Mastering Audience Insights to Drive Business Value from Video

Data is essential in today’s OTT streaming market. With so many SVoD services competing for similar audiences, having access to every possible data point on your customer, from engagement to revenue, is the bare minimum to stay in business. But to stay ahead of the curve, that requires more than data. That requires aggregated intelligence.

Marketers have taken advantage of lots of data points over the years: subscriptions, video views, customer payments, marketing touch points, video metadata, marketing channel investment. All of the metrics speak to critical business needs. But the next evolution in audience and content insights will aggregate those metrics to provide a comprehensive, 360-degree view of the video performance tied to customer engagement.

Unlocking Audience Insights

With so much data already available, this approach will unlock new insights that can provide the much-needed edge in an increasingly saturated market. For example, in order to lower customer acquisition costs and churn rates, while maximizing investment in content, companies should use these enhanced insights to inform the following strategies:

1. Focus on high lifetime value (LTV) customers. Net-new acquisition costs for OTT companies are high but audience insights can lower acquisition costs by identifying which marketing sources have the highest conversion rate and lowest cost per acquisition. Data exports can also establish high LTV lookalike profiles for ad buys on platforms like Google and Facebook, allowing OTT companies to target audience cohorts with the attributes of the most high value customers, making for a more targeted ad spend.

2. Engage stalled trialists. Audience data can indicate which subscribers signed up for your service, but have yet to stream a video. That viewer insight can inform automated marketing emails to those viewers, prompting them to watch and engage.

3. Reduce churn of at-risk customers. Identify which audience chorts are declining in their engagement and have a high likelihood of canceling based on behavioral patterns in their viewer history. Then send personalized emails with offers and watch recommendations to engage them, to prevent churn.

4. Increase loyalty. Leverage targeted, personalized marketing campaigns to promote relevant content based on viewer behavior.

5. Optimize content investment. Content acquisition costs are a huge investment. Use audience insights to understand what content is driving the most subscribers and the most consumption. Then license more content like that.

6. Promote the videos that will drive the most revenue. Use content performance intelligence to direct audiences to the content assets that will maximize the revenue achieved through the acquisition of this content.

Wrangling several disparate data sources makes it challenging to capture these kinds of insights because the data flows through multiple, decentralized systems. Furthermore, building insights from that data requires an additional layer of machine learning on top of the data infrastructure.

Delivering Business Value

This is why Brightcove recently acquired Wicket Labs, an audience insights company. In addition to offering the existing video analytics native to Brightcove, augmenting these metrics with content and subscriber insights is the latest business need. It’s the kind of audience data necessary to drive revenue and business value for OTT companies, particularly those operating with an SVoD model. Through this acquisition, Brightcove customers can collect and analyze data from multiple sources to produce valuable insights. By bringing these data sources together, our machine learning technology analyzes this scalable, harmonized data set to produce a comprehensive scorecard with insights on how to optimize content, marketing, and product strategies for more revenue.

When our video performance metrics are coupled with the audience insight data from Wicket Labs, video works harder for your business and harder for your revenue goals. Audience data plus video performance data, in a single, reliable, secure and scalable platform, layered with machine learning makes for clear recommendations that have the potential to maximize returns.

In today’s fast-paced market, having the right data is no longer enough. Businesses need intelligence from that data. They need centralized solutions that not only house that data, but translate it into measurable results. That is the next evolution of audience and content insights, and at Brightcove, that evolution is now.