Creating a Winning CTV Strategy: Marketing Your Content — Part 1

In this blog series, I’ve taken streamers and publishers through the ins and outs of Connected TV (CTV), covered how to distribute your content to the highest-value audiences, and broken down monetizing your supply. Your high-powered CTV strategy is really starting to take shape!

Now for the next step…completing your CTV strategy’s virtuous cycle by growing (and maintaining) your audience.

Building a strong brand as a streamer or publisher is critical. Like any brand out there, streamers and publishers must market what they’re selling (in this case, content and shows) to garner a loyal customer base. This is especially true as the number of CTV users — and potential market share — continue to climb.

Of course, engaging and retaining audiences is easier said than done. Streamers and publishers face a crowded market in CTV, rising churn, and the challenge of getting noticed in the first place. This is where the magic of CTV marketing comes in! 

I’ll be breaking this topic into two parts. For Part 1, I’ll walk you through how smart CTV marketing helps tackle these challenges for streamers and publishers, how it supports audience growth, and how it maximizes return on ad spend (ROAS). In this first segment, we’ll focus on the momentous task of growing your audience along with key terms you will need to know. In Part 2 next week, I’ll dig into specific CTV marketing best practices.

3 hurdles to growing your audience

While an ever-changing market is constantly throwing new roadblocks in front of streamers and publishers, there are three common hurdles for growing your audience that are critical to overcome.

A crowded streaming market

There is a staggering volume of content available today. In just the last year, “Peak TV” (an informal metric coined by FX’s chairman) reached 599 adult scripted original series across broadcast, cable, and streaming. This is up from 560 new original series in 2021 (and a mere 182 in 2002!).

With more than 200 streaming services in the U.S. alone, viewers have a plethora of choices both in terms of what content to watch and where to watch it. Plus, consumers have plenty of choices on how to stream the content. As mentioned in our previous posts, you can watch content on an SVOD, AVOD, HVOD, or FAST service. 

On the one hand, it’s amazing to have so many options — and that many come with no subscription fees. On the other hand, more access to more content also means the streaming marketplace can be overwhelming, with a higher chance of viewer fatigue. New research shows viewers are spending a record 10.5 minutes per session deciding what to watch. That’s exhausting!

Rising churn

Drowning in choice, viewers are churning at critically high levels. Most SVODs are seeing monthly churn between 4% and 7% of their global subscriber base. And, Parks Associates recently found that the average annualized subscriber churn rate for streaming video services now stands at 47%.

Besides the time and resources it takes for a streaming service to break even after churn, high turnover poses significant challenges to streamers’ and publishers’ subscriber and viewership goals. Finding new viewers who find the content compelling enough to subscribe and/or return to a channel is a challenge. 

Why are viewers churning at such high rates? For now, let’s set aside the economic picture and the fact that price increases are major churn factors across the board. On top of these factors, consumers usually can’t find the content that interests them or they lose excitement for content they’re familiar with. Others may be “rotational subscribers” who pay for a streaming service to access the new season of a show, and then ditch it soon after once they’ve watched.

The elusive viewer

Along with oceans of content — which partly account for the churn levels we’re seeing — reaching new viewers is particularly challenging in CTV’s fragmented ecosystem. 

Ideally, streamers and publishers would develop a unified sense of their target audiences. However viewers typically watch content across multiple platforms, making it difficult for publishers to gain comprehensive insight into viewer behavior.

Key terms to know for CTV marketing

The obstacles we covered are substantial, but they’re not impossible to overcome. Before you craft your marketing campaigns — and sail over those hurdles — you need to know a few key CTV marketing terms: 

• A/B Testing: A common marketing practice where you compare two versions of an ad to identify which performs better. 
• Brand Lift: The increase in awareness or perception of a brand as a result of advertising. This is determined by how advertising and marketing drive brand awareness, favorability, and/or purchase intent. 
• Targeting/Retargeting: Along with geographic area, you can direct ads to specific audiences based on a wide range of criteria. Retargeting is showing ads to people who have previously interacted with your brand or service. 
• Brand Marketing: Brand marketing is aimed at growing awareness of a brand and its values. This kind of marketing can be independent of a product or service launch. Brand marketing is often splashy, coming in the form of a celebrity partnership, sponsorship, or billboard. 
• Performance Marketing: Performance marketing is focused on certain measurable outcomes like ROAS, CPA, or CPP (see below). Performance marketing is done through data-driven mediums like paid search and social. (I’ll delve more deeply into performance marketing in a future blog — stay tuned!) 
• ROAS (return on ad spend): The amount of revenue generated for every dollar spent on your advertising. ROAS is key for any performance marketing initiative. This metric is especially important for FAST since there aren’t any purchase actions with FAST to measure campaign success. 
• CPA (cost per action): Measures the total cost of getting a consumer down your sales funnel. An action here can be a download, purchase, lead, etc.
• CPI (cost per install): A predetermined price that an advertiser agrees to pay the publisher every time a user installs their app as a direct result of an ad the publisher serves. CPI is calculated by dividing your marketing campaign spend by the number of app installs. 
• CPT (cost per free trial): Measures the total cost of a consumer opting for a free trial of your service – in the case of subscription-based streamers and publishers, a free trial to download their app and access their content for a set period of time.
• CPP (cost per purchase): Relevant to SVODs and AVODs since the viewer makes a purchase when they opt for these services. 

Wurl holds the keys to CTV campaign success

Now that we’ve introduced the hurdles and key terms to know for CTV marketing, it’s time to find the right partner to meet your needs. To grow your audiences, partnering with a technology expert like Wurl makes it easy to capture the attention and revenue potential of your CTV viewership. 

Wurl offers ContentDiscovery, a cutting-edge AI-powered advertising platform for streamers and publishers to:

• Target content to the right viewers across CTV, mobile, and desktop
• Keep viewers engaged through targeted promotions
• Set, measure, and meet campaign goals and ROI to keep your strategy agile

By up-leveling your CTV marketing with ContentDiscovery, you’ll drive higher conversion, engagement, and retention rates — all while transforming your marketing into a revenue center. 

In my next blog, I’ll share detailed best practices — including establishing goals and designing and testing creative — for making that transformation happen. I’ll then delve into the obstacles of campaign measurement (and how to overcome them with performance marketing!). I hate to leave you with a cliffhanger — but the rest of this CTV marketing segment will have to be continued….