You’ve made headway with your sports media business. Your content is thriving, and your audience is growing. You’ve established a level of brand loyalty. Now, it’s time to seal the deal and capitalize on that progress with the introduction of paid products.
Paid products are far from the only way to make money in the sports media industry. Ad and sponsorship revenues make up a particularly large portion of the pie chart, but membership programs and paid products can help you further distance yourself from the competition – if your value offering passes the test.
What are some things you should consider when creating membership programs, subscriptions, and other paid products underneath your brand umbrella? Here, we go over some of the keys.
5 Key Factors for Building Successful Membership Programs and Paid Products
1) Incentive is Essential
Before anything else, understand that incentive is essential when creating a paid product. Incentive is a constant in the sports media industry. There has to be some level of incentive for a reader or viewer to consume a piece of content. For unpaid content, however, the only transaction is time. For paid products, you have to incentivize the consumer to spend money. That’s a large additional hurdle.
Start by breaking down the incentivization process. What is it? Ultimately, when you incentivize a reader or viewer, you’re motivating them to do something based off of a value offering that you provide. Once you isolate the value offering as the root of incentivization, you can work to build out and market that value offering effectively.
2) Memberships and Subscriptions are Different
Another step of the value offering phase is deciding what kind of paid offering you’d like to develop. One of the most distinct dichotomies among paid products in the sports media realm is memberships vs. subscriptions.
Memberships and subscriptions have their similarities, but they’re also very different in a couple specific ways. A subscription is an offering for exclusive content over a select period of time. A membership may also offer some form of exclusivity, but it’s more centered on allowing the user to join a community.
With these differences in mind, you can dissect your proposed paid product offering and determine whether or not it has more membership or subscription characteristics. From there, you can fully develop your value proposition.
3) Incentivization Can Be Multi-Layered
Whether you choose a membership or subscription structure, it’s important to remember that the incentivization process doesn’t necessarily have to stop at the point of entry. There is a great deal of incentivization that goes into bringing forth a purchase, but you can also embolden the offering past that firewall, by rewarding users for additional loyalty.
This multi-layered incentivization could come in many forms. It could be a bonus system for an on-site tool or a streaming subscription, through which a user earns a place in promotions for special gifts. It could be a discounted rate earned through an early payment. The possibilities are a great many – so be creative with the ways you can enrich the value offering at various stages.
4) Consumers Are Your Best Resource for Value
You are the one providing the product, and the consumers are the ones using the product. Even so, don’t make the mistake of making it a one-way-only street. Your consumers are your best resource for determining whether or not your value proposition is being delivered on. They’re the only ones who can tell you if your product is worth it. Keep their feedback loop open.
By keeping a feedback loop open with consumers, you not only establish goodwill by proving yourself open to constructive criticism, but you can also continually improve your product, so that long-term loyalty gains prove more sustainable.
5) Over-Reliance on Paid Content is Unstable
Paid products represent an incredible opportunity for those who have the bandwidth and the brand loyalty to put them into motion. But even if you have the capability to add paid products into the equation, don’t forge an over-reliance on paid products for growth.
Because paid products require an extra layer of incentivization, your pool for paid product consumers will be smaller. Not only that, but you’ll often draw paid product consumers from your pre-existing base of loyal free-content users. If you wall off free users, you shut off a large input valve for future customers.
Because of this, you should always have a strong foundation of free content for your audience. This eases early incentivization, puts less pressure on users to make pressing commitments, and allows you to build loyalty organically, as your most loyal users pay it forward.