CTV isn’t just a branding channel anymore

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Lauren Leone: All right, everybody, welcome back to Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. Super excited to have Ruchi Patel here today, one of our group media directors and team leads, to talk about a very specific type of media in connected TV. I feel like we lump it in with programmatic a lot, but it’ll be fun to just talk about the role of CTV and how it’s changed. Ruchi, thanks for joining.

Ruchi Patel: Hey, Lauren. Very happy to be here. Again, such an evolving landscape. I know programmatic is playing a bigger role in all of these conversations, especially CTV, so very happy to be here and speak about it today.

Lauren: I think a lot of people think about CTV as when it first became type of inventory and the consumers were migrating their user behavior over to connected TV and streaming services, it became this- well, I’m going to buy less linear TV and just plop those same dollars into connected TV, but it serves the same general purpose as TV, which was just brand awareness, wide reach. I think that has changed so much now with the targeting. You think about connected TV not as this thing that only luxury, big brands can afford, but that can be part of everyone’s strategy if done right.

Ruchi: Over time, Lauren, all our clients are getting very, very sophisticated in their marketing efforts. Everybody’s starting to think about the value that marketing is adding to their business. Over time, we’ve seen clients realize that organic is great, but they require a bigger push to be able to hit their goals. That is where they’re starting to spend more in marketing. As they are spending more in marketing– and this is for small brands, bigger brands, midsize brands, all of them. As they’re starting to spend more and more in marketing, they’re realizing that they’re hitting a gap, and the gap is 100% real.

It is plain maths. There is a finite number of users to reach out to who are already at bottom of funnel and ready to convert. More and more of our clients, as they’re investing dollars in marketing, are realizing that they are reaching the cap sooner than they expected to. That is where I think the idea is more appealing to the clients now, where we have to invest in generating demand, and we have to do it through content that resonates with our users. CTV is absolutely one of the strongest places to be able to generate that, to be able to put your brand in front of users. We are starting to see a lot of that resonate with our clients today.

Lauren: The biggest challenge always is if you still think about it in this old-school TV replacement way, you think about the KPIs for connected TV are reach and frequency and maybe a little bit of engagement. That absolutely is not the case either. When you think about deploying it and saying, I’ve capped out search, I’m capping out the handraisers. If I continue to dump more money in Google, I’m just marginally less efficient with every dollar I spend. How, then, do you layer on CTV in a way that still affects the bottom line? Ultimately, that’s what every marketer is accountable for.

Ruchi: I’ll give you an example for one of the ABA clients that we are working with. Again, we are trying to generate as many qualified leads as we can in a particular market. At one point, you realize it’s not about just the dollars. You can continue spending more. Obviously, your marginal cost per lead is going up as you’re trying to invest more. The market is already saturated. You will hit a peak, Lauren, where it’s not just about the dollars. You need to start investing in demand gen.

There are people who probably haven’t even realized that they have a problem that we can solve, or there are people who have realized there is a problem, but they haven’t started really searching for it. This is where our clients will be winning because if they are not investing into that right now, you will not be able to even get the concept of marginal goes away if you think about a saturated market. Spending more, it’s not even like the next lead is getting marginally more expensive. It’s that this lead is not going to convert down the funnel, and you are practically inflating your cost and not really getting the volume that you need.

We’re talking about market saturation: how after a certain point, you’ve tapped into the users who are already aware of the problem and looking for a solution. Think about it like a pond. You’re fishing. If you are only adding in more lines, you’re not really increasing the size of the pool. You’re still fishing for the same number of users in the market. That is when demand gen comes in, and that is where CTV comes in. You can see more and more users engage with connected TV now. This is where the users are present.

They are using Netflix. They are using Hulu. They’re using a lot of these platforms, and it is a very sound medium to reach out to your users. The reach is high. The frequency is high here, and the ability of your campaigns to make an impact, helping them realize that they have a problem that you can solve, or this is a solution that you have probably not even started looking for, is very, very high. That is where CTV makes a lot more sense than linear TV or any other programmatic channel that you can run ads on.

Lauren: Yes. Once you’ve got this channel in market, one of the things we always advise on is, first of all, don’t wait to test into a channel until you’ve already found that mark. Definitely want to see people anticipating that coming and thinking about demand gen as a real evergreen part of their campaign mix. Once they have that in market or they’re testing into it, let’s say for the first time, what are the downstream KPIs that they should be seeing? How do you know if this is working?

