In the first part of our segment on marketing, I talked about how the crowded streaming market, rising viewer churn, and “the elusive viewer” make it difficult for streamers and publishers to grow their audiences, maximize ROAS, and expand their monetization. Before I share CTV marketing best practices in this blog, you should feel free to “press pause” here and go back to Part 1 if you haven’t had the chance to check it out!

Now that you’re back, it’s time to walk through some of the most important steps you need to take for a successful marketing campaign. These steps include defining your campaign goals, designing and launching your creative, and measuring your campaign effectiveness. We’ll end this blog on Wurl’s revolutionary solution that streamers and publishers can leverage for their CTV marketing: ContentDiscovery. 

Define your campaign goals

The streamers and publishers who have been following our blog series already know how to define their audience and distribute their content. They also know the decision process to monetize their content. The next big step for streamers and publishers is marketing their content. 

Marketing is crucial for streamers and publishers in two ways: 

Here are some goals that streamers and publishers might set for their CTV marketing campaigns:

• Brand Awareness generates increased consumer recognition – and preference – for your brand. Building brand awareness usually focuses on producing memorable, engaging messages that put your name, product, people, and mission front and center for your target audience. 
• Improving Engagement usually works hand-in-hand with brand awareness. When ads attract the attention of your target audience, they’re more likely to interact with the content and share it on social media or via word-of-mouth, allowing you to reach more people with your message. 
• Boosting Reach can be boiled down to getting your brand in front of more eyeballs, but it more often entails getting your brand in front of a specific set of eyeballs. This can mean expanding the demographics of your target audience or exploring new audience segments.  
• Driving Conversions is motivating your target audience to take a certain action – such as following your brand on social media, downloading content, signing up for an install, or purchasing a subscription. 
• Increasing ROAS is a key goal for most performance marketing campaigns because it means your dollars are being spent effectively. 

Two important factors to consider when you set these goals:

1. You can use different key performance indicators (KPIs) to track all of these goals. (We’ll cover KPIs when we touch on campaign measurement below.)
2. Goals differ depending on whether you’re an SVOD, AVOD, or FAST channel. SVODs need to prioritize acquiring new subscribers at the lowest possible cost over Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), while AVOD and FAST channels need to focus on Hours of Viewing (HOV) and ROAS. 

Design and launch your creative

You’ve established your CTV marketing campaign goals and set a budget. However, it’s simply not possible to achieve any of your campaign goals if you don’t have the right creative. Let’s dig into some of the different formats your CTV marketing can take and lay out best practices for designing your creative.

Experiment with formats 

CTV marketing is all about trial and error. The fluidity of the process allows for dynamic messaging and creative approaches. Start with multiple ads in different formats so you can find the ad types that win you the most attention and achieve your goals most effectively. In addition to trying different formats, you can also vary design, messaging, and duration. 

Some formats to consider: 

• In-Stream Video Ads are played alongside the content a viewer is watching. They can play before the content (pre-roll), during pauses (mid-roll), and at the end of the content (post-roll). 
• Interactive Ads enable viewers to interact with the creative they’re watching through features like clickable links, QR codes, and quizzes to get more information about the streamer or publisher. 
• Dynamic Overlay Ads automatically adjust their messaging elements based on behavioral data. These ads are particularly helpful for retargeting viewers who’ve already come across one version of an ad. 
• Cross-device Ads can boost your reach. For example, we almost always run a mobile banner component for every ContentDiscovery campaign. It casts a wider net, allowing more potential viewers to find your content.

Best practices for CTV marketing creative

• Identify your brand heavily
  Don’t assume your viewers will remember the channel number or your app name just because it flashes across the screen briefly. Remember, as engaging as your ad is, they might be multitasking! Make sure you keep your channel name, number, and platform where you can watch it on the screen for the duration of the spot.
• Leverage the power of the voice
  Similar to the first point, you want to grab the potential viewer’s attention, which could be on a million different things. You’d be surprised by how much a voiceover saying the channel name, number, and streaming platform will jog someone’s memory later — or where and how to download your app. Let the viewer see it and hear it!
• Show off!
  Your mom told you not to do it… but we’re giving you full license. Well, only for the 15-30 seconds during your CTV ad. In the few seconds you have, you need to showcase your best content. Don’t hold back. Use recognizable shows, popular actors — even famous taglines — to draw the viewer in. Think “Here’s looking at you, kid!” That would make you stop texting and look at the TV, right? Draw the viewer in and keep them wanting more.
• Maintain brand consistency
  Your CTV creative needs to use a consistent color palette, font, and style with your other marketing materials. The more consistent your branding, the more brand connection your viewers will have.
• Make clear calls to action
  Tell your audiences what you want them to do in a straightforward way. For example, tell the customer to “tune in to channel 1234” on a particular streaming platform. Or, put the logo for the app store where they can download the application itself.

Once your creative checks these boxes, your campaign is ready to launch! But now, you’ll need to begin measuring your campaign’s performance so you can make informed adjustments on the fly. 

Measure your campaign (and pivot)

Now the real fun starts! Following the launch of your campaign, you need to measure and analyze it with an eye fixed on your original goals. What makes CTV campaigns an incredible marketing tool is that they’re much easier to measure than traditional TV campaigns. 

Let’s lay out the KPIs that give your channel the greatest insight into how your campaigns are performing with the target goals mentioned earlier. (For a deeper dive into KPIs and campaign measurement, stay tuned for our next blog post where I’ll unpack CTV analytics.) 

Top-of-mind KPIs for SVOD channels

Priority KPIs for AVOD and FAST channels 

By tracking the KPIs relevant to your publisher model, you’ll be able to optimize your campaign for high-performance ads and know which adjustments you need to make, based on data analytics captured during and following your campaign. (In our final blog entry for this series, we’ll walk through the core tenets behind viewer nurturing and retention.) 

Wurl is a one-stop shop for CTV marketing

While it may be easy to define the goals for your CTV marketing campaign, designing quality creative and measuring its impact can be complex and difficult. Enter ContentDiscovery!

ContentDiscovery mobilizes AI technology to:

• Learn your content
• Find viewers who are likely to love your content
• Connect those viewers to your content through targeted ads
• Equip you with 24/7 personalized campaign measurement
• Leverage different types of creatives and track key metrics for each 

ContentDiscovery also gives you access to SparkLabs, AppLovin’s in-house creative team, who will create customized ads for you. With their unmatched CTV creative design expertise, SparkLabs utilizes the latest technological advancements (including AI) to deliver novel, top-quality ads that will boost your campaign’s performance. 

ContentDiscovery enables streamers and publishers to not only clear the three hurdles I detailed in our last blog, but also target effectively, scale profitably, optimize CTAs, get advice and partnership, and verify and measure all results. 

With quality creative and insights from these KPIs, you’ll be able to turn your CTV marketing spend into a revenue center (not a cost driver). Stay tuned!