Ideal OTT Advertising and Facebook Strategies

February 2020
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OTT & Facebook Cross-Channel Marketing

Creating cross-channel marketing campaigns that add up to more than just the sum of their parts is a challenge. Starting with two channels with complementary messaging can be an effective way to start. In our experience, using two platforms together, such as Facebook and OTT can lead to incredible results when done properly. What is OTT? OTT stands for Over-The-Top and refers to streaming TV over the internet. For example viewing ESPN+ via the app on your TV is an OTT service. Unlike traditional linear TV buys, OTT ads are targeted to users based on audience data rather than specific programs and time spots, allowing a more powerful strategy in targeting key messages to your ideal personas.

What does OTT have to do with Facebook? How does this all come together?

Start With The Audience Solution

Facebook has undergone quite extensive changes in their internal audience capabilities, but did you know that you can still use 1st party audience data in Facebook? Planning your multi-channel effort should start by identifying the right audience and determining how to leverage it across both platforms. Gemini has extensive experience working with data providers and building audiences for use cases just like this. For example, we can help you target middle aged boat owners for your floating cooler company. Relevance is incredibly important in marketing today. Targeting can’t be based just on demographics. By taking purchase signals, lifestyle/interest data and adding your own additional data to Facebook we craft high-performing audiences.

From here, it’s a matter of curating content that addresses the audience needs at each stage of the funnel. OTT and Facebook are often most used during the awareness and consideration stages, but it’s important to map out the user journey for your unique product or service. It’s not enough to show an ad on a streaming channel and then use the same ad on Facebook, you can better maximize the impact of those dollars. Let’s talk a little more about ad creative and messaging.

Curating Content, Multi-Channel Style

Before you make the investment in high-quality video production for OTT, you can first test out messaging options and content on social media and gauge engagement levels. If something works on Facebook it should translate fairly well onto bigger screens. After your test flights you’ll be able to storyboard your OTT spot with data to back up your creative concepts. By using this method you can save countless dollars that might have been wasted on producing and delivering an OTT ad that doesn’t resonate with your audience.

You’re Running OTT & Facebook – Now What?

You should expect revenue from every campaign you run, but we don’t measure OTT or Facebook the same way that we do Google search. They are different platforms used in completely different ways. By investing in a strong branding effort to create awareness within your target audience (say those middle aged boat owners) and using your ad to create movement down funnel we can do a couple of things to measure the success of our campaign.

  • Identify social metrics that matter to you (engagement rates, follows, etc) and compare against previous performance
  • Evaluate lift in google search and other lower funnel channels
  • A/B test over time to understand the total impact that social+OTT is having

Having a measurement strategy in place is every bit as important as the steps you took in developing the media strategy, it’s ok to figure it out along the way – but you can also ask for help from a partner like Gemini!