Selection of a Marketing Strategy for an Online Video Platform Using a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 MSc., Department of Management, Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran.

2 Associate Prof., Department of Management, Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran.

3 Assistant Prof., Department of New Venture Creation Department, Faculty of Entrepreneurship, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

10.22059/mmr.2025.393614.1167

Abstract

Objective
Marketing strategy determines how an organization will achieve its marketing objectives. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the most appropriate marketing strategy for each business. Online video platforms are no exception. In an age where technology has changed and evolved, online marketing has become essential for businesses in attracting customers. The success of online video platforms is having a large audience. Therefore, these platforms in their industry strive to differentiate themselves from their competitors by adopting effective marketing strategies to attract more viewers. Choosing the wrong marketing strategy leads to the loss of the audience and ultimately the failure of these types of platforms. Based on this, in this research, a model has been tried to choose the most appropriate marketing strategy for online video platforms. The proposed structure is easy to understand and can be used by industry experts of video platforms or other platforms to choose the most suitable marketing strategy. This research, which was conducted for the Amariar video platform, tries to help attract and retain more audiences for this platform and other online video platforms by choosing the most appropriate marketing strategy.
This study aims to identify the most suitable marketing strategy for online video platforms in the realm of audience acquisition, utilizing a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model.
Research Methodology
The research is applied in nature and conducted through a descriptive-survey method. The statistical population of the research includes the experts of Amariar video platform, and finally 10 people were selected through the purposive sampling method. In this research, a questionnaire tool was used to collect data, and its validity was confirmed by experts. Also, to measure the reliability of the questionnaire, the inconsistency coefficient was calculated, and because the inconsistency coefficient was lower than 0.1, it can be said that it has the necessary reliability. Initially, a library-based approach was used to identify online marketing strategies and evaluation criteria, That is, by referring to reputable articles and books related to the research on online marketing strategies and evaluations, the criteria for evaluation can be identified. Subsequently, the Best-Worst Method (BWM) and TOPSIS techniques were employed to determine the importance of the criteria and rank the online marketing strategies.
Findings
After extensive studies of previous literature, online marketing strategies identified are content marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, personalization based on data, interactive marketing and email marketing. Also, the criteria identified are audience retention, audience attraction, technology infrastructure needs, alignment with the organization's strategy, alignment with the organization's culture, competency of human resources, sales revenue, cost, and return on investment. The results of using the BWM method showed that audience retention with a weight of 0.187 was the most important criterion and audience access with a weight of 0.045 was recognized as the least important criterion for evaluating online marketing strategies.  Also, other criteria were ranked according to audience attraction, alignment with the organization's strategy, competence of human resources, rate of return on investment, the amount of technology infrastructure needed, amount of sales revenue, alignment with the organization's culture, and the amount of cost. Also, the results of applying the TOPSIS method also showed that the content marketing strategy with the highest CL, which is the closest option to the ideal answer, is the most suitable online marketing strategy for Amariar video platform and email marketing with the lowest CL value, which is the most distant from the ideal answer, is the most inappropriate. Other marketing strategies were ranked in the order of data-based personalization, search engine marketing, social media marketing, interactive marketing, and email marketing.
Discussion & Conclusion
Considering that most of the previous studies emphasized on maintaining the audience of the video platform, therefore, the results of this research confirm the fact that maintaining the audience is the most important criterion for evaluating marketing strategies. Also, the results of the survey of previous studies showed that the content for the audience is the most important principle for choosing a video platform, as the results of the present study showed that through content marketing, it is possible to attract and retain many audiences.
Online video platforms can enhance their audience acquisition efforts by utilizing the decision-making model presented in this research—which includes defined criteria, weights, and evaluation methods—to select and implement the most appropriate online marketing strategy.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

 
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Media Management Review
Volume 4, Issue 3
2025
Pages 357-385

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