Your video service is ready, your content uploaded, your communication plan on track. But do you have all the keys to make an effective web marketing campaign?
First of all, before you start working in the operational field, you must have clearly identified the positioning of your service. It is your positioning that sets you apart from your competitors in the market.
Beforehand, we must therefore ask ourselves the right questions about the offer we are proposing: how it differs, what is its added value, its attractiveness... And carefully define its targets.
Your offer responds to a request that must be clearly identified: what are its expectations and objectives, its pain points and fears, its buying behaviour, its criteria... We then talk about creating a user persona, identity cards for your targets.
Once this work is done beforehand, it is time to start working on your marketing plan. The idea is to gain notoriety and build your image and acquire new subscribers with specific levers.
1. Promote your brand and boost your image
Content strategy and blog
An effective marketing strategy: having attractive content to find your target audience helps to strengthen your brand image while building subscriber loyalty.
In B2C, content must be accessible, humorous and punchy while remaining short to be easily shareable. In B2B, if you sell your films to distributors, for example, the content must be relevant and useful so that it can answer a problem that the target group is facing. For example, you can write about film news, from films to festivals. To do this, there is nothing better than a blog section on your video platform to enrich your site with something new. This marketing action does not require a budget but dedicating regular human time will be necessary.
SEO
Natural referencing or SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consists in appearing in the first results of search engines on a given search (unlike SEA which requires a financial budget). To do this, your site (in this case your video platform) must contains many keywords related to your activity. Therefore, a content strategy with a blog naturally enriches SEO.
To improve the SEO of your site it is also necessary to enrich your product sheets while adding additional content such as directors, actors...
Feel free to contact other websites that could communicate (perhaps for free...) about your video platform in the form of an interview, article, directory.... Always ask for the addition of a link redirecting to your platform, one more point for SEO! Be careful that the link is integrated in do-follow to boost your page rank.
Social networks
Being present on social networks enables you to ensure your visibility and promote virality and word of mouth.
Social networks are a vehicle for disseminating your content strategy. You can share your content: articles, news, new releases, teasers etc. for free, but it can also be very interesting to use the advertising tools of social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter. Indeed, they allow you to target a very specific audience thanks to very advanced criteria. If you are more on a BtoB target, then consider using Twitter or LinkedIn. Feel free to perform A/B testing, by broadcasting at the same time content of different appearance to see which one is the most efficient!
Online advertising
This media takes varied forms such as displays, and their web inserts known as "banners". Online advertising makes it possible to gain notoriety and image, it is the equivalent of “posters” in the street. It will not make you win new subscribers immediately but coupled with a performance campaign such as 1 month paid search engine optimization, it can be a wise investment. You can contact sites that have the same audience as you and that include banner ads. If you can, be strategic about the location of your ads!
Public relations
Public relations, especially online press, is a way to make yourself known to niche markets. The specialized magazines distributed in both paper and digital formats guarantee a certain speed, visibility and a qualified audience. Indeed, it is important that you define the target and objectives of your “press” relations:
- Make yourself known in your market (to prospects, partners, employees)
- Demonstrate your strike force and size
- Highlight yourself to potential funders
2. Gain subscribers
Promotions and teasers
To acquire a certain notoriety, it is imperative to reach a critical mass of subscribers in order to create a natural dynamic.
Indeed, it is necessary to underline the importance of creating promotions and teasers that will aim to mobilize your subscribers, but also to promote a video on another channel to win new audiences and new subscribers.
The teaser must therefore be effective, in other words, it must make an impact on people's minds so that the Internet user or subscriber can remember the arrival of new content.
Use all your channels, social networks, but also the pages that deal with the subject of your series/video. If you have one, feel free to highlight the video on your channel as well, especially by adding it in first position in a playlist or with annotations embedded in other videos that link to the teaser video.
SEA
Paid referencing consists in renting advertising space on search engines (Bing, Yahoo, Google, Firefox...). Called SEA for Search Engine Advertising it allows to appear on very specific queries. For example, if an Internet user types "independent movies in vod" and your ad appears because you bought these keywords, you can be sure to have a high conversion rate. There is also re-targeting, which allows you to show a display ad to a user who has already visited your site or a social network account, allowing you to acquire new subscribers to grow your platform.
3. Use a test and learn strategy
From the platform, we retrieve numerical data related to the viewing and purchasing habits of users, two types of iterations are then possible:
Iteration of the marketing phase: statistics provide insight into the best strategy to adopt. Consolidating channels with the highest conversion rate, abandoning weak channels, creating more efficient campaigns...
Iteration of the content-acquiring phase: once again, sales and viewing figures point the way for acquiring or producing content that mirrors the most in-demand themes and categories and for shifting away from unpopular content.
From now you have all the keys in your hand, it's up to you!
Feel free to download our white paper "The guidebook to a successful OTT service".