How Every Creator Can Grow Their Business With the Help of OTT Data

Over-the-top (OTT) streaming services have become all the rage in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. Let’s take a look at some stats from Statista:

As a result, tons of creators and businesses are getting in on the action of the growing OTT market to help propel them into the creator economy and start making lots of money. But, to make authentic content that resonates with your audience, you need to understand the wants, needs, and the type of content they crave. To do that, creators and businesses alike need to take a look at themselves, what they’re producing, and of course, the cold hard data.

In this blog, we’ll take a deeper look into OTT data, why it’s crucial for digital creators and businesses looking to grow their audience, and how leveraging OTT statistics can help you create better content for your audience.

OTT data is important because it helps you build a video content strategy that really works. When you look at the data, you can learn a lot more about your audience and optimize your video content to be suited to their liking. Here’s how:

Understanding Audience Behavior

OTT data can provide insights into the preferences and viewing habits of a creator’s core audience. Taking a look at video metrics like overall views, unique users, spikes in viewership, playback time, and engagement can help determine which type of content resonates best with audiences.

Once you understand your audience, you can begin developing unique video content that fulfills their needs. This will ultimately drive user engagement and audience retention, especially for creators who want to reach a smaller but more engaged audience.

Predicting Market Trends

Another important aspect of understanding OTT data is how it can predict overall marketplace trends. Much like consumer behavior, OTT data can help creators anticipate shifts in user preferences and pivot video content to reach and engage viewers outside of their core audience. And yes, you should hop on to market trends.

That doesn’t mean you have to do the next TikTok dance or start pulling outlandish pranks. But, it does mean you will have to adjust. With the rise of AI content creation tools and the growing popularity of short-form video content, pivoting your video content to meet the demands of what your audience wants is essential.

Optimizing Marketing Strategies

OTT data can also help creators optimize their video marketing strategies. For example, with a video sales strategy, creators can increase engagement, generate better leads, improve brand awareness, and boost conversion rates for themselves.

To optimize these strategies, look at OTT data to ensure that your messaging is hitting your ideal target audience. If the engagement rate is dipping, it may be time to reevaluate your messaging or your target audience. If you see a spike in views at a certain point in the video, then that might be the messaging that needs to be integrated throughout. Without strategically looking at OTT data, you may not understand who your audience is and your messaging might not be hitting the mark.

Before targeting audiences with video content, it’s crucial to understand what your OTT data means. Here are some important OTT statistics to keep in mind:

Viewer Demographics

There is no better way to start understanding your target audience than by learning about their demographic makeup. If you’re a creator looking to create a strong video strategy that resonates with your audience, obviously proper targeting is crucial. With OTT data, identifying characteristics such as age, gender, and target audience location helps to establish an audience persona that should be utilized when producing content.

Viewing Habits and Preferences

After understanding the target audience demographics, it’s time to do your research on what content they enjoy the most. Some questions to ask is how often are they watching content? What other types of content does this demographic typically enjoy? How can I start producing content that resonates with this demographic and fuels my creativity? With these questions in mind, it will become easier to formulate a video content strategy based on OTT data rather than intuition.

Device Usage

Device usage is another type of OTT data that can provide insights into the target audience. Understanding where the audience primarily consumes content can help tailor the video strategy to meet their needs or the needs of the wider market. To gain a better understanding of the target audience, OTT metrics such as the devices used by the audience for consuming content (mobile device, computer, etc.), their preferences for consuming competitor’s content, and preferred time of consuming content (day, night, morning, afternoon, etc.) should be analyzed.

Content Engagement Metrics

To get even more granular, it can also be helpful to look at OTT data per video. Seeing where content engagement spikes, dips, or flatlines can determine audience likes or dislikes and can inform which types of content to continue producing or stay away from in the future. Some content engagement metrics include views, watch time, completion rate, and the number of unique users who watched the video.

