We’re living in the age of visual content marketing, and whether we realize it or not, people crave visuals.
Just a few years ago, one could get away with text-only social media posts and content marketing tactics; however, due to the inundation of digital content and the rising adoption of mobile internet, attention spans are shorter than ever, which makes text-only content quite off-putting. Although text-based content is an integral part of marketing, visual content plays a pivotal role in strategizing content marketing campaigns. As high-quality, attractive images are often challenging and time-consuming to create, several online resources have an endless number of high-quality photos available for download.
The stock image market is essentially a business of licensing pre-produced visual content for specific uses. The value chain of this industry comprises of image creators, including photographers and graphic designers, image users, and
intermediate suppliers who offer the commercial trade of usage rights in return for royalty payments. This market is predominantly composed of three types of suppliers – agencies that trade images on behalf of the photographers, archives with collections of primary image sources, and photographer alliances or corporations that trade their images. Stock photography can prove to be a great revenue-generating sideline for photographers if they can partner with a few of the stock and microstock images sites as these images can be sold to people in an instant.
The Business Challenge
With an objective to develop future business strategies, the client – a leading stock photography, footage, music, and
editing tools provider – approached Infiniti to engage in a market opportunity and competitive assessment of the global stock images market to assess the current and future market landscape and competitive dynamics across the target regions. The insights offered through this competitive assessment would help the client gain a better perspective of the needs of stock image customers, their buying behavior, and assist in benchmarking against what the competitors are currently offering.
The primary scope of this competitive assessment also included offering actionable insights to the client on the pricing landscape and promotion strategies of the top three competitors in each target country, covering licensing models, payment structure, billing cycles, and promotional activities.
Additionally, Infiniti’s market opportunity and competitive assessment team followed recent developments and innovations in the market through magazines and trade journals and reached out to leading competitors, relevant stakeholders, and channel partners to gather their views on the market. By identifying the leading competitors within the stock photography, music, and video market, our market opportunity and competitive assessment team provided valuable information on the following:
- Market share
- List of products offered
- Pricing for subscriptions
- Image sizes offered (covering image terms such as roll over, download time limits, and refunds)
- Monthly billing cycles
- License types
- Currencies they accept payment in
- Payment methods
- Major promotion and packaging tactics offered on their website
Why Infiniti Research is the preferred partner for more than 55 Fortune 500 Companies
Solution Offered and Business Impact
To meet the specific category requirements of the client, our research specialists, who have considerable expertise in conducting market opportunity and competitive assessments specific to the stock photography, visual content,
digital media, and allied industry segments, followed a blend of multiple research methodologies. The approach involved drawing inferences from our existing market experience and knowledge base from previous research engagements. Also, Infiniti’s competitive assessment experts referred to a broad range of information sources like paid industry databases, competitors’ websites, brochures, web media platforms, news aggregators, industry forums and company presentations to develop competitive hypotheses, obtain data on the pricing structure of competitors, and identify stakeholders conducting primary research.
In a short time span of five weeks, the global visual content company was able to garner actionable insights into the market and competitive landscape for stock images across the target regions. The information obtained through this competitive assessment also helped the client gain a better understanding of the pricing structure and strategies of its major competitors in specified countries to develop effective business strategies.
What do the clients appreciate about our approach?
In a relatively short span of time, just five weeks, the client derived several benefits from our market opportunity and competitive assessment engagement. The competitive assessment solutions offered by Infiniti helped the client augment their revenue potential by offering insights into the pricing landscape and promotion strategies of the competitors for developing future growth strategies.
Here are some of the key points appreciated by our clients
- Dedicated Competitive Assessment Portal. A centralized platform for the collection, storing, processing, reporting, and dissemination of information with the specific purpose of assisting the decision-making process and developing actionable insights. This portal includes comprehensive information on quantitative and qualitative aspects on target markets, competitors and end-users.
- Collaborative learning. We leveraged the experience of our healthcare team and our technical capabilities to enable report-sharing and other collaborative features appreciated by client teams.
- Database Access. Access to a patient database containing information about 60+ medical diseases and conditions, such as patients undergoing treatment, untreated patients, and patients with chronic conditions.
- Interactive Dashboard. Using our portal based solution for healthcare professionals, we took a design-first approach to problem-solving and helped break through previously held assertions.
- Value for Money. Infiniti’s dedicated client management team customizes reports to suit business requirements and offers the best insights for every dollar spent.
