How to Maximize Engagement on Your OTT Channel

The battle was over when you published your video for the world to see—or so you thought. After 24 hours, your video still doesn’t have the engagement you expected. Sound familiar? 

There are millions of creators in the world in your shoes. In fact, there are more than 500 hours of video uploaded per minute on YouTube alone. That’s a lot of content to consume! Before you let the numbers scare you, remember that it’s possible to leverage your top-quality content and turn random viewers into engaged audience members using a few OTT marketing hacks.

With a bit of behind-the-scenes OTT strategy, OTT marketing doesn’t have to keep you up at night. Hit snooze and become an overnight sensation when you follow these strategies for maximizing your OTT channel viewer engagement.

In this article:

• Deliver valuable resources and exclusive content.
• Develop a social media audience.
• Create easy-to-digest short-form content.
• Simplify engagement with a dedicated app.
• Leverage partnerships to cross-promote.
• Invest in advertisements.
• Analyze your performance and evaluate your strategies.

Deliver valuable resources and exclusive content.

Before you pour all of your money and time into revamping your OTT marketing strategy, take an honest look at your content strategy. Viewer engagement is essential, but it’s practically impossible to improve without first creating content that encourages audience retention. 

To increase OTT engagement, make your content stand out from the rest. Focus your energy on providing resources that your audience won’t be able to find anywhere else, such as educational resources, personal point-of-view, and exclusive content they can’t get from any other channel.

Develop a social media audience.

The average user spends 147 minutes per day on social media. That’s more than two hours scrolling through free content from brands, creators, family, and friends during leisure time.

Social media is one of the primary OTT marketing tactics for increasing real time engagement because of its widespread popularity and low barrier to connecting directly with users worldwide. Just like you enjoy hearing feedback from your viewers, they like to hear from you too! Don’t forget that social media is a two-way street; always respond to questions and consider developing a strategy for responding to both positive and negative feedback in public comments and private messages.

Opportunities to encourage viewer engagement with your OTT channel on social media include

• Asking questions to encourage sharing opinions, advice, and knowledge,
• Conversation-starting polls and quizzes,
• Requesting recommendations, and 
• Live streaming.

Be patient when building your social media following, as it takes time to develop a loyal audience. Try a variety of social platforms until you find the social networks that work best for your content and audience members. 

Create easy-to-digest short-form content.

Thanks to the development of short-form content apps like Vine, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, digital natives have a short attention span for online content. The good news for your OTT strategy? All you need is a quick hook to catch your audience’s attention and retain real time engagement.

Use shortened clips, trailers, soundbites, and memes to maximize the longevity of your content. Re-using pieces of your primary content in your OTT marketing strategy is resourceful and allows your audience to engage with your content when they’re out to lunch, between meetings, or on their way to dinner. Don’t forget to include a call-to-action that encourages viewers to keep watching the full video!

Simplify engagement with a dedicated app.

Would you believe us if we told you it was possible to launch your own Roku channel? It sounds like a complicated OTT marketing tactic, but you can create a dedicated streaming app seamlessly with a VDA (and it’s easier than ever with Endavo’s suite of professional services). 

Video Distribution Automation (VDA) platforms syndicate your content across many different channels to display your content in front of your audience no matter where they’re watching. Whether through a TV streaming device like Amazon Fire TV or a mobile phone or iPad on a dedicated mobile app, VDA platforms allow you to share your video content with anyone, anywhere. Now, they’ll know exactly where to find your content, and you are in complete control of the experience.

Leverage partnerships to cross-promote.

OTT marketing shouldn’t start and end with you. Collaborating with others can significantly benefit your OTT engagement by sharing each other’s audiences and airtime.

Working with partners should be a mutually beneficial arrangement. Whether you’re working with a related brand or a content creator with a similar audience, cross-promoting your collaboration will leverage both audiences to maximize reach and OTT audience engagement among viewers with similar interests.

Pro Tip: To get the most out of your partnerships, create an agreement that outlines expectations for content sharing, tagging, and usage rights.

Invest in advertisements.

Once you’ve put effort into your organic OTT marketing, you can take the plunge into the realm of paid advertisements. An OTT strategy in paid media may include

• Google PPC ads
• Social media ads
• Digital banner ads
• Interstitial video ads 

The benefit of investing in paid advertisements lies in the targeting capabilities. Develop a  strong OTT strategy identifying where your audience spends most of their time online. You can effectively and affordably place your OTT channel in front of your target audience, thus increasing OTT engagement with new viewers looking for content just like yours.

Analyze your performance and evaluate your strategies.

While you may be on your way to becoming an overnight sensation, OTT audience engagement takes time. Measuring the impact of your OTT marketing strategies shouldn’t be rushed, as momentum can build slowly but exponentially when you’ve introduced multiple tactics simultaneously.

It’s essential to routinely analyze the performance of your efforts, both organic and paid, to recognize positive and negative performance indicators. There’s no sense in wasting valuable money and time on OTT marketing tactics that simply aren’t giving you results.

If your PPC ads aren’t working, try interstitial video ads! If Instagram isn’t connecting with your audience, try TikTok! Keep your mind open to altering your OTT strategy in favor of what’s working. 

Ready, set, let’s get rolling. Get your first foot off the ground by introducing your own OTT channel with Endavo’s content distribution platform. Content creators get a 30-day, risk-free trial to see what the buzz is all about!