Core IPTV and OTT Marketing Strategy for Your Video Streaming Service

Do you have a marketing IPTV or OTT strategy?

Nowadays, IPTV and OTT services are popping up left and right all over the world. There is a perfectly good reason for that: with both IPTV and OTT markets achieving steady growth for several years now and with excellent growth predictions in years to come, plus a special boost that occurred due to the global pandemic and lockdown, everyone decided that this is the perfect time to go multiscreen.

Starting an IPTV/OTT service is a hefty project, and you need to cover a number of aspects to turn the project into a successful endeavor. Making it work can be overwhelming for a bigger provider, let alone for a smaller company that has to stretch its resources. You might ask yourself: Does it make sense to even begin such a project? I’m guessing if you are reading this article, then you are pretty much set on doing it but still need help on how to go about it.

To get you started, we have prepared a whitepaper that you can use as a step-by-step manual in order to create a marketing strategy for your IPTV or OTT project.

This whitepaper is just one of our documents related to starting your IPTV/OTT service. Here, our focus is on preparing your IPTV or OTT platform marketing strategy. We would recommend also reading the following blogs: IPTV and OTT Basics, How to Start an IPTV/OTT Turnkey Solution, Network Requirements for IPTV and OTT Service, and finally getting more in-depth with the technical aspects of the service by downloading our tech paper here.

How do you make sure that your video streaming service succeeds?

Well, just like with any other business project, there’s never a guarantee of success. However, with proper planning, research, and data analytics, you can set yourself up for successful monetization of a video streaming service with a lot of engagement from the users. A lot of businesses quickly get into trouble because of a lack of initial planning and a failure to properly validate their projects before offering new services on the market.

The first step in this journey is creating an IPTV or OTT business plan that will help you (and make you) look at your IPTV or OTT project from different angles and give the necessary answers regarding your project and how you’re going to make it work. This preparation process is not easy, but it is worth the effort because if you do it properly, it will save you a lot of time and money later on, not to mention save you from unnecessary headaches.

In the previous blogs, OTT Business Plan: A Comprehensive Guide to Launching Your Own OTT Platform, Start an IPTV/OTT Project: How To Take Advantage Of IPTV Business Opportunities, and Start IPTV/OTT Project: Research and Learn About Your Ideal Subscriber we covered in great detail the topics of defining a vision and goals for your video streaming platform, how to do proper research of the competition and the sales differentiators, how to use analytics, as well as how to define your ideal subscriber and what it means to find them.

Once you have defined your ideal subscriber and what makes you stand out from the competition, you will be able to define your core marketing message, which is the basis for your entire marketing strategy, ultimately enabling you to funnel them toward your video and audio streaming service.

Your positioning and message need to be unique. It is not enough to put up an advertisement on Google, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube stating that you provide great service. Great service is an expectation, and everybody claims they provide it, whether they actually do or don’t. Your market must value your positioning. If your position addresses a specific frustration common to your industry, then a significant portion of your market may value it.

Your clients determine what is valuable - it doesn’t matter what you think is valuable. From our experience what is important is the content they want, UX in terms of ease of use, clear and simple navigation, quick content discovery, and stability of the service, among others.

So let them know that you will deliver them an amazing user experience with great content via a service that is always stable and under control. If you want to learn more about how you can provide a complete premium UX from a seamless onboarding experience, do get in touch with us, as UniqCast has managed to deliver turnkey IPTV/OTT/DVB solutions with the qualities mentioned all over the world. We love to share our experience and know-how.

Your positioning must be easy to communicate. If your customers can’t understand in a sentence or two what’s in it for them then it won’t attract them.

Positioning Goal For Clear IPTV and OTT Marketing Strategies

Before defining your core message, create a positioning goal statement (Marketing Purpose Statement). The positioning goal is not meant to be communicated to your clients; it is meant to be the basis for all your marketing and customer service activity. This is how you want to be perceived in plain English, not in polished marketing rhetoric. For example, you can say, ”We are the best IPTV/OTT platform in the country, giving our subscribers a premium user experience with awesome content, period.”

This allows you to articulate the ultimate purpose of your marketing. From this, you might find it easier to craft a more creative marketing message, and everyone in the company will "get it" without the marketing polish.

