You are running a cloud-video streaming platform but are nowhere near your audience targets. Rings a bell?
If yes, then what you are missing is a practical digital marketing strategy – one that specifically targets the OTT industry!
The biggest concern of any over-the-top platform is to reach potential subscribers and generate more revenue. But isn’t that easier said than done? Well, not if you have a full-funnel digital video content strategy at your disposal. By full-funnel video content strategy, we mean a marketing strategy that covers all the areas of your content distribution game plan.
*“Those who aim to objectively impact their audiences should consider a fully-optimized content strategy for excellent engagement rates and good platform delivery.”*
Understanding the Marketing Funnel
You might have read enough material on the right digital marketing funnel. But why are you still struggling to convert potential customers? Well, you’re not alone. A Woosuite report revealed that 96% of website visitors don’t purchase at all. But, wait! Aren’t they prospecting?
Yes, they are. In fact, that’s why they are on your platform in the first place. So, what could be the possible reason behind their drop-offs? A major one is that 25% of businesses cannot evaluate digital marketing analytic components. If you don’t know what to place where and how it barely matters if you are getting tons of traffic. You’re just not getting leads.
Let’s do the maths. If you receive 100,000 visitors monthly and 96% of them don’t purchase anything, you have sales of 4,000 per month. To reach the sales figure of 40,000, you’ll need at least a million monthly visits. Instead, if you create a high-impact digital marketing funnel, and say, now only 80% of your visitors are non-paying, it’s possible to reach this figure with only 200,000 monthly visits. Isn’t that amazing?
This target is possible and realistic. To show you how, in this article, we shall explore the key factors of your digital marketing funnel, how you should classify real visitors, and ways to turn them into leads and possibly convert them into buyers. We shall also discuss decisive elements to meet desired KPIs and boost sales. By the end of this blog, your digital marketing funnel should be how it should’ve always been: “picture-perfect”.
What is the digital marketing funnel?
In simple words, a digital marketing funnel is a comprehensive plan that involves several steps to showcase your services/products to a specific audience. It is a road map that gives you or your marketing team direction to increase relevant traffic and boost sales.
“Digital marketing funnels are techniques used to increase consumer traffic online, encourage people to buy your product, and maintain customer relationships to build brand loyalty.”
Since a marketing funnel comprises multiple stages, at every step we evaluate and narrow down our audience. Initially, your audience pool can be bigger, but with each step, you will learn more about what your audience wants and create unique journeys based on them.
For instance, say, you are running a marketing campaign for your cloud-video streaming service and there are people who visit your website for the first time. The interface is flooded with several packages and recommendations, which will ultimately confuse the visitors and compel them to leave immediately, leading to an increased bounce rate.
70-90% of people leave the landing page immediately after opening a website. Apart from cluttered information, there can be several factors behind this like targeting the wrong niche, stuffing irrelevant keywords, or, most probably, a slow website loading time. But what matters the most is that you lost someone who was interested in you. Neither did that person subscribe to your channel (or purchase a video) nor did they submit a form for an inquiry.
There are a couple of ways to fix this. Firstly, make sure that you have a high loading time. A page loading time between 0 and 2 seconds is considered ideal. Also, rather than bombarding new visitors with a bunch of display cards of pricing packages, we recommend educating them first. For instance, you can start with a call-to-action statement and gradually explain the benefits and features which make your platform distinctive as compared to other OTT streaming websites.
Before planning a full-funnel content strategy, it should be noted that everything must be in sequence, eliminating irrelevant factors. Ultimately, not only will it give you an in-depth understanding of real customer’s behavior but it also will assist in preparing the right resource. Simultaneously, this strategy can help you increase your return on investment (ROI) since you will likely see an increase in revenue as your traffic increases. It is important to understand that ROI refers to how much of your investment is returned as revenue to the company.
How to develop a digital funnel strategy for an OTT streaming website?
Building success cases, bringing examples of customers with similar pain points and how your product solved them, is one of the practical digital marketing strategies for OTT platforms. To succeed in this competitive environment, OTT streaming services need to develop effective digital funnel strategies.
Developing a digital funnel strategy involves taking a series of steps to guide potential customers through the buying process. Your service's subscriber base can be increased if you develop a digital funnel strategy that is customized following customer requirements.
In a digital funnel strategy for a streaming business, you take steps to guide potential customers from awareness to purchase. Generally, it goes through the following four stages:
Awareness:
As soon as you have planned the structure and content of your funnel, you can begin generating traffic from your target audience through means such as social media and email marketing. During the sales process, this is the first stage of the funnel, since it serves as the first concept consumers encounter.
