The What, Who and Where of your Online Video Business

You’ve brainstormed ideas, validated them, and decided on the idea to start producing videos you can monetize. But before you do that, you need to clearly outline what you’ve decided to sell, to whom, and where. In other words, you need to figure out your VOD’s product-market fit.

Completing this lesson will help you organize your thoughts and vision so you can effectively design, construct, brand, price and market your online video business.

The What

Clearly state the value your VOD will offer. First, come up with a specific outcome that your customer will get out of your videos:

1. Will your videos teach or inspire? Or both?
2. If it’s instructional, what problem(s) will your videos help your ideal customer solve?
3. If it’s inspirational, what will your videos inspire your customers to do?

From these questions, you should be able to clearly state the following:

My VOD will offer videos that {insert action} people to {insert VOD’s topic}.

Example:

My VOD will offer videos that teach people to carve potatoes into art.

Or

My VOD will offer videos that inspire people to explore their own cities like tourists.

Great! Now before you move on to the Who, just think of one more thing:

What special added-value will differentiate your VOD from your competition?

As part of the validation process (lesson 3), you should have a good idea of what’s out there and how you can differentiate yourself from them. Once you answer that question, you have a full picture of the What.

The Who?

Who is your main target? Your best approach to answering this is to create a fictional representation of the ideal customer—in your head, or better yet, on paper. This is called a persona.

Create one. Then, assuming your videos appeal to different types of buyers, create additional personas (but keep it reasonable). Start with basic demographics such as:

• Gender
• Age
• Profession
• Education
• Income
• Interests
• And other easily definable fact-based qualities

That’s easy stuff. Don’t stop there. Create a persona that gets into the head and heart of your buyer. A persona that can answer questions like the following will give you a very clear vision of the way you create, structure and market your online video business:

• What’s the person’s day like?
• What are they trying to achieve?
• What challenges and obstacles are they facing in relation to their interests and lifestyle? (think beyond the specific topic you have chosen to teach)
• Why would they object to buying your product?
• What questions might they have?
• What media do they prefer?
• Does your ideal customer currently get a similar value elsewhere? (think beyond videos: blogs, social media accounts, books, TV shows, etc.)
• What is one or two things your ideal customers have in common, no matter how different they are in other aspects of their lives?

Often marketers go as far as naming their target personas and selecting a photo to better identify with him or her. Meet Do-It-Yourselfer Dan. Say hello to Puppy-Owner Pam. Have fun with it!

The Where?

Where you decide to host your VOD will be a key player in its online success and, in turn, how much money you generate from it. You need to select a video distribution platform that will meet all of your needs in terms of content protection and security, e-commerce options, branding, integration, and distribution.

There are two routes you can take with this:

1. Use a video on demand platform service:

Here at Uscreen we help people build and grow online video businesses. Our services make it simple to create a Netflix style website from scratch. We provide all of the tools you need to upload your videos, create your website, protect your content and sell your videos online.

All of the examples of SVOD websites you’ve seen or will see throughout Video Business School have been created using Uscreen. And, we’re so proud so many people choose us to help them create those businesses.

It’s kinda what we do best.

But because we didn’t build Video Business School to sell you our platform, we’re now going to tell you how to do this without Uscreen…

2. Do-it-yourself:

You can piece together your own online video website service from scratch. We put together an entire article showing you how to create your own SVOD platform from scratch, too.

Because no matter how you want to run your business, Uscreen is here to help. Happy building!