Why Connected TV Should Be a Part of Your 2024 B2B Marketing Strategy

According to LinkedIn’s 95-5 Rule, only a small percentage of potential B2B buyers are actively seeking solutions at any given time. With this data suggesting that only 5% of target accounts are in-market to purchase a solution, it’s become increasingly important for marketers to seek strategies that target the 95% of accounts that aren’t ready to buy today but will be in-market sometime in the future.  

The problem is that marketers must often make hard tradeoffs between their brand and demand activities. As a result, brand-building typically takes a back seat to demand generation, as marketers prioritize short-term initiatives to achieve quarterly revenue objectives.  

But the days of “quick wins” are dwindling. B2B buyers are taking longer to commit to purchases and often end up selecting a vendor from their day-one shortlist. These market conditions make a stronger case for balancing your brand and demand activities to capture the early attention of decision-makers and keep your solution top of mind throughout the entire buying journey. Emerging channels like Connected TV (CTV) offer an opportunity to get in front of buyers before they initiate the buying process to gain a coveted spot on that day-one vendor shortlist. Nearly half of all U.S. homes already watch CTV every day. With that number expected to grow to 87% by 2025, CTV is a critical channel to add to your unified, multi-channel strategy in 2024. Here’s why.

What Is Connected TV (CTV)? 

Connected TV (CTV) is a category of over-the-top (OTT) streaming devices that connect to or are embedded into a television to support video content streaming. This encompasses both Smart TVs and the devices connected to TVs, like sticks and gaming consoles, that give viewers access to a variety of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.  

As more people cut their cable cord in favor of these streaming services, CTV has increasingly become a powerful channel to capture buyer attention. In 2022, Nielsen reported that CTV outperformed cable and broadcast TV to become the dominant form of entertainment on U.S. TV screens. And according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), CTV is one of the fastest-growing channels in digital video ad spend—up 22% in 2022, and 37% faster than short-form video from web and app-based publishers.  

3 Reasons to Include CTV Advertising In Your Marketing Strategy 

With continued economic uncertainty, longer sales cycles, and increased buyer complexity, now more than ever future buyers are the source of future cash flows. A unified brand-to-demand approach focused on building relationships with prospects before they’re ready to buy allows you to deliver a consistent personalized experience that increases awareness and fuels pipeline growth and revenue.  Here are three reasons why a brand-to-demand strategy maximizes your exposure to buyers so that your brand stays top-of-mind throughout the decision-making process, and why CTV is key to bringing this strategy to life.  

1. Reach More Digital and Self-Guided Buyers 

Buyers are becoming more independent when exploring solutions to their business problems. With Forrester research indicating that 90% of the purchase process is completed before buyers contact a vendor, it’s up to marketers to guide buying committee members toward a decision.  

Forrester reported in their Q4 2021 B2B Advertising Trends Survey that half of its participants read, watch, and listen to business topics and trends for more than four hours per week, with 41% spending four or more hours educating themselves about specific vendor products or solutions during the last purchase decision. The same survey found that 30% of VP and other functional leaders spend over seven hours a week with business media, with 71% of VPs and leaders educating themselves on vendors for about four hours per week when they need to decide on a purchase.  

This level of independent research is why it’s important to reach the 95% of “out-of-market” buyers before they initiate the research process. You need to build brand recognition and trust through a brand-building strategy, and then balance those efforts with demand capture activities to close those deals and win a lifetime customer. The frequent use of CTV offers the earliest opportunity to get in front of decision-makers, which adds to the likelihood of being included in initial solution research and the day-one vendor lists.

2. Increase Your Opportunities for Personalization

Personalization has become a critical component of a successful ABM strategy. Buyers no longer want more personalized buying experiences, they demand it.  

When it comes to brand-building, data is key to not only understanding which accounts are moving in-market for a solution, but also identifying the buying committee members within these accounts who will research and engage with relevant content and messaging. Each committee member comes to the decision table with separate concerns and pain points. You need to reach these buyers with personalized experiences to stand out.    

CTV’s reliance on IP addresses to identify viewers makes it easier to target buying personas. This allows you to deliver different ads and messaging per home based on a viewer profile.  As online advertising becomes more difficult due to cookie deprecation and an increase in user privacy laws, most experts expect CTV to grow in popularity as more marketers shift funds to it. When used as part of a unified multi-channel strategy, CTV helps drive higher engagement across the entire sales cycle. It increases your reach by continuously serving content and messaging that empowers decision-makers at every stage of the funnel with information and reinforces your brand’s reputation as a partner and solution to trust.    

3. Gain Better Metrics for Real-Time Measurement and Optimization

Understanding how early-stage accounts interact and engage with content is crucial for measuring and optimizing your brand-building activities. When it comes to measuring brand-to-demand activities, many B2B marketers struggle with demonstrating ROI for their efforts. Most of the time, this is because they focus on the wrong metrics. When measured as part of a unified multi-channel strategy, CTV provides an opportunity for marketers to look at higher value forms of measurement that focus on buyer trends and behaviors over time, which will make your marketing motions more flexible and proactive versus reactive.  

Marketers increasingly need to move away from click-based attribution and instead look at higher-value forms of measurement that look at trends and the correlation of behaviors over time. In Forrester’s Q4 2021 B2B Advertising Trends Survey, the top three buyer behaviors in response to advertisements were unrelated to a “click-through” action. Instead, buyers are researching the solution on a search engine, visiting the website without clicking the ad, or sharing the ad’s primary messaging with colleagues.  

With a fuller picture of the entire buyer’s journey, multi-channel strategies allow you to measure engagement over time and identify optimization opportunities as needed. By linking your CTV engagement to your entire multi-channel ABM strategy, you can understand how your content performs in the early stages of the sales cycle. This allows you to evaluate how your brand and awareness efforts are driving and linking to your demand generation strategy. More importantly, this visibility makes it easier to uncover optimization opportunities to generate more revenue, improve ROI, and increase win rates through more relevant and personalized marketing content.

How You Can Get the Most Out of Your CTV Advertising with Madison Logic

As the sole ABM solution unifying the four primary channels B2B buyers use most within the centralized ML Platform, Madison Logic empowers you to maximize your impact through unified, multi-channel campaigns with content seamlessly tailored to buying stages across the funnel. Leveraging ML Insights, which combines three independent signals into a single intent score, you can more easily determine which accounts to engage, the key personas within these accounts, and the content most likely to drive account engagement and pipeline impact. 

Learn more about the value ABM Connected TV can bring to your organization when you request a demo today. 

Stay on Trend in 2024 with Our Predictions eBook and Resolutions Webinar 

CTV has become a critical channel to include in your brand and demand efforts. What other opportunities are there to make 2024 your most impactful year yet?  

Download the 2024 B2B Marketing Predictions eBook to learn more. 

Want more information about the developing trends you need to know about in 2024 and how you can commit to leveraging them properly—without overhauling your ABM strategy? Watch our B2B New Year’s Resolutions virtual event where Senior Vice President of Product, Liz Ronco, and Senior Marketing Manager, Johanna Shirman will walk through the key market predictions taking hold of ABM and how to embrace them to generate better results.