LinkedIn ConnectedTV Playbook

1. Introduction

- The purpose of this playbook is to help marketers successfully run ConnectedTV ads on Linkedin.

- If you’re running a demand generation program, ConnectedTV is a great way to add another medium to your media mix as it blends Linkedin's targeting capabilities with TV ads. 

- If you’re targeting B2B and your audience spends time on Linkedin, you're in luck. But if your audience doesn’t spend time on Linkedin, ConnectedTV is a great way to get your brand in front of them. Otherwise, you might have to rely mostly on display ads and offline marketing.

Although you can use other platforms like MNTN to target this audience, we have found more success on Linkedin due to its superior targeting, integration, and reporting capabilities.

Summary 

ConnectedTV is Linkedin’s newest ad format where you can run video ads on TV. 

Although at first this might seem like a luxury, given there are likely many ad types you’re not fully utilizing on Linkedin, ConnectedTV is different. This ad happens outside of Linkedin, but not on display/partner networks; it happens on TV.

If your audience doesn’t spend much time on Linkedin, ConnectedTV is the best way to reach them through another medium. Unlike other platforms where you can run TV ads, ConnectedTV doesn’t require an initial investment, you can start with a $50 daily budget right away. 

Its targeting and reporting capabilities are superior because the filters are powered by Linkedin. You can integrate ConnectedTV into your overall Linkedin strategy within the Linkedin Ads ecosystem, such as using this campaign for retargeting, creating a retargeting audience from this campaign, or using your conversion goals in this campaign.

2. Benefits

- Your audience might not be spending much time on Linkedin, but you still need a way to reach them. ConnectedTV offers a new medium. 

- With less competition, it’s cheaper than most Linkedin campaigns. (Although you’ll need a higher investment to produce videos compared to creating static ads) 

- Unlike other platforms where you can run ads on TV, ConnectedTV doesn’t require an initial investment, and you can use the same targeting and reporting capabilities that Linkedin offers.

- Additionally, you can use it to create a retargeting audience - we’ll cover this later.

Example:

Your ICP is developers, but the person who signs the contract is the product manager.

You need the first action from developers because product managers don’t fully understand the problem your product solves, developers are the ones using your product.

Although Linkedin is effective for reaching developers, you can't get much exposure to product managers on Linkedin likely because they aren't spending much time on the platform.

So, you can run a ConnectedTV ad for product managers, targeting them in their homes with a video content explaining how you help developers.

That’s what HockeyStack is doing for CMOs and CROs. 

3. How to do it?

Step-by-Step Guide: Experimenting with ConnectedTV 

Although running a ConnectedTV campaign is a relatively easy process where you literally just need to create a campaign; optimizing and understanding the success is slightly different from other Linkedin campaigns. 

- We first need to start with a question: What do we want to achieve with ConnectedTV ads? 

Answers could vary: adding another medium to your demand generation strategy, reaching your audience if you suffer from low reach on Linkedin, speeding up your sales process, or building retargeting audiences. You can achieve many goals, so first, decide what you want to achieve.

- Next, depending on your answers above - what will you need to promote? For example, if you want to add another medium to your demand generation strategy, you might consider using testimonials. If you want to educate your audience, then use product value materials.

- Once you decide, you need to get a video done. Please note that videos cannot exceed 1 minute, so you need to be short and concise. Make sure that the video is 4K because it will be shown on TV, and it needs to be in a 16:9 format.

Since this is an experiment, I don’t recommend starting with many different videos due to the cost of investment. You could start with one and decide if you want to continue with it once you have some results. 

Just go to Linkedin, build your campaign with your default targeting, and add the video - this is the obvious part.

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One thing to keep in mind is that your watch rate will almost always be 100% because these ads are non-skippable. On some occasions, you might see 96%-97%, which means that your audience turned off their TV or something. 

This also means that in-platform metrics cannot be used to measure success; you’ll need to adopt a different approach. Here is how we are measuring success for ConnectedTV. 

You launched, then what?

- Check your demographics report to see who you’ve ended up targeting and exclude the irrelevant people.

- An easy way to measure success is to run a funnel test. Run the campaign for a few weeks and ensure enough people saw your ad. Then, create a remarketing audience. Retarget this audience with your other campaigns; if their engagement metrics are higher than your cold audience, it means the TV ads are working.

- If you target open opportunities, do this by targeting half of your open opportunities. If the targeted open opportunities close faster and/or have better conversion rates than the ones that weren’t targeted, it means the ads are working.

- In our case, we used HockeyStack to measure the incremental lift by comparing the weighted score of companies that have seen our ConnectedTV ads to those who haven’t. We measured this at the contact-sales, pipeline, and revenue levels.

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- On the contact-sales side, the ConnectedTV audience was 1.6x more likely to visit the website and submit the demo form. On the pipeline and revenue side, the difference wasn’t significant, with only a 5% and 2% positive correlation, respectively. 

