5 ways to help consumers answer that age-old question... "what should we watch?"

We’ve all been there. You finish a long day at work and you plonk yourself on the sofa ready to indulge in a few hours of harmless TV viewing.

The issue is, there are so many channels and so many shows that you begin to feel a little overwhelmed. You flick for what seems like eternity until you settle on a familiar series or a show you’ve already seen.

And that’s when you’re alone. The situation is even trickier when we add others to the mix. What if you like comedy but your partner digs action films? Or what if you share a TV with housemates and one likes rom coms, the second is into indie films, and the third is only satisfied with nature docs? It’s tough.

With more of us spending more time at home than we’re perhaps used to, this ‘problem’ is at its peak. Research carried out last year found Brits alone spend 187 hours a year browsing streaming sites – more than a third of the time it takes to learn a language.

As an entertainment provider, cutting down this dead time couldn’t be more key to keeping your current fans hooked – and attracting new ones. So, what can you do?

1. Target specific audiences based on context

With so much content out there, you want to do everything you can to make your users’ lives easier. Think of sci-fi fans who NEVER step out of their genre, why waste their time displaying the latest episode of The Crown? With our platform, mtribes, you can define who the right people are for specific content by segmenting them into Tribes.

From there, you can target users with said content and set a date and/or time period to run your campaign. For example, the week before a new Bond film is released, you can target action fans with past Bond films to really get them excited for the new instalment. You can even manage traffic allocation, meaning you could show different messaging to the same Tribe to see which is working the best.

For each Tribe you create, you can build Tribe cards that aggregate everything you know about the specific audience. These cards are like a deck of player cards, with each card sharing statistics to give more info about their hand.

2. Really get to know your audience

Knowing a user is into ‘sci-fi’ or ‘rom coms’ is just the start. There’s a whole lot more you can learn about your audience to really understand how they consume content right now – and what they might want to watch in the future.

To do so, you can set up Tribe parameter filters. For example, by finding out the average session time of different audience groups, you can learn how quickly you must make an impression on potential customers and make the most of those minutes. You can set filters including when they were ‘last seen’ and which device they’re viewing their content from.

You can also apply Tribe filter combinations to carry out A/B testing and uncover further insights. For example, by using contextual property filters to identify customers in trial, you can target them to find out what motivates them to stay on past their free period.

3. Learn from the data and optimize targeting

Picking your Tribes is just the beginning. mtribes takes the guesswork out of targeting – you can view a handy visual dashboard that’s designed to be easy to understand by non-technical operators. You can view loads of stats, including:

• Served success rate: The number of times a Scenario (an experience that has been configured for a specific audience Tribe and/or scheduled for a specific date and time) was served to or clicked on by your users in the last 30 days
  
• Weekly activity: The number of times this Scenario was served in the last seven days, with the busiest days and hours highlighted
  
• Tribe of the week: Displays activity of a specific Scenario against all Tribes containing the same users as in your targeted Tribes
  

This data is an essential tool to help you continuously improve your targeting and work out where’s best to spend your budget.

4. Build a real-time relationship

With mtribes, you can also target your users with relevant content based on their location. It can help you to target them with ‘seasonally appropriate’ content, i.e. holiday shows during the summer months or arctic nature shows as the weather gets cooler. Tricks like this can even be used to resurface older content by giving it a new, relevant ‘hook’.

5. When choosing what to watch, provide your users with a personalized UI that’s right for them

With our targeted UX management console and suite of multi-platform reference apps, AXIS, you can also adapt the design, navigation, page layout, promotions, and content within your OTT player. After all, if your audience is unique, why isn’t your UX?

You can alter the background and text colors to react to a certain theme, as well as use our Accessibility Checker to make sure the colors selected can be read by those with limited sight.

You can also add Promotional Rows, a feature that allows space for advertisers to promote their products and services directly within the UI, without negatively impacting your customers’ experience. The creative is up to you and the advertiser, but it provides the opportunity to produce compelling content that viewers will genuinely want to engage with – and that doesn’t interrupt any viewing time.

Conclusion

These days, watching television is far from a ‘one-size-fits-all' approach. Taking the pain points out of the viewing experience and ensuring your users can spend their time enjoying your content rather than wasting energy picking what to watch will be key. Sending your content live and hoping your users will stumble across it is no longer enough – intelligently targeting them with relevant content and finding ways to personalize their UX has never been more important. Follow these tips and that age-old question, “what should we watch?” will be answered once and for all.

Have you got any questions for the team? Get in touch or say hello over on Twitter or LinkedIn.