be provided at the time of launch? (~2 Months) |
| Example: Approximately 100 hours |
| How many hours of archived content (older than one year) would you be able to publish? |
| Example: Approximately 100 hours |
| What is the resolution quality of your content? |
| Lower than 720p 720p (HD Ready) 1080p (Full HD) UHD (4K) |
| What type of content do you currently have? |
| Full-length content Conferences (Multi-Presenter) Short Video Long Video Podcast Live Event VLog Web-Series User-Generated Content |
| How many hours of content could be produced per month? |
| Example: ~ 100 hours |
| Distribution Channels |
| Desktop iOS tvOS Android Android TV LG Samsung ROKU Amazon FireTV Chromecast |
| Licensing |
| Global or Local? |
| Example: US, Canada, and Mexico |
| Monetization |
| What kind of monetization option do you want to use? |
| Free-watch AVOD SVOD TVOD |
| What kind of subscription do you plan to use? |
| 24-hour passes Three-day passes Monthly subscriptions Annual subscriptions Flexible subscription for any time interval |
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 in 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.