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- We also tested this with open opportunities where we knew the procurement process would take a long time. The targeted opportunities had 8% shorter procurement processes.

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Lastly, we used the ConnectedTV audience as a form of remarketing audience alongside the thought leadership ads remarketing audience; like we didn’t treat this audience as a high-intent remarketing audience but rather as an audience that we will educate more, meaning we used this audience as the second layer of our targeting. (Not cold, just a bit warmer audience)

Our data shows that if your audience is first exposed to your thought leadership ads, they engage with your other content 1.75x better.

We had been using this approach for over a year, so we decided to do a similar thing with the ConnectedTV audience. 

The ConnectedTV remarketing audience had a 1.45x better engagement rate with our other content compared to the cold audience. Although this is positive, it was behind what we are seeing with the thought leadership remarketing audience.

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However, if the audience was exposed to both thought leadership and ConnectedTV content, the engagement rate was 3.4x higher compared to the cold audience, suggesting that the multi-threaded approach shows a significant impact.

My recommendation is to run the first test for two to four weeks. If you get direct conversions, that’s perfect. However, direct conversions should not be the way we measure success in ConnectedTV. 

If you use HockeyStack, you can understand if it’s working or not easily - but if not, it’s not the end of the world. If you have a self-reported attribution field on your demo form, you can track those answers. Additionally, if you hear prospects mentioning seeing your ads on TV during sales calls, or if you see better results in the retargeting audience from ConnectedTV ads compared to the cold audience, these can all be considered successes.

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So, in a nutshell:

-Self-reported attribution answers

-Mentions during sales calls

-Better performance in the retargeting audiences

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But please note that to run a retargeting campaign, you first need to have enough people in your remarketing audience. Therefore, you will need a longer time to measure success—about three weeks for the initial ConnectedTV campaign to get the audience, and at least two weeks for the retargeting campaign.

If your goal is to add another channel to your demand generation strategy, your additional success metric could be the number of people reached. 

If you are using it to support your ABM motion, your additional success metric could be the percentage of accounts reached.

Once you see initial success, you can consider investing in more videos and start testing what types of videos perform better. For instance, if you run one video about product feature A, one about product feature B, and one testimonial, and see that feature B influences your metrics more, you could focus on creating more videos about feature B.

4. What else? 

- Run ads to your open opportunities and their buying committees to speed up the sales cycle. 

- Run ads to your audience who might not be spending a lot of time on Linkedin.

- Run ads to individual contributors if you target decision-makers; run ads to decision-makers if you target individual contributors.

- Create a remarketing audience from the people who’ve seen your ads and retarget them with other content to increase their intent levels.

5. Best practices

- Keep It Simple: This is an ad you see on TV. Put yourself in their shoes. If you were watching TV and got targeted by an ad, you’d want it to be chill. Otherwise, it might backfire and build negative brand affinity.

- Retargeting Audience: I cannot highlight the importance of this enough. Once you create a retargeting audience from the people who’ve seen your ConnectedTV ads, you can use this audience in your remarketing campaigns. Obviously, seeing these ads on TV doesn’t mean their intent is high; however, they will have more familiarity with your brand. 

- Focus Your Message: You don’t need to explain everything—just choose a few key points. Consider the intent levels; your audience wants to watch TV, so don’t bore them.

- Targeting Large Companies: Try not to target companies with 10k+ employees because they get most of the impressions. If you need to target them, do it in a separate campaign. This is a general thing with Linkedin Campaign Manager; however, with ConnectedTV, the impression share of 10k+ companies is much higher than what we usually see.

- Funnel Test: Do a funnel test and understand how metrics change among companies exposed to these videos versus those who weren’t.

- Destination URL: Make sure that you have a specific destination URL because, at the end of the video, Linkedin shows a QR code. Although most people won’t scan it, you can still track the actions of those who do.

6. Review & verification

Before going live, make sure to check:

- Is your destination URL working?

- Is your video suitable for TV?

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Once live, monitor the following:

- Cost per reach; you’d want to see a cost per reach cheaper than your Linkedin video ads.

- Review the demographics data; and check out job titles, company names, and company sizes.

7. Recap & summary

In this playbook, we’ve covered ConnectedTV ads and different ways that you can utilize these ads. Obviously, these ads need to be considered as a supplementary strategy next to your Linkedin strategy and shouldn’t replace your main ads. But they can significantly enhance your overall marketing efforts by reaching audiences that may not spend much time on Linkedin.

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Key points to remember:

Audience Engagement: ConnectedTV ads can increase brand familiarity and engagement, especially when combined with other types of content like thought leadership and product value ads.

- Measurement and Metrics: Use self-reported attribution, sales call mentions, and retargeting audience performance as indicators of success.

- Testing and Optimization:  Start with a simple campaign. Don’t forget to run funnel tests and compare results to ensure effectiveness.

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