Over-the-top (OTT) marketing is one of the best ways to reach an audience that's truly interested in what you're selling. You can use OTT advertising to reach people who don't watch live TV, with the ability to connect with more targeted audiences and keep them from skipping your ads. As more people subscribe to digital video and streaming services, it's now more important than ever to take advantage of this growing opportunity.
According to research from Roku, around 60 million households in the U.S. will completely transition to streaming services by 2025. Many of those households will likely be among the over 260,000 in Portland alone. If you want to maximize your reach in this city and beyond, incorporating OTT marketing into your ad campaigns could help you thrive.
The following are some helpful tips that cover how to market on OTT and connect with your target audience. By putting these into practice, you'll be able to launch a successful Portland, Oregon marketing strategy with OTT advertising.
1. Hyper-Focus Your Target Audience
One of the key advantages of OTT marketing is the ability to keep your audiences highly targeted. This is crucial if you want to connect with specific communities like Portland. By hyper-focusing your campaigns, OTT ads will appear for this audience in the right place at the right time.
For example, you may want to reach your audiences at a specific time of day when they're most active on streaming services. For many working professionals, the appropriate times could fall on evening hours after work or at various times during the weekend. At the same time, the audience interested in your products or services is likely interested in specific networks. With a hyper-focused campaign, you can push ads through the right network at a time when this audience is most likely to be watching.
2. Utilize Cross-Channel Retargeting
Your OTT ads don't have to be limited to streaming services, either. Through the use of cross-channel retargeting, your OTT ads could also appear on other platforms that prospects use. This can be invaluable to your marketing efforts, considering that 87% of retailers agree that marketing with multiple channels was integral to their success.
For instance, you could have an OTT ad that connects with prospects through their TVs. Through retargeting, you can supplement those ads with others that show up in other streaming services, display ads, audio ads, and others. As a result, you'll be able to use the OTT ecosystem to connect with audiences long after that initial encounter with your brand.
Using a cross-channel marketing strategy will help you stay in the minds of prospects, eventually turning them into leads and customers. Cross-channel ads can also help build more trust among audiences as you become more recognizable. Through repeat exposure, people will be more encouraged to learn about your company and what you have to offer.
3. Customize Your Ads
If you want to reach people who will truly be interested in your products or services, you need to develop specifically targeted ads. Generic ads simply won't cut it if you want to reach your audiences. Instead, try to personalize your ads to satisfy the ideal audience.
The beauty of OTT is that you can more easily tailor your ads to connect with audiences based on their interests. For instance, you could have two different ads with different messaging based on two target audiences. One could highlight a specific service that benefits them, while the other could cover another service. Using a highly targeted campaign, both ads can appear on each audience's preferred network and time slot. Personalized retargeting campaigns could then connect with each audience to push more relevant ads.
With the help of custom ads, you'll be able to reach multiple audiences with campaigns that speak more directly to them.
4. Play Into the Portland Market
Geography could largely influence the types of OTT ad campaigns your business runs. If you want to connect with the Portland market, it's important to have a good understanding of audiences in this area. For example, one of the most popular industries in Portland is software IT. People working in IT are tech-savvy prospects who are likely to spend a lot of time on the internet. Subsequently, targeting this audience could start with a relevant OTT ad campaign that appeals to their streaming preferences. This is followed by a retargeting campaign that appears on other websites they're likely to visit on a daily basis, exposing them to your brand every day.
If you can gain a deeper understanding of your target market in Portland and other cities, you'll be able to maximize the effectiveness of your OTT ads.
Taking each of these tips into consideration, you can develop a winning OTT ad campaign. If you can learn more about your audience and create highly specific ads, you'll be able to connect with the Portland market and many others. For help with your Portland, Oregon marketing, consider working with a local media partner to get started on building a successful campaign.
