Targeted Marketing Delivers Successful Launch

MagellanTV was breaking into a niche space that was already dominated by one direct competitor and a handful of secondary competitors. With a newly created website and almost no brand recognition, they were struggling to meet their subscription goals. They needed a digital marketing plan that allowed them to generate awareness, communicate brand value, and ultimately produce subscribers.

With such a broad potential target and so many competing streaming services, our team needed to quickly identify the right mix of digital tactics that would resonate most effectively with MagellanTV’s core audience. Additionally, our efforts needed to assert the brand’s identity in the marketplace, all on a nimble marketing budget.

Our approach utilized a complementary set of strategies to ensure that MagellanTV’s site infrastructure was solid, provide good user experience with optimized content, and increase brand awareness through SEO and paid marketing campaigns.

• On-Page SEO and Content Strategy – Our team performed keyword research to identify key industry, service, and documentary subject matter-related terms, identifying opportunities to rank for their individual documentary pages as well as their blog. We evaluated MagellanTV’s direct and indirect competitors to produce an opportunity gap analysis that highlighted missing content.
• CRO – We ran A/B and usability tests to ensure that site functionality and messaging were clear, allowing users to easily navigate to the content they were looking for.
• Paid Social and Paid Search – Our initial focus for paid channels was general brand awareness, but over time, we optimized for the documentary genres and subject matter that provided the most quality leads.
• Off-Page SEO – We worked to build backlinks and media awareness for the emerging streaming service in a space crowded by its sizeable competitors. We collaborated with other teams to initiate and maintain relationships with multiple podcast hosts and YouTube influencers.
• Targeted Influencer Marketing- Given that MagellanTV’s service was media, it made sense to explore Podcasts and YouTube as potential marketing channels. We created an influencer referral strategy, starting with Podcast advertising on programs that resonated with documentary film watchers. We then shifted into YouTube sponsorships to pursue more subscribers, which proved to be much more successful due to the visual nature of the medium.

Our collaborative approach to MagellanTV’s digital marketing efforts and targeted influencer strategy contributed to a 42% MoM growth in organic users over the course of a year. CRO efforts across all channels led to increased subscriptions, ultimately boosting the conversion rate nearly 5x for this emerging streaming brand.

YouTube sponsorships skyrocketed streaming service subscriptions for MagellanTV. During our six-month advertising campaign on the platform, YouTube referrals accounted for 22% of the total site traffic and drove 48% of all subscription sign-ups. To increase ROI we negotiated all contracts, saving more than $150,000 in ad spend and concurrently significantly reducing CPA over the course of the campaign.

Paid search optimization also delivered great results over the same time period. MagellanTV saw an 85% decrease in CPA over six months, with the average CPA for YouTube referrals 48% less than all other paid channels during that time frame. This rapid increase in sign-ups established YouTube as a cost-effective advertising channel for the brand.