As the CTV landscape continues on its path of rapid growth since the pandemic, with giants like Netflix launching ad tiers, players like Walmart entering the space through M&A and streamers doubling down on global expansion, new challenges and opportunities are emerging.
If you’re looking to experiment and thrive in the CTV space, here are three tactics for optimizing success:
Crafting the Most Effective Targeting Strategy
In order to get consumers to look up from their phones during a commercial break while they’re watching the latest episode of The Traitors or the three-hour-long Oppenheimer, your ad needs to truly speak to them.
Marketers today have very little time to capture a consumer’s attention, which exasperates the need to reach that right customer with a hyper-relevant message in their precise moment of need. Unlike linear advertising, CTV empowers marketers to take this personalization a step further and more effectively reach audiences to drive purchases and strengthen customer loyalty.
Advertisement
To do this, you need to start with thoroughly understanding your customer and their behaviors. Enter: Data-Driven Targeting.
By understanding where, how and when your target customers are engaging with content across streaming platforms, combined with their purchase behaviors and motivations — their “why” — you can ensure you maximize your media buys and drive results.
Leveraging a combination of insights like intent, location and purchase data, you’re able to understand customers’ true real-world motivations and shopping habits, powering predictive ad experiences that can connect your target audience with the right message when it’s most relevant — right before their next shopping trip.
You can also create relevant, local approaches to campaigns, which translate better with key audiences. Whether it’s updating the ad experience based on the spoken language of a particular market, dynamically updating location and pricing details or only serving ads based on the weather or in-stock products at consumers’ local retailers, there are countless ways to hyperpersonalize experiences based on more effective targeting tactics that never could’ve been imagined on linear.
Deeper levels of insights will not only promote better success on Peacock or Hulu; they also enable you to amplify your strategies with a customer-first omnichannel approach, unlocking endless inspiration for creative ad experiences.
Enhancing Personalization to Strengthen Customer Relationships
Make each impression more meaningful with personalization. Modern consumers expect personalized ads that best address their needs. In fact, recent studies show that most consumers across demographics rely on personalized ads to simplify future shopping trips and wish lists.
Think big with your ideas. Consider interactive elements like “pick your own adventure” experiences to capture viewers’ attention and ensure they see the most relevant products. Take that a step further by incorporating engaging experiences like gamification or QR codes to quickly incite action.
As one example, if you’re a grocery chain trying to promote your latest line-up of healthy private label products, craft a “choose your own adventure” experience featuring two different simple weeknight recipes. A simple 20-second time-lapse of the simple recipe paired with a QR code can inspire and enable viewers to quickly add the items to their shopping cart while they’re streaming their favorite Bravo show.
Alternatively, outerwear brands can take a regional approach and update ad experiences so each product featured better aligns with the viewers’ real-time weather conditions. People in Florida or Texas might be looking for lighter-weight windbreakers, while shoppers in New York and Chicago want your warmest winter coats. For coffee chains launching new seasonal drinks, apply that same strategy and adapt ads to showcase hot versus iced flavors based on region and real-time weather changes to efficiently pique consumer interest.
Not only do these targeted creative approaches strengthen customer relationships, they also ensure you’re optimizing your ad spend.
Doubling Down on Measurement and Optimization
As marketers, measurement has always been essential when it comes to proving our value. However, when experimenting with rapidly growing and evolving channels like CTV, it’s even more critical to uplevel your measurement program and maintain a holistic view of how each campaign impacts your key KPIs and the bottom line.
So how can you take your current measurement program a step further to optimize results? It’s simple — invest in real-time measurement and always-on attribution to constantly keep a pulse on performance and capitalize on in-flight optimization, minimizing the risk of experimentation.
If you’ve launched two dynamic CTV ads on Peacock and Hulu and find one is significantly outperforming the other in a market like New York or Los Angeles, you can quickly adjust your frequency and shift your spend in real time as the campaign is inflight, to ensure you’re doubling down on the markets that are most receptive to your messaging and product. Don’t wait until post-campaign analysis to evaluate your success. In-flight optimization has proven to eliminate up to 94% of media waste.
CTV is an incredible medium for not only driving awareness but also enhancing your ads to drive engagement, incrementality and stronger customer relationships. You just need to ensure you lean on your unique insights to craft a customer-first approach, by combining effective targeting, personalized brand experiences and real-time measurement.
If you do that, even in a fragmented and growing landscape, you’ll quickly begin shattering goals and seeing rapid improvement in your results.
Daniel Perez is Chief Marketing Officer at InMarket. He has over 18 years of experience in digital marketing, with a focus on SaaS-based enterprise solutions. Prior to joining InMarket, Perez spent time sharpening his skills within product marketing, leading the brand-direct product marketing efforts at Celtra and launching the product marketing team at Cuebiq, both fast-growing MarTech organizations. Previous to Cuebiq, Perez served as Director of Marketing and Business Strategy at Donnelley Financial Solutions. He holds an MBA from the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University in New York City and a bachelor’s degree in business and psychology from Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. Perez is based in New York City and is passionate about food and travel.
