Looking to boost your customer acquisition efforts? Discover the 7 essential components of a winning CTV customer acquisition strategy with this guide.
Connected TV’s unique mix of precise targeting, performance measurement, and broad reach call for a tailored customer acquisition strategy
In the modern media landscape, attention is more split than ever before. Customer acquisition costs have risen 222% in the last eight years, in part because competition for people’s time has grown so much. In this fragmented world, efficiency-minded marketers are looking for opportunities to bring in new business without breaking the bank. That’s exactly what connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) streaming provide, and more and more marketers know it: Projected ad spend for CTV has increased by 14.4% for 2023 as marketers integrate the channel in their customer acquisition strategy.
By integrating the following components in your CTV customer acquisition strategy, you’ll set your business up for sustainable success.
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Critical Components of a CTV Customer Acquisition Strategy
Discover strategies, metrics, examples and more with Customer Acquisition: A Practical Guide.
Critical Components of a CTV Customer Acquisition Strategy
Audience Research
One of CTV’s great strengths is its ability to target audiences with granular specificity. Putting ads in front of the right audience — that is, those customers most likely to convert — is more cost-effective than advertising to as wide an audience as possible. That’s because a higher proportion of viewers will convert, lowering your cost per acquisition (CPA). Going wide has its perks, too, but efficiency is not one of them.
But before you can correctly target your audience, you need to understand it. How old are your customers? What cities do they live in? How much money do they make, and in what fields? What are their favorite TV shows, news sources, or hobbies? By answering these questions, you can fill out your knowledge of where your customers congregate and guide your customer acquisition strategy with confidence.
Consider performing market research, from surveys to focus groups, among existing customers and near-conversions. Use that data to build audience profiles, or aggregated representations of your ideal customer types. These audience profiles provide a basis on which to model your marketing efforts, so the more detailed they are, the better.
Data-Driven Targeting
Equipped with deep knowledge of your target audience, you can now make use of the precise targeting abilities of CTV and OTT. Using programmatic advertising allows these platforms to get you the best possible inventory for your ad spend. In fact, 81% of digital video advertisers who moved budget from linear TV to CTV cited targeting and efficiency as their reason.
Content Personalization
In modern commerce, the watchword du jour is “personalization.” McKinsey reports that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when that personalization doesn’t land. On the flip side, getting personalization right can mean up to 40% more revenue versus non-personalizing competitors.
For marketers, this personalization means perfecting your creative materials. This is another way in which deep knowledge of your target audience can come in handy, as it makes tailoring your creative to their tastes that much easier. You can use geotargeting to speak to their home cities, behavioral targeting to address their interests, and contextual targeting to fit in with the material surrounding your ad. Mastering all of these aspects of personalization will make your creative more effective, bringing in more conversions with each ad.
Your main tool for honing your creative is A/B testing. Because CTV ads are so much more cost-effective than linear TV commercials, it’s faster and easier to iterate on their designs. Feeding new iterations into the ad platform and measuring the results (more on that later) can help you figure out which campaigns are most effective, how to improve underperforming materials, and optimize each campaign’s return on ad spend (ROAS).
Cross-Channel Consistency
No customer acquisition strategy worth its salt restricts itself to a single channel. Research has long shown that marketing across multiple channels reinforces each channel’s results, and that’s particularly true for CTV and OTT. These channels pair particularly well with search and social marketing thanks to second screening. According to tvScientific research, 78.2% of consumers use a mobile device when watching streaming TV content, and 31.2% use those devices to research or purchase products advertised on streaming TV. To learn more about how to make the most of all your marketing channels, read our free playbook.
To maximize this cross-channel effect, it’s critical to maintain a consistent brand identity. Imagery, tone of voice, design principles, logos, and more — when these elements are aligned across your marketing channels, it reinforces brand recognition, in turn building trust and credibility among customers. That can increase revenue by up to 23%. The more consistent your branding, the stronger the reinforcing effect will be.
Retargeting Campaigns
Even when you run a successful ad, there will be some viewers who see it and connect with it, but don’t convert for reasons beyond your control. Maybe they’re on their way out the door, have their hands full with the baby, or simply left their smartphone in the other room. Whatever the reason, these viewers have suddenly become high-quality leads if you can manage to get your ad in front of them just a handful of additional times. These further ads nurture their interest and can help get them over the line to conversion.
With CTV and OTT’s ability to follow the consumer journey across the internet and TV, you can better identify near-conversions that just need a little more convincing. You can also refine the timing of your ads to help them land at the moment when each customer is most ready to convert. Plus, with CTV and OTT’s powerful attribution features, you’ll know when your efforts are successful. Speaking of…
Performance Measurement
Linear TV may provide enormous scale, but it offers little in the way of attribution. It’s all but impossible to prove a one-to-one connection between the ad a viewer sees and any action they take as a result. That makes it difficult to evaluate the success of your customer acquisition strategy.
CTV and OTT are immune to such shortcomings. Here’s how it works: When a CTV serves an ad, it takes note of the household's IP address in an exposure file. A device graph simultaneously checks for other devices on the same network and adds them to the exposure file. If anyone in the household uses any of those devices to complete the action the ad intended, whether that's visiting a website or making a purchase, the CTV platform records it and stores it in an outcome file. Finally, the exposure and outcome files are compared to match each exposure to its corresponding outcome.
With such clarity of data, you can measure the success of your customer acquisition strategy at the most minute levels. Some key performance indicators to keep in mind include:
- Cost per completed view (CPCV): Calculated by dividing the ad cost by the number of completed views.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA): Calculated by dividing campaign spending by the number of customers who completed a specific action.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): Calculated by dividing the revenue attributed to your ad campaign by the cost of that campaign.
A Trusted Partner
Moving into a new marketing channel means having to learn a new set of ropes. There are not only skills and techniques to master, but also tools and platforms to choose. tvScientific is ready to help with it all. We built our unique platform for performance marketers looking to get the most out of a cross-channel marketing strategy, and our outcome-based solutions ensure you hit the right audience at the right time. You can then use our fully transparent analytics to track campaign performance and optimize in real-time. Get in touch today to learn more.