Ruchi: Whenever somebody is launching programmatic, CTV specifically is more like, “I’m not sure if this is adding any value to my campaign.” There are two things about it. Before I go into KPI, the one thing I would like to call out is you have to make sure the investment is stable enough to actually make an impact. If you are only spending– again, just top of mind, you require at least four to five exposures per household to be able to have a genuine impact on your bottom-of-funnel conversions whenever you’re thinking about CTV. That is the one thing we have to make sure that the investment makes sense.

The second thing, you have to look at the lift in brand search that is happening on the organic side and even in Google Ads by launching CTV. CTV is more of a top-of-funnel tactic, and you are absolutely going to keep an eye on reach and frequency. The idea is, as I’m launching programmatic and CTV specifically, I’m starting to see an improvement in the conversion rates down the funnel, the best case that you can make is after launching CTV in a particular market, we saw an increase in branded impressions for that particular market. Make an EV test out of it. Do it for one market. Keep another market dark in terms of CTV.

It has to be a comparable market, of course, but that is the one thing that you would absolutely look at as the KPI. Then the other part, Lauren, that I would focus on is the quality of these forms. Again, I say forms as one of the conversion actions. Somebody sells out a form. They are going to probably again fill out the form even without CTV, but if you have CTV, you will see that the conversion rate of these forms to an actual patient substantially improves over time. That is why I wanted to call out there are some caveats. You want to make sure that the investment is sound enough for it to actually make an impact on your bottom-of-funnel campaign.

You absolutely want to make sure we are lining that up, but you will be able to see more users searching for your brand, and because they have so much more awareness about what your brand is offering, the conversion rate from a lead to an actual booking is likely to also improve. These are the two factors that we have to take into account. The third one would be give it time. Programmatic does not happen overnight. You cannot launch CTV today and expect the conversion to happen two weeks down the line. We have to make sure that we are giving our campaigns a four-to six-week ramp-up period and then assessing all of these KPIs.

Lauren: I did an episode with Lisa about more broadly programmatic a few weeks ago, and she talked about at least a couple months of an organization committing to this buy. Then what you hope to find in that is that those downstream increase in branded impressions through your search console, longer time on site, larger percentage of new users, and then ultimately that conversion rate; as those improve, you want to then try to sustain that level, not just, “Hey, we liked what happened,” and cool, test is done. What you’re really trying to do is say, this is now an evergreen part of our strategy.

Ruchi: I think everybody wants a proof of concept. That is where the idea of having a control market and a test market comes up. We are talking to CFOs, people who understand numbers, and we have to make a case for it. You’re 100% right, Lauren. This is not an on-off strategy. You don’t do it once, and you call it a day. We do it once for a few markets. We show the value by all the KPIs that we just enlisted a few minutes ago, and then we make a case for it. This has helped X, Y, and Z market. We need to replicate this, and we need to continue running it.

There is definitely testing to be done on whether we need to increase the investment in CTV, what is the exact value that we are driving, and nowadays we have Fresh Paint and we have so many other programmatic vendors that can give us a lot more understanding of the true value that CTV is driving, but this is something that is becoming more and more of an evergreen part of your strategy and not a seasonal thing that we do when we start to see a drop in demand.

Lauren: That’s a great leading point, Ruchi, because you convert CTV into an evergreen part of your strategy. CFOs bought in. We all like the increase down funnel, and we like the marginal. We like moving some of our marginally inefficient dollars over, but then what? What does a testing cycle look like with CTV? What are some of the things then you’re exploring, testing, budget levels, audience? What does that look like for you?

Ruchi: Budget is definitely one of the things because we have different markets and you want to make sure that– first of all, whenever we are starting to run CTV, we are always doing an estimation. There’s a forecast with an XYZ budget for this particular month, knowing the market that we are going to be addressing; this is the level of investment that we think will have a substantial impact. As you start to see that impact, you absolutely want to understand whether you are under-invested or over-invested based on the actual data that you gather. The first thing is once I started to run the campaign for around four to six weeks, I want to understand what is the impact that these dollars have been able to drive.

The second thing is audience targeting. When you talk about healthcare clients, we are working with a very niche set of audiences. We are also bound by HIPAA, so it’s very difficult to directly target patients. We always have to start with different groups of audiences. We have to test out PurpleLabs or any claim-based providers, and we have to understand which of these audience groups are seeing the most impact in downstream conversions. It also comes down to audience testing.

