CTV advertising has taken over as one of the most essential pieces of any successful marketing strategy—and data enrichment is becoming a key to its success. With CTV, you can bring custom insights about your customers to a premium video content environment. This enables you to make more informed ad decisions and expand your reach.  

There also are a lot of easily accessible data sets that can be implemented quickly to get scale and initiate a CTV campaign. These off-the-shelf audiences are great ways to create brand awareness, but understanding the right audience segments that make up your core customer base is what can truly elevate your CTV initiatives. So, how do you achieve that with data enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of merging first-party data with third-party data to gain better insights about your customers. The process can be done in a variety of ways, but the most common approach is to use a data partner that has a large, high-quality database of audience data.

The data partner will match your first-party data with their database to create a more comprehensive profile of your customers. This profile can then be used to target your CTV ads and create more personalized messaging. CTV also presents the opportunity to measure the performance of the new audiences.

Let’s look at some CTV advertising challenges and how data enrichment can be used to help solve them.

3 CTV advertising challenges

So, what is keeping some advertisers from succeeding with CTV?

Knowing who your audience is: Often in CTV, advertisers are quickly adopting or executing on the channel without careful consideration of the specific strategies that need to be implemented to identify the right audience for their message. Identifying the core characteristics of your audience and understanding the activation identity layers can help enhance the performance of CTV campaigns and minimize waste.   

Finding customers similar to your loyal customer base: If a partner doesn’t have data or have the ability to share data, they can’t adequately plan and create a pool of prospective customers who are more likely to convert or engage with your brand. 

Creating meaningful strategies: Trying to overcomplicate strategies using off-the-shelf tactics and quickly pivoting when results aren’t as expected wastes time and resources. Instead, investments in meaningful prework can help in the effective design of a campaign.

With these challenges in mind, what can data enrichment do to help solve them?

Identify and reach the right audiences

Data enrichment can help you to identify the right audiences for your ads and waste less budget on impressions.

CTV gives you the capability to reach targeted audiences. Being able to understand the makeup of your core customers can lead to meaningful insights and tactics in identifying your audience in the CTV landscape.

Data enrichment also can be an ongoing tactic that is continuously refreshed, as the customer profile of your audience today, may not be the same a year from now.

Understand media consumption behaviors

Data enrichment can help you better understand media consumption behaviors as well as how your core customers like to engage with advertisements. For example, you can use third-party data sets that highlight high-indexing content data like college football viewers or comedy TV viewers to find different ways to reach your prospective audience.

In addition, you can gather insightful information about how your core customers prefer to engage with advertisements. For example, you may have a certain profile of customers that are highly engaged with the CTV channel, but a different customer profile that is more responsive to email marketing.

Expand audiences and find net new prospects

Data enrichment can also help you gain valuable behavioral information about your customers so that you can fill in the gaps and gain insights that support planning and targeting.

For example, in a recent report, Experian found that high spenders during the holiday shopping season have a higher propensity to also live in metropolitan areas and are between the ages of 20-50.

Data enrichment gives you the opportunity to find similar trends in your data and expand your targeting tactics to identify new prospects. You can also create a custom audience to expand your first-party targeting, finding more responsive prospects.

You can gather these types of insights by working with a data partner that has a large breadth of data to see trends across categories. 

Create personalized messaging

Data enrichment can help you create more personalized messaging for your CTV ads by analyzing key demographic and lifestyle attributes to find common trends in your audience. This can be used to create personalized experiences between your brand and the consumer by delivering relevant creative that appeals to your audience.

For example, a shoe brand may find that a large portion of its audience is avid runners and lives in a metropolitan area. The brand can tailor its message to talk about comfort and support on hard surfaces, and the creative can include images of people running in a city.

Enriching your first-party data is a powerful way to improve your CTV advertising results. By merging your first-party data with third-party data, you can gain better insights about your customers and target your ads more effectively. You can also create more personalized messaging and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns more accurately.