By Azuan Muda
It won’t matter if you produce amazing content but fail to market it the right way. Distributing the right content to the right audience will be one of the most important elements for driving revenue. Before kicking off with your marketing activity to promote your content, find out who your target audience is.
The success of your marketing strategy may solely depend on two defining factors – audience and content. The more you know about your audience, the more successful your overall content marketing strategy will be. Consider these questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- Where do they watch your content (mobile phone, tablets, laptop)?
- Which genre do they watch most?
- What is the market size of your audience segments?
- What type of format do they watch most – films, drama series or anime?
In order to engage your audience, you’ll need to create promotional and marketing strategies at the same time.
It is a given that premium American and Korean content continue to dominate and drive subscriber acquisition across major over-the-top (OTT) platforms in the Asian region. That said, for the past two years, Chinese language dramas (C-dramas) are becoming popular among audiences in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
So, how do you market C-dramas, say in Malaysia?
1. Exclusive and original content – Many OTTs are producing their own Chinese-language originals that would be available on their platforms. Netflix produced several Chinese-language originals such as Nowhere Man and Triad Princess in 2019. Meanwhile, ‘You Are My Glory’, originally produced by Tencent Pictures, is only available on WeTV.
2. Premier on OTT before on local free-to-air channels – It is a strategic partnership that we could see between Netflix and TVN for K-drama series. Similarly, it was a strategic move when Baidu’s iQiyi partnered with Primeworks Studio early this year. iQiyi will have exclusive first window broadcasting rights to its viewers in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei for the majority of Media Prima’s TV3 titles.
3. Exclusive preview – This gimmick is quite trending lately and it works. Recently, iQiyi premiered an exclusive preview of ‘The Ferryman: Legends of Nanyang’ with a solid premium production quality as their latest attempt to proliferate its footprint in the local market.
Marketing your content is about outreach and distributions to the right audience. Know your audience that you want to engage and leverage available marketing channels simultaneously. Once you build your audience and market exclusive content, you would increase revenue through subscriptions and advertising in no time.
Azuan Muda is co-founding and bootstrapping several media and technology startups on a local and international scale.