Core Message For Your Video Streaming Service

After defining your positioning and interviewing current and potential customers, you can create a marketing message to communicate your purpose in a way that clearly demonstrates the difference between doing business with your company.

The idea is to create a short statement in a way that sends a powerful marketing message. So, instead of, "We are an IPTV/OTT provider," you might say, "We bring premium entertainment and user experience to our viewers on multiple screens”. This response contains your ideal target market and the benefit of doing business with you all in a handful of words. You can use this simple formula: “We (action verb) help/teach/show/coach (target market) how to (get a benefit)”. Resist the urge to tell them what you do; find a phrase that allows you to sound different and forces the listener to think or ask, "Really, how do you do that?"

Key Strategic Indicators to Reach IPTV or OTT Goals

Once you have the essential elements of your marketing strategy, it's a good idea to create a list of measurable indicators that will allow you to track your progress toward reaching your goals. 

Some of the obvious things, such as revenue growth, income, and new subscriber acquisitions, should make this list, but consider adding things like:

• Prospects
• Direct inquiries
• Monthly concurrent number of users
• Number of active/total subscribers
• Total viewing time
• Average viewing time per subscriber
• Received calls to call center for new subscriptions
• Received calls to the call center for a number of customer complaints
• Website visitors
• Number  of VOD purchases
• Number of purchased LiveTV packages
• PR mentions
• Referrals
• Churn
• Upsells made
• Testimonials received

Include some of these more micro-indicators to help you work towards and realize your big-picture goals.

The above list of KPIs is focused on direct interaction with the subscriber.

However, to provide the best IPTV/OTT service you need to define a list of technical KPIs to make sure your service is top-notch.

Some of those indicators are:

• Channel availability
• Audio/Video quality
• QoE, Channel change time, video start delay
• EPG navigation responsiveness 
• VOD session quality
• Device KPI’s
• Network KPI’s

If you are interested in a detailed list of service-related KPIs let us know. For start we suggest reading our whitepaper on starting an IPTV/OTT service. 

Core Branding

The final strategy piece is to take your ideal customer profile, positioning goal, and core message and determine the visual elements that will help support those foundation pieces if you already don’t have one. You will need to define your brand colors, logo, image, typeface, and slogan and implement them on your stationery, business cards, advertising, email formats, printed materials, signage, website, etc.

Product/Service Innovation

List and describe the services and packages/offerings your company offers. For each offer, cover the main points, including how much it costs and what prospect or client level it targets.

Think in terms of guiding customers through the marketing funnel: what needs and customer benefits does each level of products or services offer? Are you not only turning prospects into clients but turning clients into repeat customers?

As you list and describe your products, you may run into one of the benefits of good planning, which is generating new ideas. For example, the service innovation for an IPTV/OTT business might look like this:

Suspects: First month free of charge 

Prospects: 3 months free of charge without contract obligation

Clients: 6 months premium discount with a bonus package of premium content for a 2-year contract

Loyal Client: Discounted price plus free additional premium packages, and features

This approach asks you to develop a very deliberate series of marketing, product, or service offerings with a specific intent:

• Automatically qualifying your prospects 
• Gaining their permission to allow you to market to them
• Offering a low barrier or trial service
• Focusing on over-delivering on the purchase
• Moving the client to other opportunities or levels of service
• Generating word of mouth or referrals

What can you create or offer to suspects/prospects to gain permission to market to them? What upgrades will you offer to clients to turn them into repeat clients, and champions?

Pricing Rationale

What is your pricing model? it's important to give serious thought to the pricing of each offer. With well-thought-out pricing models, you will have much better success with attracting and keeping subscribers.

Determine and list an overview of your pricing model and explain briefly what thinking or analysis has gone into this model: 

• Have you studied competitive offers? 
• Does the price of IPTV/OTT need to be profitable on its own or it will be bundled with some other services, like internet or mobile data, and will serve only as a taser for other services?
• Have you studied industry pricing models? 
• Have you compared with global video services such as Netflix?
• Have you considered freemium models?
• Have you considered free packages with advertising and subscription-based packages without advertising?
• Have you surveyed prospects or customers to see if your pricing is in line and acceptable for the value you plan to offer? 
• Make sure you address any free or trial pricing you plan to use as a marketing strategy.

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