Making money in the sports media industry can be difficult. Ad revenue is a large part of the profit equation for both composite brands and solo content creators, but a new segment of growth is unlocked when you’re able to secure premium users, or paid subscribers.
There are many avenues through which a standard user becomes a paid subscriber. On social media channels TikTok and X, or video intermediaries such as YouTube, content creators can construct tiers wherein added offerings are given to those who contribute.
Still, the paths to paid subscriptions aren’t limited to social channels alone. Paid subscriptions are common for written content feeds, to give readers exclusive high-value content, and interactive online tools are valuable assets as well.
Whatever your brand mission is, odds are you have a desire to dip into the premium user base, and expand your avenues of revenue generation. Here are the landmarks on the consumer journey toward becoming a premium user that you should know.
6 Critical Checkpoints When Converting Paid Users
1) The Consumer Gains Awareness
The first two checkpoints of the consumer’s journey are intricately linked, but the consumer can’t have interest in your specific content before they have awareness of it. Thus, the consumer gaining awareness of your brand is the very first landmark to know.
As you keep creating content and your brand grows, more eyes will naturally come into contact with your work. Even so, passive and active marketing play a crucial role in this stage.
You can engage in active marketing with graphics and social promotions, while the substance of your content and your social interactions also passively market your merit as a voice in the sports media industry.
2) The Consumer’s Interest is Piqued
If you’ve ever gone fishing, this is when you get that first nibble. This is when the consumer progresses beyond simple brand awareness, and expresses an active interest in the content produce.
This initial interest often takes form in simple interactions, like social post clicks or single page views — but that pure interaction alone shows a degree of interest. That new user actively spent time and energy to view your content. In that short window, you have their attention. The next landmark explains how you keep it.
3) The Consumer Recognizes a Value Function
Once you have the consumer’s interest, the next task is to keep it for the long haul. So how do you convert interested one-time users into regular consumers? You have to incentivize them to stay. To do that, they need to recognize a value function within your work.
More simply put, the consumer has to find value in your work, in some shape or form. This value is recognized when the content fills a need or want of the consumer. Your ideal value function will change depending on your target audience.
Some users want informative, in-depth analytical content. Some users want humor and engaging conversation regarding a league’s top storylines. Some users want the kind of community that keeps they themselves involved. Some want accessible analysis on social media.
You’ll know whose value proposition you’re trying to cater to through your brand mission. Once interested users in your target audience recognize that your value function matches their desires, they might end up becoming regulars on your page.
4) Creator Builds on Value Functions With Consistency
We’ve seen the consumer progress from an aware party, to an interested party, and now to a semi-regular user. The leap from a semi-regular to a paid consumer is not a short one, and this is the landmark that fills the gap.
Even once you’ve established a regular rapport with a consumer, you need to not only deliver on your value function consistently, with consistent new content offerings, but you’ll also have to build on it to work toward become a premium source of content.
How do you build on value functions? It’s simple: Find new ways to give consumers value in your content. Maybe you’re informative and analytical, but now you’ve upped your game with eye-catching graphics. Maybe your informational writing is what draws people, and now you’ve improved your networking to source quotes from other credible voices.
Within your brand vision, you should have an idea of what your target audience finds value in. Continually exhaust those avenues, and you’ll strengthen your foothold with your growing base.
This is the phase where regular readers become newsletter subscribers and email list participants, expressing an extra level of commitment to your content because of your layered value offering.
5) Creator Builds Past the Premium Threshold
Your regular reader has become a loyal consumer of your content, and has expressed an extra level of commitment. It takes work and a long-term establishment of value to bring a consumer to this point, but once they’re at this level of loyalty, you can present them with paid content offerings.
You’ve built up your value functions so that every one of your consumer’s needs is met, and your consumer has responded by becoming a loyal audience member. Now you can guide them past the paid threshold by offering additional value — exclusive written content, interaction opportunities, new tools to use, and more.
6) Loyal Users Are Retained, While Others Come Up the Pipeline
Getting past the premium threshold is the last landmark in the consumer’s individual process, but your process of retaining old and gaining new premium consumers still carries on. Even after earning premium users, you have to keep your value offering up-to-date — both to keep them around and to siphon more from your regular user base.
It’s a cycle that never truly ends, and at any point, six different users may be at six different points in the process. There’s no skirting around this fact: You have to incentivize in order to earn premium users — but the secret to incentive is in the value proposition.
Playbook
- Gain consumer awareness
- Pique consumer interest
- Establish a value function
- Build on value functions with consistency
- Build past premium threshold
- Retain users and maintain the cycle
