Connected TV (CTV) marketing might be one of the more recent marketing disciplines, but it's already indispensable to advertisers and business owners. As the world moves away from linear TV towards streaming and CTV, if marketers want to be seen and heard, they have no choice but to include CTV marketing in their toolkit.
But CTV proficiency is more than understanding CTV video specs, having a cool campaign concept, and knowing your target market. To truly succeed in the often tricky world of CTV marketing, you need to establish specific goals and understand how to measure them.
What do you want to achieve with your CTV marketing campaign? How do you plan to measure the success of the campaign? And importantly, how can you use the measurement metrics to improve and become more effective? These are the essential bigger-picture questions you need to answer as a CTV marketer and advertiser.
Establishing CTV Campaign Goals
As with most marketing campaigns, you need to start with your audience. Your value proposal, advertising message, audience, and every other aspect of your campaign depend on who you're trying to reach.Step 1 - Understand The Audience
Most marketers will already have an idea of their target audience and would have taken things a step further by creating avatars. Avatars, also known as buyer personas, are customer profiles that marketers use to understand their target audience better.The key here is to go into as much detail as possible. Based on your market research, you can use the information to bring this target audience to life. Besides the usual demographic metrics like age/sex/race/religion/location/culture, you should also include:
- Hobbies
- Buying patterns
- Favorite products and services
- Budget
- Politics
- Anything else you feel is relevant to your specific service or product
For each campaign, product or service you have, you should consider the target audience before setting your goals. Since the audience and the message will most likely be different each time, the plans will also change accordingly.
Step 2 - Establish a Budget
There's no point in even thinking about your goals until you've set your budget. Some plans will be within your reach, and some won't. Budget plays a huge role in understanding what is reasonable and possible and what isn't.It is essential to mention that you shouldn't be under budget for something as crucial as CTV advertising. Keep in mind that this is the number one growing performance marketing platform in all advertising areas, and you can position your brand in a highly effective way. It is in the best interest of your business to produce high-quality ads and place them in the most effective and relevant places to reach your audience.
Step 3 - Establish Marketing Objectives
Understanding your audience and your budget are both critical initial steps. The next step is to establish what your marketing objectives are. Are you trying to create brand awareness? Are you marketing a specific product or service? Are you trying to drive traffic to a particular landing or social media page? Perhaps it's all of the above.Step 4 - Set SMART Goals
It might be an oldie, but it's still relevant. Keeping your audience and budget in mind, you need to set your goals. Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-specific. Goals should also be adjusted for each campaign and reassessed based on the measurement of your campaigns.Speaking of which, measurement is a vital element of CTV advertising, too. Let's take a brief look at why.
Measuring CTV Marketing Campaigns
The first and most crucial aspect of measuring CTV marketing is that you should always use a solution provider for the best possible results. You may be able to gather the many different metrics yourself, but the interpretation of the metrics is what counts. Understanding what they mean to your brand and how to use them to alter and finetune your marketing message is essential, and that's best left to the professionals.Let's look at three ways to ensure the best measurability from your CTV marketing campaigns.
1 - Choose a credible and established measurement provider
The first prize would be using a CTV advertising solution for all your advertising needs, including placement, tracking and measurement. It is worth it, especially when it comes to CTV advertising which requires experience and nuance.2 - Request Relevant Data
Whether you're using a CTV advertising solution provider or dealing with the publishers or platforms directly, you'll need access to the essential information.CTV Exposure Data includes show-level data and data collected in VAST micros.
- Genre Data - This helps you determine how well your content matches specific streaming content genres.
- Conversion data - Conversion data includes information on the people and groups interested in your content. This data is precious to finetune your target market, reevaluate your ad messaging, and retargeting purposes.
3 - Analyze and interpret the data
This is where it gets a little tricky for business owners and advertisers who aren't 100% familiar with CTV marketing. CTV advertising measurement solutions will use tools like identity graphs to match exposure to conversion, which is essential.CTV marketing success is achievable if you take the proper steps to establish your goals and measure the results. Also, remember to choose a CTV marketing solutions provider for the best possible advice and assistance!
