The Complete Guide to Streaming Video Marketing
What is streaming video marketing, and how does it work? Whether you're an OTT provider with an AVOD service, an advertiser investigating marketing on a streaming service, or an ad broker serving in between, streaming video is the way of the future. It's an extremely effective way to market a company's goods and services and offers a high ROI for all concerned.
Quick Takeaways:
Streaming video marketing involves delivering promotional content via streaming media platforms
Marketing via streaming video increases brand awareness, website traffic, and sales
To create a streaming video marketing strategy, you need to establish your goals, define the target audience, set a budget, select streaming platforms, be consistent, and track performance
Understanding Streaming Video Marketing
Streaming video marketing involves promoting products and services via streaming video services. These services can be:
Social media, such as Facebook or Twitter
Video sharing sites, such as YouTube
Ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) OTT services, such as Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Tubi
In almost all instances, streaming video services let advertisers target their ads to specific customer types and, quite often, individual viewers. Dynamic ad insertion (DAI) and programmatic advertising enable advertisers to bid on ad slots based on viewer characteristics and insert ads in real-time. Unlike traditional broadcast advertising, DAI doesn't send the same ads to all viewers. The microtargeting possible with DAI delivers ads that have been precisely targeted to their interests and behaviors to viewers, which increases ad engagement and performance. (Pixalate estimates that programmatic advertising on streaming video reaches 72% of U.S. households.)
Introduction to programmatic advertising.
Is Streaming Video Marketing Effective?
Viewers watch many streaming videos online, and their usage continues to increase. Viewers spend almost twice as many hours watching streaming video today than just four years ago. It's where people go to watch what they want to watch.
Average hours of online video watched per week.
To the question of whether streaming video marketing is effective, the short answer is a resounding "yes." In Wyzowl's Video Marketing Statistics 2022 report, marketers had this to say about the effectiveness of video marketing:
93% say it increased brand awareness
87% say it increased traffic to their websites
81% say it increased sales
The reason for these numbers is that video marketing generally is more engaging than traditional display advertising or content marketing. Consumers prefer images to reading long blocks of text and moving images over static ones. Studies show that viewers retain 95% of a message when they see it in a video, compared to just 10% with text-based messages. This engagement is even higher with the microtargeting available in streaming video. With targeted, dynamically inserted ads, OTT services have completion rates up to 90%.
All of this contributes to the increasing ad spend on streaming video. According to eMarketer's U.S. Programmatic Video 2022 report, programmatic ad spending increased 82.4% in 2021—and looks to keep increasing in the foreseeable future.
Creating a Streaming Video Marketing Strategy
Once you decide to make streaming video marketing part of your overall marketing plan, you need to develop a strategy for moving forward. Your strategy should include the following six elements.
Streaming video marketing strategy
Establish Your Goals
The first step in any marketing strategy is to establish your goals. What do you want to accomplish with your streaming video marketing? Do you want to:
Increase brand awareness?
Establish a new product?
Drive traffic to your website?
Generate leads?
Increase sales?
Your goals will help determine your target audience and the platforms to use. Your goals will also help inform the content and style of your ads.
Define Your Target Audience
The next step of your streaming marketing strategy is to determine who you're targeting. You need to define your audience so you'll know what content to deliver to them and what platforms to use. With DAI and programmatic advertising, you can narrowly target the viewers you want to see your ads, thus maximizing the efficiency of your ad spend.
For example, many streaming video platforms let you target your ads based on viewers'
Location
Gender
Age
Education
Lifestyle and interests
Device platforms
The more precisely you define the audience for a campaign, the more targeted your ad distribution is. An in-depth understanding of your target audience helps you discover the pain points and deliver more relevant content.
Set a Budget
As with any marketing strategy, you need to set an overall budget as well as budgets for each campaign. This budget should include the cost of purchasing ad time and the cost of producing each ad. (If you're advertising on the major AVOD OTT services, you need professional production values, just as you would with traditional broadcast advertising.)
The nice thing about programmatic advertising is that it helps you spend your ad budget efficiently. You define your target audience, set a budget, and let your demand-side platform (DSP), an automated ad broker, determine and bid on the best slots for your ads across multiple platforms. Thanks to AI-assisted automated bidding, you pay only the amount necessary to win the bidding for each slot.
Select the Most Appropriate Streaming Platforms
Determining which streaming platforms to target is part of the programmatic advertising process. You give the DSP a list of platforms you want to use based on what your target customers watch, and the DSP finds open ad blocks on those services.
Not every streaming platform is equally effective for all customers, however. If you want to reach a younger audience, YouTube will be better than the ad-supported OTT services that rely on classic TV programs for most of their content. Some platforms are more popular among certain demographic segments than others. It's all a matter of knowing your target audience and where they like to watch their streaming content.
Be Consistent Across Platforms
Whichever platforms you or your DSP opt to target, your advertising needs to be consistent. You want to send a consistent message across all channels since many viewers channel hop across AVOD platforms and social media. Take an omnichannel approach so that customers get the same message, whether they're on Facebook, The Roku Channel, or your website.
Track Performance
Finally, you need to constantly track the performance of your streaming video marketing campaigns. You need to know which ads on which platforms and content are working and which aren't. Where are you getting the most bang for your marketing buck? Double down on the most productive ads and platforms and minimize spending on those that aren't pulling as well.
That means tracking several key metrics, including:
Ad views
Call-to-action (CTA) responses
Lead or sales generated
Revenue generated
Sales per user
Revenue per user
Most of this data is available in real-time, enabling rapid decision-making and repositioning.