Interest:
Stage of interest: At this stage, the consumer is interested in your brand and is more likely to engage with it on social media or click on your advertisements. During this stage, traffic is generated that initiates the sales process.
Desire:
The Desire Stage is part of the funnel in which consumers are learning more about the brand and what it can offer them. At this stage, consumers are primarily comparing similar products from different brands before making a purchase.
Action:
After considering their options, a consumer begins to take action at this stage. The consumer may choose to make a purchase or complete a contact form with their personal information.
Your OTT streaming website's digital funnel strategy needs to identify the steps potential customers take through the funnel. Each step of the funnel can then be targeted with content and marketing campaigns.
A good example of this would be creating awareness campaigns that target people who are not yet aware of the advantages of OTT streaming services.
In order to effectively reach and engage your target audience, you need to gather valuable insights. In this scenario, Teyuto helps you in measuring and evaluating the success of your strategy by defining specific objectives and corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs) through audience video consumption behavior.
Tenuto Analytics shares an in-depth user behavior and engagement assisting OTT streaming funnel in improving their user experience. Not only it increases conversion rates but also drives more revenue.
Here are Three Ways, Tenuto can help you in making a funnel strategy for your cloud-video streaming business:
- User-Behavior Insight
Streamers can conveniently access the audience data such as what type of content they are watching, how much time they are spending, and at which time they watch a particular content.
- Identify Target Audience
Streamers or OTT platform owners can use Teyuto Analytics to identify target audiences. This data will help you to segment audiences based on demographics, interests, and viewing preferences. Ultimately, this information can be used to optimize digital marketing strategy.
- Optimizing Content Delivery Method
Teyuto enables its users to monitor audience activity. You can easily track user behavior in which way they are consuming content. Through this, you can effortlessly optimize content delivery methods such as adaptive bitrate streaming for different devices.
6 Steps to Implement a Full-Funnel Content Strategy
Brand Awareness
Creating brand awareness is the first step in building a funnel for cloud video streaming, which is the widest part since you aim to get the most traffic to your site. As a consumer, brand awareness refers to how familiar a brand is with a company and how likely they are to think of that brand when deciding which products to purchase. You may start by reaching out to a wider audience and narrow down your target audience as you progress.
Following are some critical questions that will assist you in planning content for branding.:
- What are the most common problems your customers are facing?
- What solutions do you offer to solve them?
- Do you have better plans compared to your competitors to solve specific problems?
- What social media sites your customers are using?
- Does your content have a strong pitch to cater to customer needs?
Maintain Interesting Leads
After you've built brand awareness and created engaging content, it's crucial to keep users engaged. You can accomplish this by telling potential buyers how you can solve their problems or help them reach their goals. You can use the problems consumers are experiencing to your advantage if you identify them. Explain to consumers what you can do for them and how your brand can do it better than your competitors.
Generate Compelling Content To Beat Your Competitors
Consumers are likely to compare your product with your competitors' OTT streaming platforms during the sales process. To convince consumers to choose your brand over your competitors, you can create content and other marketing materials.
The best way to do this is to share your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) effectively. What makes your product or service different from the competition is your USP. For this purpose, you can share positive reviews from your past customers to demonstrate how you're better than other brands or use stats to illustrate how you're different.
Lead Conversion
Social media content generates leads, but creating content for a brand's website converts potential leads. Lead conversion is the process through which a consumer goes from viewing a brand to taking action with it, such as purchasing a product or signing up for an email newsletter.
By optimizing your landing pages and contact forms, you can achieve this goal. Consumers can also be convinced to buy products or services by writing sales letters. Using language that resonates with a user's desires or concerns can motivate them to make a purchase.
Improve Customer Relationship
In order to increase brand loyalty and attract new customers, it is essential to maintain relationships with customers after they have made a purchase. For this purpose, consumers can leave reviews on products they have purchased. You can also build stronger relationships with consumers by sending them valuable and useful information at no additional cost, and by asking them to review your products.
Customers who are satisfied with a brand's activities, products, and services are more likely to recommend it to friends and family. You may also add a resource page or a help section to your site. Users can access this information quickly by looking at frequently asked questions on these pages.
It is also important to have a good customer service team in order to maintain a positive relationship with customers. Customers will feel appreciated if they feel that they are being treated well by the company.
Focus on Customer Retention
Customer retention involves ensuring that your brand's products, services, and performance are satisfactory to your customers. Increased customer retention can boost brand profits and boost consumer confidence.
