Advertising, Connected TV

Go Big or Small With Connected TV Retargeting

Go Big or Small With Connected TV Retargeting

6 Min Read

This post was produced in partnership with Lever Interactive, a digital advertising agency specializing in emerging channels.

When you think of television advertising, audience targeting isn’t usually the first thing to come to mind—but it soon will be after reading this post. Linear TV has turned off many brands, with advertisers utilizing this format for one main reason—brand awareness. But, even that is a subjective measure, which is why advertisers (specifically in B2B) have avoided it altogether as it doesn’t deliver the insights needed to justify the spend.

The television advertising industry has progressed in leaps and bounds over the past few years, specifically on formats like streaming (Connected TV). Statista reports that Connected TV (CTV) ad spend in the U.S. will grow to $42.4 billion by 2027. So why are advertisers and agencies flocking to this performance channel? Let’s explore the ways in which MNTN’s agency partner, Lever Interactive, has made the most of CTV’s audience capabilities, with great success.

How Connected TV’s Audience-First Approach Works

Connected TV applies an audience-first approach to targeting. And no, we’re not referring to what audiences are watching, but instead CTV’s innate ability to drive relevant ads to viewers across different types of programming. Lever Interactive, one of MNTN’s leading agency partners, have taken hold of Connected TV’s audience-targeting capabilities—and reaped the rewards. “Reaching a B2B audience through TV advertising required assumptive placements based on network almost exclusively. On CTV we don’t have to assume where an audience will be tuning in and at what time.  We can simply build an audience-focused campaign that reaches a B2B segment with every buy,” says David Sutton, Vice President at Lever Interactive.

MNTN Performance TV embraces the audience-first approach through giving advertisers the ability to target first- and third- party audiences. 

  • Go beyond traditional TV targeting with MNTN Matched by matching directly with your most valuable prospects using keywords — all to drive the best outcomes. Our system analyzes your website and mobile app data to create a keyword profile of your ideal customera, which you can then edit by adding and removing keywords, just like you do with paid search.

  • Utilize first party audiences in retargeting campaigns to reach existing customers (and the ones brought in from your prospecting campaigns)—this can be done a number of ways, such as retargeting existing customers, cart abandoners and even those who expressed interest in certain sections of your website. MNTN Performance TV also released a CRM upload tool, which makes it easy to upload your customer email database and target them directly on Connected TV.

The Best Approach When Targeting B2B Audiences on Connected TV

B2B advertisers might think there’s no place for them on television, but CTV’s audience targeting features change the game. “The reality is that we have the same advanced audience targeting approaches available to us, but B2B advertisers can get stuck in older thinking that their audience is too niche, too granular, and too difficult to target.  The silver lining is that B2B brands’ hesitation to invest in CTV provides more untapped potential into very efficient advertising, which is apropos for any early adopter but that gap is growing smaller by the day,” explains Sutton.

Here are a few best practices we recommend B2B advertisers apply to their audience targeting strategy to start off on the right foot.

  • MNTN Performance TV’s audience targeting feature gives advertisers the flexibility to be as granular or broad as they wish. We recommend first casting a wide net and group together similar audiences you think would engage with your message.
  • Experiment with different audiences and / or keywords to see which segments are resonating with your messaging and ad creative.
  • Drill down and view performance data tied to each individual audience segment included in their targeting—providing a detailed picture of the exact, high value customers responsible for driving conversions and revenue. “[CTV advertising] provides advertisers with learnings on [their] B2B audiences – where they’re streaming, what time of day, what device, what networks, and so on,” says Sutton. Ultimately, the insights gleaned from this feature alone is a powerful addition to any B2B advertiser’s overall marketing strategy. 

A B2B Success Story

Why should B2C brands have all the fun? Postman, a leading API development platform who drove a 6x Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with MNTN Performance TV. The brand was looking for a new channel to reach their ideal customer and set themselves apart from the competition. They turned to MNTN Performance TV to help them reach the right audience, and motivate those viewers to visit and convert:

  1. They used their own CRM data to create an audience of qualified accounts on MNTN’s Performance TV platform. This first party data enabled Postman to accurately target consumers who they’d already identified as enterprise decision-makers.
  2. Launched a prospecting campaign focused solely on attracting new business. While they wanted to bring fresh customers to their product, they were intent on only targeting people for whom their offerings would be a good match. Using MNTN’s integration with LiveRamp and other trusted data providers, Postman found specialized consumer segments in-market for B2B API software. These groups included IT business decision influencers, people who work at B2B companies in the Fortune 500, and software developers.
  3. L​​aunched a lower-funnel Performance TV retargeting campaign to capture that engaged site audience and drive them to convert. This time, they retargeted people who had visited one or more of their enterprise-focused landing pages.

The end result? Postman was able to easily track vital KPIs like order ID values that were configured to track conversions and return on advertising spend (ROAS) that could be tied to their sales pipeline. They also saw responses in their “contact us” form that indicated these potential customers had seen Postman’s CTV ads via MNTN and were interested in exploring their enterprise offerings.