What telco, streaming, and broadcast media businesses can learn from leading subscription marketers on building and retaining high-value audiences.

MarketBridge announces the release of their latest benchmark report, “A Marketers Guide to Subscription-Based Revenue Success.” In surveying a diverse set of companies across many industries, MarketBridge set out to better understand the challenges subscription businesses are facing and the metrics used to measure success. Brice Chaney, Senior Vice President, Technology and Media at MarketBridge, explains that for the media industry, marketing’s role is more critical and challenging than before—especially during the pandemic. “According to Deloitte’s COVID-19 digital media trends survey, 39% of consumer respondents reported a decrease in household income since the pandemic began. And those consumers who lost income were twice as likely to cancel a streaming service,” says Brice. “While it’s tempting to double down on retention marketing to staunch losses, we found that greater than 60% of retention contribution is from engagement, having a variety of influence points across entire the customer journey.” The report dives into marketing’s role across the four critical stages of the customer journey: Brand development, demand generation, cross-sell and engagement, and retention.

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“With ever-growing pressure to offer original content, adapt to 5G speed and bandwidth, and compete with emerging content-delivery ecosystems, telco and media businesses tend to over-focus on ‘what they are bringing to market’—sometimes at the expense of ‘how they are engaging the market’,” says Andy Hasselwander, Chief Analytics Officer at MarketBridge. “Companies that engage in true audience-centric marketing see significantly higher brand health, acquisition, cross-sell, and retention KPIs, and ultimately see superior long-run subscription growth.”

The report details subscription marketers’ top challenges and most important KPIs across the four key stages of the customer buying journey. Select insights from the report include:

• 96% of marketers say the subscription model has increased expectations of marketing’s contribution to their company’s revenue growth, as “winner take all” micro-industries become more common
• 43% say their biggest brand development challenge is competing with larger/higher spending competitors; share-of-voice is increasingly a zero-sum game
• 25% say poor understanding of individual customers’ wants and needs is the number one barrier to better cross-sell and engagement performance; a prerequisite to delivering personalized experiences
• Almost all marketers struggle to find effective retention tactics—but have found success in focusing instead of predictive modeling to identify likely defectors and providing them with “zero moment of truth” value in real-time

The report concludes with three specific recommendations for driving subscription model success:

1. Establishing an ongoing voice-of-the-customer system
2. Measuring and optimizing marketing attribution both up- and down-funnel
3. Integrating marketing with product and customer service functions as appropriate by customer stage

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