Conquer Audience Engagement in Media & Entertainment Through Personalized Experiences

Millions of people across the globe tune in to their favorite shows to unwind, often binging multiple episodes in one sitting. Others mount stationary bicycles or treadmills and tune out the world to focus on achieving momentary bliss through exercise. Still others look to websites or magazines to read the latest news, gossip, or other captivating stories.

These consumers have seemingly endless options when it comes to their subscriptions. But that often means consumers aren’t loyal to a particular brand. Rather, they jump back and forth between services when they find something tempting on a competing platform — such as when a subscriber to Netflix jumps to another service, such as Hulu, for a show generating buzz or when a service like Walmart+ offers products not available through Amazon Prime.

With all of these choices, how do you maximize your audience’s engagement with your service?

It is an essential component for any company, especially those offering subscription services, to inspire audience engagement. With increasing competition, brands that hook their customers and keep them engaged are more likely to build trust. This trust in turn helps services avoid customer churn – the annual turnover rate for streaming services is nearly one-fifth of all subscribers. Customers, who are pickier than ever, will repeatedly return to their sites to consume more content, stay loyal, and likely share that content with their friends or colleagues. Engagement optimized with the help of data (unified access to multitudes of data currently siloed across your organization that provides a unified, 360-degree view of your customer) and artificial intelligence (AI) – which can help optimize insights and provide personalized journeys at scale – is key for a wide spectrum of industries and organizations, but achieving it requires:

A robust selection can keep your subscribers engaged longer. If they prefer to listen to ’80s music non-stop, they will favor a service that includes as many of the decade’s tunes as possible. If their preferred flavor of TV show is ’90s sitcoms, they will most likely subscribe to the service that allows them to revisit a full complement of those shows.

The more your catalog aligns with your customers’ preferences, the longer you can keep them hooked. AI can play a role in achieving this by analyzing external data corresponding with your target demographic to ensure your content is resonating and make adjustments when engagement begins to wane.

The goal for any company with a subscription service is to encourage their customers to consume their offerings. An intelligent, AI-powered recommendation engine can tailor every customer experience by taking into account what they have already consumed and serving up additional content that’s relevant to that history. If a customer played numerous football and basketball games on a video game platform, your recommendations should prioritize similar titles to sustain that customer’s interest. Minimize the amount of time they search — for a new e-book, a workout class, or a new show to binge — so they can spend more time enjoying the service.

The more content a subscriber consumes, the more data AI has to draw on to ensure it’s providing the most accurate and effective recommendations possible. But it goes beyond that, with not only pushing related content but actively marketing it. AI can almost instantly create promotions for a live stream of a concert targeted to a customer who’s been watching music content, for example.

Offering something your competitors don’t can help grow your audiences and unlock compelling experiences that drive increased engagement. Adding loyalty programs into your subscriber management strategies can help retain customers and encourage engagement. For example, Max could partner with a theater chain to provide loyal subscribers movie tickets or AppleTV could institute a points program for subscribers that gives them discounts to the App Store or in person at Apple retail stores. Or loyal subscribers could be given exclusive content or early access to new releases.

AI can pull from your existing data to ensure your subscribers are aware of relevant loyalty reward programs, using generative AI to draft personalized emails, marketing messaging to promote aspects of the loyalty program to best entice subscribers. It can create segmentation to make sure avid documentary viewers, for example, aren’t receiving promotions to sign up for a boxing pay-per-view rewards program that would be better served to sports fans – and vice versa. Your integrated AI can also almost instantly create promotions around these programs targeted to the right audience.

User experiences are key for keeping your audience engaged. Whether it’s a smooth app or website UI or the ability to access and control the service through different channels like voice assistants, bridging the gap between the content you create and the fans who consume it can keep your customers tethered to your platform. Here are some key aspects to a quality user experience:

• Reliable service: Users expect your platform to be available and responsive whenever they want to use it; slow or buggy performance deters engagement and leads to a frustrating experience.
• Service controls: Features like intuitive and responsive voice assistants and apps provide users with convenient ways to interact with the platform.
• Intuitive controls: Offering a seamless and flexible viewing experience, such as allowing viewers to stop a show on one device and pick it up in the same place on another, is highly valued.

Effective data strategies are critical to achieving this. Unifying data siloed across various platforms, from billing to subscriber management to service for example, ensures your integrated AI draws on a 360-degree view of the customer to ensure user preferences and behaviors are understood and catered to, creating personalized user experiences.

Audience engagement is measured with a number of different metrics:

• Engagement time
• Active users/daily users
• Retention rate
• Churn rate
• Customer lifetime value (CTV)
• Average revenue per user (ARPU)
• Frequency
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Engagement time is one of the clearest indicators of success. For a streaming service, it could be the number of hours a person spends watching programs. For a fitness platform, it could be the number of classes they complete each week. For a publisher, it could be the length of time they spend on each page or how many pages they visit. Shares are also important. Does your audience share links to your content with their friends? Do they talk about your content on their social channels?

Trailblazers in the media industry are using the power of their technology platforms to innovate across their businesses. They are consolidating processes onto one platform to make their teams more efficient. They use data to deliver personalized experiences for fans. And they’re building audience communities that can deeply engage with the brand through immersive experiences.

Grupo Globo owns Globoplay, a subscription video-on-demand service that streams a billion hours of content every year. In 2014, the company implemented a multicloud technology and data platform to help better understand its subscribers, create more personalized customer experience, and increase customer engagement with its brand.

As a result of modernizing its data platform, the company can now tailor digital marketing journeys for Globoplay’s customers based on their profile and viewing history and deliver personalized recommendations. This has contributed to an increase in the number of subscribers, as well as the time subscribers spend viewing content. Having a consolidated view of customers also makes it simpler for customer service teams to assist subscribers on their preferred channels, improving service efficiency.

Here’s how other trailblazers are making the most of their technology to separate themselves from the pack and keep their audiences engaged:

• How Orlando City SC uses data to understand and reward its fans
• Formula 1 boosts fan satisfaction to 88% by making every second count
• Robert Kraft's pro sports powerhouse notches its next big win
• World Champions, the Texas Rangers score big with a 360-degree view of operations data