As we take a deeper dive into core strategies for VidOps success, we are excited to share a variety of unique perspectives from the video operations lifecycle. Guest blogger, Nick Franklin, CEO of ChartMogul, shares insights gleaned from VidOps that can help you focus on securing data-driven value for your business.
Actionable metrics are at the core of every effective video operations team. Some organizations start by establishing a culture where employees can uncover, diagnose, and surface areas of opportunity. But when you’re a busy, multi-threaded team, it can be challenging to execute on more than a few ideas at once – especially if those projects are cross-departmental and not the core focus of a given team (e.g. you want to implement a new CRM or lead scoring framework for your sales team when they need to be zeroed in on a revenue target).
There’s an additional layer of difficulty here too. Actionable video data has a short shelf-life (more on this here).
So how do you encourage behavior and improvement that helps your organization grow in a way that doesn’t feel out of reach? Start by focusing in on what is most important to the success of your overall business and your most critical initiatives. Know which questions to ask and which KPIs you want to hit. Tie those questions to actionable change so that in daily, weekly, monthly meetings, your team(s) can see the impact of collaborating and of optimizing your video operations lifecycle. Finally, build a rhythm around reviewing those insights on a regular basis. Try bookmarking each report in the order you want to review them and working through those reports one at a time with key players.
Not sure where to look first? Below we’ve outlined four key insights and reports that align and excite your VidOps players:
Content curation: Which content categories can you tie to the most revenue? To the least? What differences exist in target geographies or demographics? The British Film Institute carefully curates a selection of new and classic films for their VOD subscription service, the BFI Player+. Using tools like ChartMogul, their team can pull together thoughtful recommendations based on data – not conjecture. This is especially important for growing VOD organizations where customer interviews and focus groups simply can’t encompass the opinions and preferences of a large and diverse audience. What’s more is that informed content curation drives engagement, audience growth, and quality – key components of all retention strategies.
Delivery: Where are your best customers engaging with your videos? On which platforms? Where does your delivery leave customers wanting more? The delivery landscape is changing daily with new endpoints popping up and increased competition. You need an open and flexible distribution infrastructure that enables your teams to make changes when necessary. For most organizations, it’s simply not feasible to be everywhere (on all platforms), like Netflix – so listen to the data and take a selective approach.
Churn: Do you know what the characteristics of your most successful users are? When and where do users leave? Consider using a cohort analysis to understand if and why the user journey breaks down.
Here are some examples of insights you can glean from cohort analysis:
“Churn in the first three months is higher for users who watch videos on one platform compared to another.”
“Users who signed up for a paid plan in December are more likely to churn in June.”
“The introduction of a new paid plan has helped solve the retention issue for users of a certain type at month three.”
Addressing user retention issues can impact cash flow, user satisfaction, and your product roadmap enormously. This cheat sheet can help you understand and use churn concepts to your advantage.
Marketing efficacy: Don’t let actionable marketing data sit siloed with someone in creative or finance. After all, VidOps is a company-wide initiative. Enrich your subscription data with information about which marketing programs drive the most subscribers. Are you retaining those subscribers? What engagement measures can you use to make sure that your users are fully integrated with your product and connected to your brand?
Here’s my last piece of advice: don’t fall into the trap of analysis paralysis. By defining and linking key reports and KPIs to actionable VidOps efforts early and definitively, you’re sure to see success.
Nick Franklin is the founder of and CEO ChartMogul. ChartMogul takes raw data from multiple sources and turns it into beautiful and easy-to-interpret visualizations, enabling anyone within a subscription business to run analyses and extract deep insights from their customer and revenue metrics.
