What if I were to tell you that there's a way for B2B advertisers to reach their target audiences in a way that has not always been possible – on TV?
With the advent of Connected TV (CTV), B2B brands now have the ability to engage prospective buyers outside of the office and in the comfort of their own living rooms.
Not only that, but you can retarget customers and prospects that have already visited your website the next time they plop down on the couch to watch their favorite TV show, at a time when they’re already paying attention.
That’s right. The time for B2B marketers to integrate CTV into their media plans is NOW.
What is a connected TV?
A connected TV is any television that is either a Smart TV or is attached to a device capable of streaming video. Devices such as Apple TV, Roku, and Chromecast are the most popular. Connected TVs can access programs across a litany of apps such as Netflix, Hulu, SlingTV, and Twitch, among many others.
With so many streaming services available, there is a massive shift happening. People are getting rid of traditional cable and watching almost everything on demand. Goodbye Comcast, Optimum, and DirectTV — hello over-the-top (OTT) services.
While it’s true that many of these subscription services, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, make users pay a subscription fee and therefore don’t have any ads, many other apps rely on ad support for revenue (for example: Hulu). And since they are not beholden to traditional TV networks, they have opened their ad inventory to programmatic and other digital buying platforms in order to secure the advertisements.
This opens up the possibility for B2B brands and their agency partners to access that inventory and place video ads just as they would any other online digital paid media. And it is much more targeted, since you are buying a specific audience and not a time slot on a network where anyone could be watching.
What are the benefits of CTV for B2B brands?
This emerging media channel is still wide open, as we are in the early days of its apparent rise.
There’s a lot to be excited about here. B2B advertisers are not normally seen on TV, so when niche B2B audiences see ads from players within their own industries, there is a certain wow factor involved. It’s an amazing way to make a big impression and encourage engagement.
These high-impact TV spots drive awareness and position you as a savvy B2B brand, all while guaranteeing meaningful impressions with non-skippable ad formats. The perception of your company will go up, too, as this feels just like seeing a household brand name advertise on traditional TV.
This new tactic can be used to drive brand awareness, and you can layer your CTV buy with your other digital media to surround your prospects and customers with your brand. So when a prospect is in the market for your kind of product or service, or hits your website, they can be targeted across a wide range of touch points — including their TV.
Now you can become a big player within your industry: the B2B brand that’s everywhere.
The return for early adopters of CTV can be huge, but rest assured that other B2B brands will begin to dabble in this space as time goes on, so now is the time to act.
How do you target CTV ads?
We get it, you don’t have a huge budget like B2C brands do, and you are certainly going to be held accountable for showing a return on this kind of investment.
For B2B marketers and advertisers who must report on performance and ROI, placing traditional TV ads was never a prudent move in the past. It’s just too much budget with too much waste, and very little you can do to measure the results.
Now with CTV, you can easily target, monitor, optimize, and track the dollars you spend. Hyper-targeted CTV placements allow you to know exactly who is watching your ads.
Here are some of the ways you can target via CTV:
- Using third-party data to hit specific viewers based on their job titles, industry, interests, and more.
- Using your own first-party data, allowing you to build detailed targeting profiles that leverage your CRM data to target customers and prospects that have already engaged with your brand.
- Prospect targeting, which allows you to input demographic, behavioral, firmographic, and other third-party segments, broadening your reach while gaining new and extremely relevant exposure.
- Search- and intent-based targeting, which leverages what people are searching for online, as well as the content they are consuming, to make sure they are relevant to your brand.
Ultimately, this means your ads will show up only when your prospects are watching and when they are primed to buy, virtually eliminating waste and maximizing your budget’s potential.
How do you track CTV advertising?
When it comes to B2B marketing and advertising, you must have tight performance tracking, and with CTV, you can achieve that.
You can track everything from impressions and completion rates to the explicit actions viewers take after seeing your ad. Tracking things like cost per acquisition (CPA) and site visit rates is now achievable from TV to digital.
What’s even better is that CTV can be fully integrated with Google Analytics through certain platforms, so you can track this right along with all the other digital campaigns you have running.
For the first time ever, B2B marketers can look at TV as a viable channel to integrate in their media mix and feel confident that they will be able to show a positive effect on the bottom line.
Other Benefits of Leveraging B2B CTV
Knowledge is Power
Knowing who your audience is when buying CTV placements makes it possible to also build multi-channel campaigns that target them wherever they are in the digital realm, thus increasing exposure and consistency and boosting impact and conversions.
Being able to track this performance across channels also provides you a clearer picture of your customer’s typical path to purchase, which allows you to show attribution results to your spend more clearly, as well as tweak and optimize your programs over time.
A More Familiar Format
With YouTube ads, as well as other programmatic video ad placements online, brands are constantly interrupting short-form videos that viewers want to watch quickly and move on.
With CTV, on the other hand, video ads are placed at the start of premium long-form TV programming and feel much less intrusive since this is an advertising format and structure that we are all familiar with.
Increase the Relevance
I may have put this last, but it is certainly not least. When advertising of any kind aligns specifically with the interests of the viewers, it is viewed more favorably.
In the context of B2B and CTV, we are talking about targeting viewers with solutions that directly align with their livelihood. These ads will be far more well-received due to their relevance, in turn becoming more exciting and less likely to be viewed as a distraction or interruption.
This all adds up to an exciting opportunity!
B2B marketers now have a powerful new tool in their integrated marketing toolbox, giving them the ability to effectively use TV as a means to get in front of customers and prospects.
The CTV arena will surely evolve, and how marketers in various industries use it to maximize impact will vary. But now is the time to test the waters and reap the benefits — before the competition jumps in the pool.
If you’re a B2B marketer that wants to learn more about CTV and other advertising strategies, we’d love to chat and see if it’s a good fit for you. Contact us today!