4 CTV challenges for B2B and how to overcome them

CTV advertising introduces unique challenges in targeting, measurement and creative supply — and that’s just for B2C brands. Throw in B2B’s long sales cycle, the measurement nuances that come with it and the wrinkle of humanizing services or tech products through great creative. You can understand why B2B brands have been slow to integrate CTV into their marketing portfolios.

Now, understandable doesn’t mean strategic. There are many advantages available to B2B companies willing to do the work to run CTV campaigns, including relatively low (compared to Google and LinkedIn) costs and the chance to build a brand differentiated from CTV-shy competitors. 

To fully realize CTV’s potential, B2B marketers must overcome four key challenges: 

• Crafting compelling creative.
• Targeting the right audiences.
• Measuring bottom-funnel impact.
• Achieving meaningful scale. 

1. B2B creative for CTV

Making creative pop for B2B is tough for a couple of reasons. 

• The product or service is often tech-based, which doesn’t naturally lend itself to emotional appeal. 
• The audience’s needs are business-related rather than personal, creating a layer of distance.

Add to that the fact that approximately 95% of B2B buyers aren’t in market and looking for what you might be selling, and you can see that developing creative that connects is a fairly tall order.

The challenge is best addressed on two fronts:

• Developing general brand creative that highlights core value propositions for awareness.
• Developing problem-solving creatives targeted to buyers nearing a decision and focused on the specific pain points your product or service solves.

As for emotions, while humor and heartstrings are reliable options for great B2C creative, B2B is much less about heartstrings. Ideate how to layer in humor and ensure the creative feels relatable to the buyer persona. Are the people shown in the ad representative of who would benefit from your product?

If a potential buyer (or purchase influencer) can laugh and recognize themselves in your creative, you’ve helped build affinity and awareness for your brand, no matter the user’s stage of purchase intent.

Dig deeper: How to make CTV ads that stick

2. B2B targeting

With the exception of LinkedIn, most platforms have a much easier time targeting users for B2C campaigns, whether through interests, demographics or a combination of both. There are plenty of reasons for this. 

For example, there’s no such thing as a B2B impulse purchase. Only a small segment of people watching TV would see your offer as relevant. Still, there are also a couple of ways to counteract it:

• IP address targeting (both corporate and household) is a core foundation of measurement. Device graphs that tie IPs to business/personal emails make this effective.
• Firmographic data (e.g., company size and industry) will become more popular as LinkedIn takes its CTV push seriously.

Many platforms are still B2C-centric and cookie-reliant, but LinkedIn’s CTV push offers potential by combining its rich user data with IP-level targeting for B2B precision. 

IP address targeting that connects to LinkedIn user profiles will let you use LinkedIn’s access to first-party professional data like job title, industry and company, which isn’t something you’ll get from other platforms.

Dig deeper: LinkedIn introduces CTV ads for B2B campaigns

3. Bottom-funnel measurement

I’ve written plenty about how to measure CTV’s actual impact. (TL;DR: Structure strategic tests and be prepared to show CTV’s influence on other, more performance-oriented channels.) However, the initiative gets more challenging with B2B’s long sales cycles and multi-user buying committees. 

The key is setting expectations and implementing robust measurement to track touchpoints over time. For example, someone who saw an ad six months ago and now visits the website. With the proper tracking, long sales cycles can still be connected back to CTV exposure.

4. B2B scale

Other than notable exceptions like Salesforce and HubSpot, very few B2B products or services boast the audience size of a B2C product. Scale can be a massive challenge for B2B campaigns on any channel.

Luckily, we don’t measure B2B campaigns like we do B2C campaigns. In B2B, scale is less about quick wins and more about making sure you’re consistently reaching the right people and tracking their actions across the funnel.

Because sales are usually big-ticket revenue boosts, you don’t need to target millions of people to get a benefit — you need to target the right people so they’re more likely to choose your brand when it’s purchase time.

Instead of fast-response metrics, focus on cumulative reach and frequency over long intervals with the right audience. If you’re hitting the right audience with effective creative and messaging, you will see an impact on your pipeline and revenue.

Dig deeper: 2025 is the year for B2B brands to embrace CTV

Wrapping up

Other than huge brands like IBM, there aren’t many B2B companies playing in the CTV (or linear TV, for that matter) space. This means you can use CTV’s storytelling capabilities to help your brand build awareness and affinity faster than your competitors.

You may not get instant sales (or a Cannes award) for doing it, but done well (and measured effectively) over time, CTV will pay you back in spades.