The third thing is creatives. Creative fatigue is real. We have videos, and we want to make sure when the videos are aligning in theme with the messaging that we are sending downstream, like to the bottom-of-funnel campaigns. Also, we are picking up on the messaging that the audiences are responding to in the bottom of funnel, which is also evolving. You always see that a particular kind of value proposition works better. Then over time, the users are responding to another value proposition that works better.

You have to make sure that even when you’re reaching out to users on the programmatic side of things through CTV, we are refreshing the content. We are talking about no wait list for ABA, but that is something that if my competitors are also testing into, we should probably be coming out with something else that makes my provider stand out. Creative is absolutely the third thing that we would continuously test into. We often underestimate the value that nice video or a very compelling video can have on the entire funnel conversion. Absolutely something to continuously test into. Even if you have a very stable campaign structure with your CTV offering.

Lauren: Yes, I think that’s a great point that often gets underestimated is the parallel need for creative strategy and execution. You’ve got to have budget for those things. You’ve got to have a way to measure the impact, know when fatigue is coming. These are all the things that I know our team works on, but oftentimes groups will say, “I don’t want to spend XYZ monthly on creative production,” and then we get this really great initial outcome from our test. Then that campaign fatigues, we don’t have the right creative investment parallel to it, and you start to see a channel that otherwise should be working really well start to fatigue and not work well despite the fact that we know with the right inputs it can be a long-term strategy.

Ruchi: Another, Ms. Lauren, that we have seen sometimes across our media mixes, the messaging is very important. We are talking about a concept. For example, just going back to like maybe an ABA client where you’re trying to use emotional messaging to reach out to parents, you want to make sure that resonates across all levels of the funnel. You cannot have a CTV video that has an emotional appeal to parents, but by the time you bring them down the funnel, we’ve completely changed the language, and it is more focused on very heavy value propositions. Obviously the messaging does change by funnel, but you have to stick with the creative theme and make sure that you are resonating that as you are bringing the user down the funnel. There’s so much that we can do with creatives, and that is probably the one area that becomes a focus of evolution as your programmatic strategy matures.

Lauren: Yes. Speaking of that, pushing people down a funnel, just really quickly to round out this episode, when we talk about CTV. You’ve got search, you’ve got organic, very bottom funnel. You start to see those fatiguing, you come in, and you launch CTV, which feels like you’re going from here to here. There’s all these other things that live in the middle. What should people be doing with those CTV audiences in the middle of the funnel? Just talk a little bit about the sequential messaging development.

Ruchi: Whenever you think about top of funnel, the idea is to reach out to a very broad segment of users and also using this to create a funnel. Of all of the 100,000 users that I was able to reach out in a very particular geographic segment, X percent of these actually ended up watching my video, X percent of these watched my video to a certain extent, and X percent of these did not really engage with my content. This helps you create different groups of audiences that can then be remarketed in different ways.

Again, as you’re creating these audiences, we can then start using them in the middle of funnel for other tactics like display remarketing, native remarketing. If you think about the entire funnel, Lauren, we are trying to create demand in a market where we are not sure if the user really has a need or not. CTV works as a layer where I’m showing this ad to everybody. Hey, we are an ABA therapy provider, and we understand the cues with your child. We are here if you need any help. Once we see that somebody engages with it, we know that the chances of bringing them down the funnel is so much higher. We remarket them within the programmatic platform using display or native tactics.

The other thing is now we have the capability to actually funnel our audiences from programmatic into Meta as well. We can create a cross-channel targeting strategy where all the users who connected or who interacted with my ad in the top of funnel can now be remarketed using Meta campaigns on social, on Facebook and Instagram and remarketed. The idea is we use the top-of-funnel CTV campaigns to create a group or a segment of audiences who we think are in need of support from our ABA centers, and then we continue to move them down the funnel and ultimately with the objective of converting them in the bottom-of-funnel campaigns.

Lauren: Yes, absolutely. Guys, if you’re listening and you’re wholly reliant on bottom funnel, maybe you’re testing into Meta, but your Meta isn’t performing because you’re still trying to treat it like a very bottom funnel channel, CTV is a great avenue to consider to test into. Work with your agency, your in-house team to design a test that is strong enough investment to Ruchi’s point, because going too shallow, you’ll test yourself out of the channel. You’ll never learn. Make sure you make the investment in the creative and think about how it plays into the broader mix. We’re big fans of CTV over here. Ruchi, thanks for joining and giving everybody the inside scoop on how they should be thinking about it going into the rest of the year.

Ruchi: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Lauren.

Lauren: All right guys, if you’re listening, please like, subscribe, share wherever you get your podcasts, and we’ll see you guys on the next episode.

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