Are you creating meaningful regular video communications to engage with your community, but missing the opportunity to drive revenue through your content?
Have you considered how your back catalog of videos, webinars and conference recordings should be combined to create a new revenue for your Association or organization?
With online engagement now more important than ever, its crucial to have a simple but effective strategy for your video content and education, that will create a continuous income stream for your organization.
It’s true that turning videos into revenue starts with producing valuable content, but you’ll need more than just great videos if you want to create a video-driven revenue stream.
Once you’ve created your video content – whether it’s from recent webinars, training videos or recorded virtual events, it’s time to partner with a video hosting platform that will successfully automate & scale your operation. This is the first step to start selling your videos online.
A Video hosting and Monetization platform, like webcastcloud, does more than just capture video content during your virtual or hybrid events. It’s the vehicle that empowers you to create your organization’s branded video streaming channel that drives video sales & cross-selling year-round.
Whether you’re a sole trading entrepreneur or head of a global Association, everyone can benefit from incorporating video into their business strategy.
Organizations producing video content that is highly targeted & valuable to a specific audience & market, should be maximizing the value from the effort that is put into their content creation.
Video monetization is a strategy that works for a wide range of businesses. This includes organizations offering entertainment & insights to customers, or Associations offering continuing education content, webinars & industry conferences to their members.
Once you’ve chosen your video hosting platform, set up your branded video library, and uploaded your videos, it’s time to choose how to sell your videos online.
While there are many different methods you can use to sell your videos online, we’ll focus on seven popular and proven Video eCommerce features. These different pricing strategies to sell videos online can be used as a stand-alone product or in a hybrid approach.
1. Sell a Video Streaming Subscription (SVOD)
Position your organization’s video channel as a must-have subscription for your community of learners.
Offering a video streaming subscription to your community, clients and members, provides them unlimited access to all of your great video on-demand.
Subscription Video On-Demand (SVOD) is best suited to organizations that consistently produce a high volume of quality video content – but it doesn’t necessarily have to be on-demand only.
With webcastcloud, you can provide access to both live streams and on-demand recordings to subscribers of your video channel.
An annual or monthly subscription to your branded video library, creates year-round value for your community & members. A Subscription gives the user full access to all your new and existing videos for a recurring monthly or annual fixed fee.
The subscription structure is hugely popular, especially for OTT video streaming services. A recent study found that 68% of people have at least one streaming video subscription, like Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Launching your own subscription will provide a consistent revenue stream from your online community, and the opportunity to make an informed decision on future content creation investments based on the regular revenue from your growing subscriber base.
If your organization is producing a wide variety of video content channels, for example, multiple conferences, webinars & continuing education, or are delivering a variety of content topics. The all-access subscription to your entire video library might not necessarily be the best choice.
Alternatively, create a subscription product just for a specific channel of videos. Ie, Conferences OnDemand Subscription or Webinars Series Subscription.
Your members can commit to a smaller subscription fee, and gain access to the premium video content from that series, topic or channel.
This provides the opportunity for your online video product to grow into new avenues, events or topics, and to sell them as other subscription products or through a one-time transaction using pay-per-view.
2. Pay-Per-View Video Monetization
While a video subscription is the most popular structure, the pay-per-view model is a close second. Pay-per-view is when a user has a one-time transaction to access a single video.
A pay-per-view or video paywall is a great structure for monetizing individual videos. This structure is a good fit for organizations producing a low volume of videos, but whose video content is very targeted, popular, or valuable (ideally all three).
Some organizations use free videos as a lead magnet to draw new audience members to their video library, then selectively monetize popular videos in the same library using pay-per-view.
Pay-per-view is highly relevant in the event industry and is commonly used to sell on-demand video access to popular and topical recorded events, conferences, and seminars.
If you’re an association considering video pay-per-view, then ensure your platform support member pricing tiers. This ensure that Association Members will receive a discounted ‘member only’ pricing, and non-members pay full price for your videos.
Webcastcloud automates member pricing tiers, where different pricing can be set for a variety of different membership types. For example, student member or an affiliate, will have a different price than your full members.
The flexibility to automate prices through integration with your Association CRM will allow your members to feel like they are receiving a value-added discount on their purchases.
3. Corporate Video Subscriptions
A Corporate Subscription is similar to SVOD, however instead of a single user gaining full access to your video library for a reoccurring fixed fee, now multiple users in an organization gain access to your videos through an Enterprise Subscription.
This method of selling videos online is best suited to Associations or Training Organizations that produce video content that is suitable to a wider audience or have a training package that is valuable to a group of staff within an organization. It is an effective and quicker sales approach, to sell one subscription product at a premium price, rather than trying to sell tens of hundreds of individual subscriptions to those employees within one company.
This model is also great for Association who have corporations as members, rather than only individuals as members.
With this model, your client’s entire organization can benefit from your educational video library on-demand.
