OTT Marketing Strategies

Different OTT platforms, since their inception understands the needs and pain points of consumers, come up with a solution to solve these demands, and produce a user- and business-centric product are some primary steps taken by OTT platforms. Some other considerations are competitors’ research (to understand the competitor’s landscape, features, and shortfalls), consumer research (listing the consumer’s expectation and taste) & prototyping (a representative model is built to validate its experience).

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Favored factors which lead to the adoption of OTT services by consumers are its cost, content availability, convenience, smartphone & mobile internet penetration, user experience, social value, and net neutrality.

In the last two decades, the marketing landscape for everything has changed dramatically. Consumers are better connected, educated, and have more alternatives for meeting their expectations.
A marketer’s work is not only concerned with stimulating the interests of potential consumers but with engagement, conversion, and retention as well. Their task involves choosing of correct marketing platform or channel for converting the users and developing a cost-effective marketing budget.

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Every OTT platform adopts different strategies for its promotion and web series and its original content publicity.

Embedded marketing:

Embedded marketing, product placement, and branded entertainment are all concepts that refer to brands being paid to appear in web series, movies, documentaries, and entertainment channels. This strategy is adopted for associating a product with the character, which highlights the name of the brand. The brand name adds credibility to the content. So, this strategy serves as a win-win deal for the brand, characters, and the web series. The pervasiveness of this strategy is gaining a lot of traction among brands and producers to support the expenses and expand their outreach with mutual benefits.

Email Marketing

For most marketers, email marketing is a common means of communication. With its smart recommendation engine, the email channel makes it simple to send triggered emails. Additionally, the What You See Is What You Get capability makes emails more engaging and allows effective upsell or add craze among the audience.

In-App Notifications as OTT Marketing strategy:  

In-App notifications allows the use of many of those features as online or app-push alerts. Custom designs, different event notification schedules,  and CTA button support, and more are included to make the audience app experience more engaging.

Web-push Notifications:

Web push notifications allow platforms to reach users across all major browsers. A variety of designs with a small or large image are used for notifications depending on marketing objectives. Some platforms use the channel to automate campaigns with e-commerce-specific triggers. It also supports the expansion of outreach across many geographies and domains. 

Video Ads:

The usage of videos in OTT marketing is an excessively popular tool to engage the audience.  OTT platforms make films ranging in duration from 15 seconds to one minute to increase engagement. These strategies encourage more interaction from the audience.

OTT Marketing Campaigns:

Digital marketing campaigns are also among a buzz among the publicists and marketers where the audience engages with leads. This strategy is appreciated for introducing curiosity and transparency among the audience.

There is an endless number of strategies that are adopted for effective marketing of the content by OTT platforms. The marketing strategies of Amazon Prime and Netflix greatly vary on factors like sentiments of the audience where Netflix earns global approach or modern sentiments. On the other hand, Amazon Prime has local approach or traditional sentiments. The other factors are cost, availability of content and access, etc.

The genre and nature of the content and OTT platform influence the marketing style for the content. Ex: Mirzapur from Amazon Prime Videos was good enough for creating a stir with its bold dialogues or dialogue snippets, the show’s scenes were well absorbed with meme culture even before its release. While Family Man used character cliffhanging as a tool to garner people’s eyes and its interesting campaigns like #TheFamilyManJobHunt and #SrikantKahanHai.

About the Author

Punya is a student at Delhi University, stoked with inquisitiveness to absorb and probe into every aspect of the social world. As a digital marketing intern at Social Buzz, Punya takes joy in learning the nuts and bolts of Digital Marketing. She loves to write and learn about marketing campaigns. When not writing, she is found strolling in the gardens near water or just gazing at the night sky.