Having happy customers can also encourage them to become brand advocates, which means they will introduce new customers to the brand. Your customers can benefit from this by renewing their subscriptions at a lower price or by reducing their subscription fees.
As a marketer, the goal is to ensure that your customers stick with your brand for a long time. Maintaining customer satisfaction differs from strengthening customer relationships because you're keeping them satisfied, not trying to track their records only.
“Remember that repeat purchases are a sign of satisfied customers. Keep your communication with consumers up-to-date and monitor their engagement with your brand, regardless of the channel you use.”
Marketing Metrics and Analysis
Marketing metrics are the first step in developing plans, actions, and strategies for any company. These indicators help to measure the success of a specific campaign or of an entire content strategy. By using this data, we can observe and compare each stage of a project in a practical and direct way without any assumptions.
Understanding how to use them is crucial to remain successful in this domain. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, goals should not only be evaluated at the beginning and end of a campaign. They must be assessed throughout the content marketing funnel.
Important Metrics to Track Content Funnel Performance for a Cloud-Streaming Business
How do business metrics affect marketing work? What are the main indicators in this area that should be monitored constantly? You can identify their direct impact on your bottom line by separating the major ones!
Visitors
Visitor numbers show how many times people visit your website. Monitoring this metric is essential since it directly reflects the audience that the company's website or blog attracts. As a result, this number is expected to rise every month. Keeping a website's number of visitors stable may indicate that it doesn't attract new visitors.
Leads and Conversion Rate
A lead is someone who fills out their contact information on your website or blog in exchange for something – be it a newsletter subscription, downloadable material, contacting an advisor, ordering a trial, or other types of content – after reading your content or value proposition. As one of the main metrics of Digital Marketing, this measures how many people you can start a relationship with in order to make a sale in the future. It will be a good point to start if people are ready to provide you with enough information.
However, we should not only look at the number of Leads but also the percentage of visitors who convert on Landing Pages. It is called a conversion rate (expressed as a percentage). It's useless to bring traffic from a traffic source if it doesn't generate leads. There is something wrong with your strategy: either you are attracting the wrong visitors - who have nothing to do with your company - or the content you provide is not engaging enough for your target audience to leave a comment.
Cost per Lead (CPL)
CPL (Cost per Lead) determines the value of each Lead generated by dividing the amount invested in Digital Marketing efforts by the number of Leads generated. As a result, measuring and comparing this value can be an excellent way for marketing to gain more credibility and investments.
CPC
Paid media campaigns commonly use CPC (Cost per Click) as a marketing indicator. This is a measure of how much is invested for each click received on an advertisement.
CPA
CPAs or Cost Per Acquisition are often used in paid media campaigns to identify the amount paid for your audience to achieve the main objective of the campaign. A conversion cost is displayed if the goal is to sell a product via e-commerce, or if the campaign aims to generate new leads by downloading new material.
CPM
CPM refers to the amount paid for an ad or campaign to appear to a thousand people. Having greater control over the amount invested in each disclosure action is helpful.
CTOR
An important metric for email campaigns is CTOR or click-to-open rate. We can easily calculate an email's click-through rate by dividing the number of users who click and open it. As a result, it differs from the usual click-through rate, since the data is not based on those who receive the email, but on those who open and view it.
Return Rate
The return rate represents the percentage of people who have a new interaction within a given period after performing a certain action. It can involve filling out a form, clicking on a Call to Action, or interacting with pop-ups. If 1000 people convert on a Landing Page in two weeks, and 200 of those people then convert again on another Landing Page, we have a 20% return rate.
ROI
In the Marketing area, ROI is used to determine how much a company has earned from its investments. ROI is calculated as (revenue generated - costs and investments).
Customer Acquisition Cost
The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is calculated by dividing the marketing and sales investments by the number of customers acquired during the same period. A company's financial health is determined by this metric. If you run a marketing campaign worth $1,000 and get 40 customers, your CAC is $25. Some professionals, however, calculate the CAC not only based on the amount spent on advertising but also on the salary of the professionals involved, the infrastructure required to create this campaign, and other costs.
Summary
The measurement of content marketing results is essential for the content strategy in the OTT video streaming business for both individual content creators and business companies. Creating webinars, videos, or podcasts can help the company generate valuable information for the next content, start building relationships with potential customers, and achieve digital marketing goals.
Signup with Teyuto today and start building your marketing funnel because it will help you in tracking your campaigns, and target audience, and optimizing content delivery methods.
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