Embracing an Intelligent Lead Discovery Solution to Lower Customer Acquisition Cost

Sep 07, 2021

Media & Entertainment | 6 min READ

The quest towards securing the next million digital TV & video subscriber base

In today's highly fragmented multi-screen TV & video services segment, content has been the primary driver for media enterprises to secure a newer digital customer base and accelerate reach globally. Although acquiring a subscriber base remains the leading business priority, enhancing incremental average revenue per user (ARPU) and safeguarding profitability are also key for a long-term competitive edge.

Kedar Mohite

Former Global Head

Media & Technology Practice

Birlasoft

Furthermore, as cost pressures continue to rise attributed to most media enterprises managing two multi-faceted content supply chains, i.e., linear, and non-linear TV & video, the convergence of the operational ecosystem is pivotal in meeting the changing business requirements. These distinct digital customer engagement workflows hamper operational productivity and result in significant revenue leakages, i.e., inefficient siloed and fragmented customer journey from acquisition, on-boarding, retention to upsell.

Thus, unification of downstream media value chain from customer acquisition to engagement is also vital to strengthen long-tail market positioning. As the cost of customer acquisition, as depicted in figure 1, continues to rise for most media enterprises, Birlasoft believes that leveraging a highly converged agile but modular lead discovery solution is crucial in today's connected digital TV & video services era.

Although the below figure highlights that the cost of customer acquisition has declined for both the surveyed media enterprises in 2020, but broadly it's increased annually by 6.5% between 2015 and 2019. Therefore, as margins come under pressure, enterprises are pushed to lower costs and streamline the customer acquisition journey, i.e., from lead to on-boarding.

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Embracing an Intelligent Lead Discovery Solution to Lower Customer Acquisition Cost

*Cost of customer acquisition is calculated as marketing and sales spend as a percent of total subscribers for that particular year

** As pandemic pushed most of the population towards in-home entertainment this had a downturn in marketing and sales spend for 2020 resulting in the organic acquisition of newer customers rather than utilizing promotional campaigns

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Volumetric Customer Acquisition Is Essential for Sustainability

A majority of media enterprises (including digital service providers) embark on the OTT first growth strategy, and churn is fast becoming one of the primary KPI's attributed to:

The lowering window of exclusivity of content differentiation, i.e., Sky no longer controls the EPL rights.
Limited preferred content per platform, e.g., content spend reached more than one-third of total OPEX for most pure-play OTT platforms globally.
Slight disruption of household entertainment spend index due to increased unemployment rates in most of the global economies (almost 4mn unemployed in the US alone for more than 12 months)
Continued increase of premium OTT platform pricing, e.g., DAZN annual subscription stood at €149.99 (+25%) in 2021
Growing penetration of ad-supported platforms offering both premium and niche content repositories at scale (In May 2021, Amazon launched an ad-based service)

Although churn remains a key challenge, as competitive pressures exponentially rise with the entrance of newer digital TV& video services, volumetric acquisition of a newer customer base is necessary for media enterprises in the long run. Historically, these enterprises have followed a conservative approach woven around:

Horizontally (financial institutions, payment wallets, loyalty programs) and vertically (digital service providers, publishers, online news properties, etc.) integrated partnerships.
Third-party aggregator based promotional campaigns, i.e., coupons, etc
Freemium (limited duration) and pre-launch discount offer based access to the content repository

As highlighted by Nilesh Patel, Co-founder & CEO of LeadSquared “The biggest challenge for media companies in today’s multi-platform connected economy is to streamline the customer acquisition journey from lead capture to upsell engagement along with improving marketing & sales utilization rates. The high-volume, high-velocity nature of user acquisition in the media segment makes it crucial to address this challenge early on and plug any loopholes in the process.”

Furthermore, as these modes have enabled media enterprises to secure new volumetric customers, these siloed customer acquisition initiatives will be insufficiently attributed to every digital user's real-time change in media consumption preference across multiple devices, locations, and platforms long-term basis. Thus, this demand for transformation of customer acquisition workflow utilizing an agile, automated lead discovery solution such as LeadSquared, a strategic partner to Birlasoft since May 2021.

Lead Discovery Solutions Amplify Sales & Marketing Throughput at Lower TCO

As the digital touchpoints for each media asset continue to surge, managing and monitoring these signals (termed as lead) lie at the epicenter of sales and marketing teams across today's media enterprises to reduce the customer acquisition lead-time. Furthermore, complexities for these teams multiply attributed to the rising pre-bundling of third-party OTT TV & video services by most media enterprises to enrich their engagement rates. A good example is digital service providers such as cable TV, satellite TV, and telco operators pre-integrate Zee5, Netflix, etc.

Also, these traditional media enterprises need to focus on upselling OTT bundles to the existing linear customer portfolio. Therefore, the convergence of these multi-dimensional signals or lead into a single repository is slowly but gradually becoming the new normal.

Although unification of these leads lies at the epicenter of sales and marketing operational efficiencies, enterprise-wide syndication of these signals will reduce the customer conversion cycle and improve promotional campaign return on investment (ROI) in the long run. Finally, an industry-specific qualification algorithm will enable media enterprises to discover and focus their bandwidth on tier-I, and tier-II prospective leads to improve the volumetric conversion ratio.

Embracing Intelligent Lead Discovery Solution to Lower CAC

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DIY self-service, cognitive services (AI/ML), and managed services core differentiators

Upsell of multi-generation digital TV & video services including OTT is the necessity for a majority of media enterprises attributed to aggregation becoming the key differentiation strategy, i.e., either in-house or hybrid aggregation of multiple services from TV & video, music, gaming, news, local sports, e-learning, etc. Therefore, lead discovery solutions will witness a strong adoption curve across diverse media & entertainment segments such as:

continuously changing consumption platforms

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Also, Birlasoft believes that media enterprises will follow the traditional conservative procurement approach towards lead discovery solutions, focusing on vendors offering strong industry-specific used cases and value propositions. Some of the core competencies and functionalities that are crucial in improving penetration across the media & entertainment segment are as follows:

Core	Value add-ons
Ease of usability for sales and marketing teams (includes user friendly UI/UX on multiple devices)	Professional and managed services
Industry specific lead qualification modules or templates (e.g. cable TV, broadcaster, sports franchises, OTT, music etc.)	DIY self-service application
Tier-I referenceable customer base	Cognitive services (AI/ML) and predictive analytics based sales and marketing modules
Transparent and multi-layered pricing models (per month per user, event and usage based etc.)	Used case optimization
Deployment flexibility (on premise, cloud (public, private), hybrid cloud)	Support remote and hybrid workgroup collaboration
Tightly integrated third party systems (ERP, CRM etc.)
Automation and real-time data sharing, access and collaboration

Therefore, embracing an intelligent lead discovery solution will facilitate media enterprises to accelerate their newer customer acquisition at lower TCO and enable building a tailored monetization avenue model resulting in safeguarding churn in the long run.

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