An Enterprise-based Video Subscription is a good fit for industry and profession specific on-demand educational video content, like continuing professional development or continuing learning videos.
4. Cross-Sell and Upsell your Videos
By launching your corporate branded video library, with a powerful searching and metadata engine to categorize and structure different channels of videos, courses, webinars, conference & events online. Your online community will be cross-exposure to your wide variety of video resources, channels and topics.
Netflix, Ted Talks, Amazon Prime, Hulu – are all driving consumer expectations around the quality we now expect in a video streaming services.
A Netflix-style video platform that will showcase trending videos, most popular, recommendations based on content you are watching, or your past viewing history, our viewers become exposure content across different channels and video most-relevant to them.
Doing big things with your video content is all about the upsell.
It’s your packaging, premium access, discounts, subscriptions. The McDonalds upsell strategy ‘do you want fries with this’ has been successful for years and can work well for your organization’s video content.
5. Membership Only Video Channels
Premium member-only video content is great for Associations and Training Organizations
with an existing membership database, that also want to package up premium
features for higher levels of subscribers.
Your members love feeling part of a select in-group experience, and website resources should be vast and inclusive of video.
We don’t want to give our content away for free – so creating member-only content will help add-value into your existing membership and support a loyal community, whilst increasing your revenue.
A tiered approach for videos within your library, where a particular members group gets premium access will add immediate value to your membership package and support member retention.
Although it is also an ideal tool for recruiting new members. If they can see and search your video library as a non-member and are exposed to locked videos that are member only, this can promote and recruit new members to your Association or organization as they will gain the privilege of watching when they have an active membership with you.
An integrated video platform that can use membership groups from your CRM, Association database or your subscription lists, should be able to segment video and channel access to provide an effective resource for loyal members.
You need to regularly publish video content so that it’s worth the price of a membership subscription, so ensure you are funnelling all your videos, webinars and training through your member-only video access.
5. Bundle Together Video Purchases
A bundle structure groups together two or more videos with similar content themes to create a single new offering. Bundles help simplify the user’s purchasing decisions by grouping together video access for a single fee.
Bundling can be used as a stand-alone model; however, this structure is commonly used in combination with a per-pay-view, video channel access, or video subscription structures. Bundles are an effective tool to upsell users from purchasing a single video to a collection of videos. Bundled videos are often positioned as “discounted” offers.
Typically, the producer will offer a video bundle at a discounted price compared to purchasing each individual video. Bundles are used to tease users, giving them a taste of your video content before they upsell to a channel or subscription model.
6. Sell Channels not Videos
Do you have too much video content to simply offer video bundles but not quite enough to justify a video subscription?
Are your videos strategically categorized, segmented, and grouped together?
If you are producing a range of categorized video content, targeting different audience groups, then selling videos online through different categorized video channels is a good strategic fit. A video channel is a collection of videos focusing on a specific topic/theme tailored to a targeted audience.
Video monetization through selling video channels, works by funnelling users through a centralized video library “Home-Page” containing multiple video channels. Now from your video library, your users can purchase the video channels that best meet their needs. Furthermore, funnelling all users through a centralized branded video library “home-page” creates multiple Video & Channel upselling opportunities.
An example of using channels to sell videos online is an Association selling educational videos, to different member groups or industry-specific groups. This example Association produces educational videos for three membership groups, Pre-School Teachers, Primary School Teachers, and High School Teachers. An all-access subscription is valuable to users that work across every group, while other users that only specialize in one area/group might struggle to justify the cost of an all-access subscription.
However, providing the option to purchase select channels gives the user an opportunity to access a specific “course” video channel relevant to them. This still leaves the door open to users purchasing additional channels or a subscription in the future.
7. Create a Hybrid Video Monetization Model
Every sales strategy and pricing structure offers a different appeal to varying target audiences and types of video content being delivered. Research your current marketplace to gauge what your audience expects from your video offering. It’s important to be comfortable testing, changing, and optimizing the ways you sell your videos online. Ultimately It’s up to you to select the video monetization model or model combination, that best fits your video content & video strategy.
Be flexible with the video monetization structures you use. Customize different payment structures based on different audience needs and stages of the buyer’s journey. In fact, combinations of these structures are commonly used together to both capture a wider target audience and maximize revenue. Providing a combination of flexible purchasing options increases the likelihood of users buying your videos. Depending on your unique offering and target audience, we recommend selecting up to three payment structures and refining them over time.
Amazon prime is a well-known example of combining both subscription and pay-per-view structures together in order to maximize revenue. Online learning commonly combined pay-per-view (A Lesson), video channels (A Course), and subscriptions (Multiple Continued Learning Courses) video selling structures to meet different user needs.
Are you ready to take the next step?
Do you want to turn your videos into a regular revenue stream?
webcastcloud’s all-in-one Video Monetization & Virtual Event Platform is purpose-built to transform your online video content into year-round revenue.
webcastcloud are invested in your engagement and monetization success! Contact our team for a demonstration today!