With Endavo, you can easily analyze OTT data and create powerful video content for your channel and brand. Here are some of the advantages of using Endavo’s OTT data analytics platform:

The Endavo multi-dimensional reporting dashboard can quickly show users their monthly views, app views, top trending videos, top performing channels, and a map of visitor locations:

Users can also see full detailed reports on each of these statistics and can filter down to ultra-granular reports needed for specific content, channels, consumption methods, and much more. Here is an example with monthly views:

And top trending videos per channel:

Users  can also see revenue reports from transactions, channels, advertisements, promos, and channel affiliates:

They can also see how many subscribers they have and track new subscribers and churn:

And track followers per channel:

With Endavo’s OTT data, users can constantly monitor channel performance, what growth metrics channels are reaching, and how they can improve their video content strategy. Let’s take a look at how creators can use Endavo and OTT data to build their content businesses further.

OTT data is not without its hurdles, however. Because of the sheer amount of data creators have to deal with, pulling out pertinent OTT statistics and insights can be a challenge. Here are some of the challenges with using OTT data and what you can do to solve them:

Data Overload

The digital revolution has truly given us more data than we ever could’ve asked for. This can be both a blessing and a curse for creators; with so many metrics abound it’s easy to get lost in the sea of information.

Because of that, creators need to be able to see which data points are most prevalent. Sure, that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it is possible. The key is prioritization. Begin by defining clear objectives for your content strategy. Whether it be increasing views or improving watch time, focus on only the metrics that align with these objectives. Start small and work your way up to having to deal with all of these data points simultaneously.

Evolution of Viewer Preferences

As we’ve talked about a lot, viewer preferences are constantly changing. As a creator, it is your job to keep up. While relying on past OTT data can be a big part of that, it’s just as important to keep an eye on current trends in your niche, pop culture, current events, and the video content industry in general.

So, you need to adopt a dual approach. You need to analyze OTT to gather insights into your video performance and you need to be an expert on the world and everything going on around. It’s a tough ask; trust us, we know. But by being an internal and external video expert, you, your content, and your audience will thank you.

Analyzing Competitors

Analyzing demographic data from an OTT platform is integral for creators to learn who their audience is—and more importantly—who their competitors are. With OTT data, creators can track the demographics of their audience and research what other content they gravitate towards and the creators whose content they consume. With that information in mind, creators can start producing content similar in scope, production value, and format to their competitors, and attract a wider audience from a similar demographic.

For example, let’s say you are a travel vlogger looking to expand your reach, and your audience is primarily 25-35-year-old working adults in the U.S. As a creator, you may look at other travel vloggers like Casey Neistat to see how he produces his content, what makes it so engaging, and how you can use his content production techniques to grow your audience.

Analyzing Device Usage

For creators wishing to grow their business with OTT data, they need to also need look at how content is being consumed. By assessing the type of device their audience is using, where the peaks in viewership on a video are, and what kind of content receives the most views month over month, creators can start seeing how they should position their content in the future.

For example, let’s say that the videos getting the most views on your channel come from short clips taken from your longer-form content that has been optimized for mobile devices. With that in mind, you can start producing your content in such a way that makes it conducive to being cut into shorter segments for fast, mobile consumption, rather than producing longer content that sees less engagement overall.

Analyzing Content Consumption

Finally, creators should recognize which videos of theirs receive the most views. Seeing which videos are trending or have the highest views month over month can indicate which type of content needs more attention as you continue making videos for your channel.

Did your audience prefer more humorous content last month? Then start producing more of that! Did they like it when you did a conspiracy theory breakdown or a true crime documentary? See if those get more views as you publish them to your channel.

Once you find a video content niche that gains you at least 1,000 true fans, they will be more than willing to support you on your quest for audience growth, and you’ll start earning revenue and growing your business in no time.

Analyzing OTT data is crucial for creators of all types looking to thrive in the competitive world of streaming content. The best way for businesses to start growing with OTT data is by leveraging tools like Endavo. With Endavo’s customizable OTT tech platform, creators and businesses alike can easily build a home for their content and reach a wider audience than they ever could have imagined.

Start taking control of your content with Endavo; sign up for a free 30-day trial, or hit us up to learn more about how our OTT platform can help you amplify your voice and engage with your audience like you never have before.