Grow and Engage your Audience on your OTT Service
How do I get more people to discover my app? As an OTT technology provider with a decade of experience, this is hands-down the question Float Left gets asked the most. To answer this, we’re going to break-down four strategies that we’ve seen work well with our clients:
1. Traditional Marketing Campaigns
In a growing OTT market, launching an app is just the beginning. 10 years ago, you may have been able to launch an OTT app with little marketing efforts and make out well, but with today’s competition, marketing is essential to get your app seen. Of course, traditional marketing campaigns are always a good idea and “traditional” by today’s standards means social media campaigns, Google Ads (targeting relevant keywords), and email campaigns. Do not underestimate the power of these campaigns, and expect to allocate a large budget to see results.
2. Platform Promotions
Platforms such as Roku and Amazon Fire TV have promotional opportunities that allow you to purchase ads for your app on the home screen (Roku), as a banner (Fire TV), as a screensaver (Fire TV), etc. Each platform has different guidelines and formats, and it is imperative you follow those guidelines closely to get your ads approved quickly. These promotions could get expensive but they perform well by getting your brand in front of the right audience.
3. Priming your app for the App stores
All platforms are built on different technologies that require specific codebases and development languages. It is important that when building an OTT service for multiple platforms, the technology used is native to that platform (i.e. Roku apps are written in Brightscript). By using native language for each platform, you will be prepared to take advantage of any marketing opportunities that may come your way, such as being selected as a featured app. If your app is not natively built, the stores will pass over your brand when selecting candidates for promotion. Contact us if you are interested in building native OTT apps or want to learn more!
4. Universal Search and Discovery
Universal Search and Discovery is a very impactful feature that is often missed by brands. It allows users to search for a movie, TV series, episode, actor, or even director on a platform and the search will return a set of services that contain that piece of content. Users then have the option to install that app and watch — this is how unknown services with great content can drastically increase their installs. Each platform has different requirements to integrate a library of content into its searchable database, but the primary way is to prepare a formatted list (XML) and make it available to the platform. If you are interested in incorporating Universal Search into your app, contact us, and let’s talk!
We recommend implementing all of these marketing strategies to get as many eyes on your brand as possible from various angles. There is, unfortunately, no way around the fact that you will need to spend a good chunk of change to get results, but if these strategies are implemented correctly, they can help make your brand stand out among the crowd.
