Consumer Engagement: Maintaining and Growing Customers: Insights from ThinkAnalytics

May 4, 2022

https://www.parksassociates.com/blog/article/consumer-engagement–insights-from-thinkanalytics

 

by Parks Associates | May. 4, 2022

 

Parks Associates continues its fifth annual Future of Video conference with the virtual conference, “OTT Churn: Marketing and Retention Strategies”, on Thursday, May 5 from 11 AM to 1:30 PM CT. Peter Docherty, CTO and Founder, ThinkAnalytics will be on the panel, “Consumer Engagement: Maintaining and Growing Customers” at 12:30 PM CT, addressing the role of original and exclusive content, best practices in utilizing it to maximize engagement and stickiness, and solutions to retain and grow customers.

1. What are the most significant opportunities for retention?

In two words: personalized TV. By really understanding the content, through sophisticated metadata (Content Intelligence), and understanding viewer behavior (Audience Intelligence) from the very first interaction with the service, operators can feature a wide variety of personalized viewer experiences that keeps people watching.

The days are long gone when someone would be prepared to sit in front of a TV and zap through a bunch of channels for 10+ minutes to find something to watch. In today’s environment, you have about one minute to convince a customer to watch content before they move on to something else.

Luckily, service providers have the ability to quickly create, test, manage, and modify use cases and campaigns through A/B testing. Testing different recommendation types help find the perfect blend of personalization, popular content, trends, and editorial control. The goal is to make sure they realize they haven’t exhausted the catalog of content available – before they’ve watched the last episode.

Personalizing experiences dramatically also affects how much content viewers watch and their perceived value of the service. Our customers have proven that engaged viewers are loyal viewers, and loyal viewers optimize revenue. The same applies to ad-funded services – if the viewer thinks that they have exhausted the catalog then they won’t return to the service and there’s nothing the platform owner can do since they don’t even know who that person is.

Another example is Search. Many people think that Search is a problem that has been solved and that all searches are the same. But we know that that is very far from being the case. For example, we work with customers that switch from their existing Search solution to the Think360 Search capability and found over a 300% increase in the number of plays as a result of searches.

2. Where do you feel the biggest challenges or opportunities related to content?

There is a vast array of fantastic content available, but that is the challenge and the opportunity – enabling easy/lean back discovery of the right content for each viewer. Having a massive catalog without personalization means relying on the viewer to do the work to find something to watch.

Today there is more data than ever on what a person watches, on what device, for how long, and what they choose to watch next. We have seen significant results when you combine personalization algorithms and techniques with a service provider’s editorial expertise. The effectiveness of these data-enhanced editorial campaigns can increase by as much as 4 times.

This type of Audience and Content Intelligence provides insights into not only what to serve up in a personalized content rail, but into larger trends on what viewers are most interested in through aggregated data sets. This can ultimately inform content development and acquisition strategies.

3. How do services and content owners determine the right mix of content to entice consumers?

There is a huge variety of choice and service providers can decide if they want to appeal to a mass-market with a large variety of content or go for a more niche audience and overserve that audience specifically.

Whatever their business strategy, through the combination of Content and Audience Intelligence, service providers are able to understand the type of content that is driving the most viewing in their user base and use this valuable information to drive content strategy.