Drive Your Digital Transformation
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the ways that media companies can adapt for success.
- Identify the steps media companies can take to achieve their goals.
Overview
The media industry is growing at an exponential rate—many services that were important a decade ago have no bearing today. So much is happening in the industry:
- Subscription services give people more choices than ever before.
- Ad campaigns give communities awareness of every new offering in the market.
- Media companies are investing in modern and superior technologies such as IoT, AI, data mining, and machine learning to deliver unparalleled media experiences.
- Companies are streamlining customer onboarding to optimize service adoption and customer retention.
Why is this important for media companies? It means they must adapt to the changes in the industry and create effective, brand-centric media solutions. But how?
Keep the Customer at the Center of All Innovation
The early 1990s saw the advent of a new concept in the field of technology. Donald Norman, a cognitive psychologist at Apple, coined it user experience. The concept was simple—listen to your customer, and create products and services that solve their problems. Although the concept has exploded into methodologies and best practices, the value of the core idea remains true even today.
It’s a no-brainer, but the longevity and success of a media company depend heavily on its customer relationships. What do they like? What excites them? What are their pain points?
For example, Leslie, a subscriber who watches every Ken Burns documentary ever made, probably doesn’t appreciate a recommendation from her streaming platform for the best slice-of-life anime of the 21st century. Though maybe she would because we don’t know everything about Leslie! With that said, it’s more likely that she would like a discount on a bundle package that includes the History channel. The value comes with knowing Leslie’s likes and dislikes and personalizing her experience. In turn, she rewards the company with her loyalty.
Creating personal experiences and moving from a business-centric mindset to customer-centric approach is at the heart of any company success story. Media companies can take it one step further and maximize customer lifetime value by using integrated revenue streams. These include a combination of subscriptions, ads, commerce, and licensing to form a unified revenue stream.
By knowing the customer and engaging with them personally, the media and entertainment industry can better monetize customer lifetime value. Specifically, businesses can:
- Offer subscriptions for content consumption.
- Provide advertising-supported content in place of paid subscription packages.
- Sell or license content to reach consumers through third-party partners such as distributors or merchandisers.
- Switch from inventory-based advertising to targeted advertising.
- Offer content-based products like game downloads and experiences such as ticket sales for theme parks.
Transforming Media Companies
How can media companies meet the expectations of this evolving industry? To start, they can use Salesforce Media Cloud to rapidly design, launch, and monetize media experiences.
This transformation is possible through the following shifts.
- Media companies focusing on the core competencies of their business—creating and delivering products and ads that consumers want. The right tool, like Media Cloud, gives companies a platform to help them accelerate the transition to a customer-centric business. This way, they can maximize customer lifetime value by driving a single view of truth and creating integrated or hybrid revenue streams like subscription, ads, commerce, and licensing.
- Media companies shifting from an inventory-first to an audience-first approach by converging ad sales on a single end-to-end platform. This way, they have a singular view of the customer and can use their first-party data. This shift goes a long way in a cookie-less world dominated by walled gardens like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which have solid first-party data—information a company collects directly from its customers and owns.
- Media companies considering virtual experiences, power collaboration, and new experiences across the emerging media value chain. These experiences include virtual production and events through digital commerce and advertising.
- Media companies, especially the traditional ones, reorienting their operating models. To stay competitive, they must improve profitability and operational efficiency. The opportunities range from creation to consumption through automation, digitization, and gathering data-driven insights into their customers.
- Media companies considering accelerating global subscriber growth because the days of regional or national-only marketing are gone. One way is with a platform-based approach that gives you purpose-built, scalable, flexible, and modular media solutions. What platform could it be? You guessed it. Salesforce Media Cloud.
