Growing Your Marketing Strategy with CTV

4 Min Read

Considering how fast the digital marketing landscape keeps evolving, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, especially when you’re adding another platform to the mix. You’ll need to learn a new set of best practices, spend a ton of time optimizing for success, and more. When it comes to Connected TV, fortunately, you don’t have to start from scratch. 

Allie Lindly, Senior Customer Success Manager at MNTN, recently joined AdExchanger to discuss the best practices for a successful CTV campaign. Let’s walk through the highlights of this conversation: 

Getting Started With CTV

New to CTV? Feeling panicky? What even is TV? We get it. Traditionally, television advertising was reserved for massive enterprise companies with seemingly unlimited time, money, and in-house advertising talent. But seriously, don’t panic. CTV has changed all that. Today, Performance TV advertising sits alongside your paid search and social media digital marketing strategies—with many of the same features. 

Advertisers have been testing CTV strategies and finding what works best for them. Now that you’re ready to join them, you can use their experiences as a blueprint for your own campaign. 

The Path to Greatness

We’ve taken some of these best practices established through successful CTV strategies and put them together into what we call (booming, godlike announcer voice) The Path to Greatness. Let’s take a look at some best practices to help you along your CTV journey: 

Combine Your Strategies From the Start

When you’re first kicking off your CTV campaigns, you’ll want to start with both prospecting and retargeting campaigns. That might sound like a lot—but it’s worth it. 

What happens if you wait? Well, you won’t suffer, per se. Brands that pursued a wait-and-see approach started with prospecting only, delaying their CTV retargeting campaign until around the 45-day mark (or about halfway through their first 90 days). In the second half of their first 90 days, they drove 17% more site traffic and 52% more return on ad spend (ROAS) than they did with prospecting alone. So they did pretty well. 

But they didn’t do as well as they could have. Consider the brands that kicked off with both prospecting and retargeting campaigns on day one—these campaigns saw higher returns than those staggered campaigns. Our research found that these brands achieved 27% more site traffic and roughly 2x more ROAS during the first 90 days than those that launched with prospecting alone. 

The takeaway? Use retargeting to level up your CTV campaigns right out of the gate. According to MNTN’s research, retargeting creative has an average shelf-life of 176 days, so you can hang onto it for a while and connect with already interested potential customers. 

Consistency Is Key

Good things take time. While you, of course, always want your data charts to be heading up and to the right from day one, keep in mind that performance accelerates over time. MNTN’s research has found that brands need to give their campaigns 75 to 90 days to get up to speed. This time frame allows for both successful delivery and optimization, ensuring you see the most accurate campaign results. 

Through consistent, high-quality video creative, you’ll be able to reach your audience all year round. But you’ve got to update your ads regularly, too. Our advertisers’ data suggests that evergreen creative has an average shelf-life of 59 to 64 days. You’ll want to revise your video content every couple of months to avoid ad fatigue. 

You’ve got an opportunity to ramp up your campaigns with seasonal creative. With an average shelf-life of 10 days, seasonal creative helps you reach those customers who need an extra push. Try offering a holiday-centered deal, or even just remind them a specific season is coming up (please don’t forget to send your kids back to school).  

‘Tis the Season(ality) 

With a consistent rotation of fresh video creative for your evergreen and seasonal campaigns, you can keep your audience engaged. And don’t worry, if you already have seasonal creative, you don’t have to start over every year. Try starting with what you already have and freshen it up to make it as impactful as possible. We’ve found small changes—like swapping out a generic end card for a seasonal one—can make a massive impact on your campaign results.

Plant the Seeds of CTV

Just like in your garden, you won’t enjoy the fruit the same day you plant it. (Unless, of course, you’re buying a full-grown tree. And hey, that’s just cheating.) With CTV, you’re probably (never say never) not going to see drastic results the day after you launch. 

But the sooner you plant the seeds and give your campaign time to grow, the sooner you’ll enjoy a higher ROAS, increased marketing performance, and a flourishing (last garden pun, we swear) business. Watch the full webinar here.