How Does Your Performance Grow? For Home and Garden Brands, It’s With Connected TV

April showers bring May flowers, or so the adage goes. It holds true for many home and garden brands, as well — if by “showers” you mean “ad spend,” and by “flowers” you mean “great marketing outcomes.”

To get a better understanding of how this vertical approaches their marketing strategies, we explored how real home and garden advertisers on the MNTN platform are taking advantage of Connected TV to drive great results, along with recent trends in both consumer and advertising spend.

The Two Types of Home and Garden Brands

Before we get started, it’s important to establish that how home and garden marketers approach their ad strategies depends entirely on whether their brands have more of a focus on home improvement (such as power tools and sodding services) or decor (like furniture and fixtures). Consumer spending on home and garden follows a different seasonal pattern depending on that category. As a result, the best time to advertise will differ for the two segments of these brands. For the sake of brevity in this digest, we will call all brands under the home improvement, outdoor services, and tools umbrella “improvement” brands, and those in the furniture, interior decorating, and appliances categories “decor” brands. 

Improvement brand ad spend and consumer purchasing behavior tends to follow the ebbs and flows of seasonal weather — picking up during the sunny spring and summer months, then falling off toward the end of autumn as winter weather looms large. Many advertisers in this category therefore tend to focus their advertising efforts on holidays like Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day — allowing their creative to capture that summer feeling with bright colors and lifestyle content. 

Decor brands, on the other hand, can expect consumer spending to follow a more typical direct-to-consumer purchase cycle. These home goods are often bought at a constant rate throughout the year, then see interest pick up during the winter holiday season, as consumers cooped up by bad weather seek to improve their indoor spaces. And by taking advantage of shopping holidays like Black Friday weekend, the winter holiday season, and resolution season in early January (aka Q5), decor brands can draw in new and old customers alike with seasonal deals and gifting ideas. 

You can see what the combination of both of these categories looks like in monthly home and garden TV ad spend in the chart below. 

MNTN Advertisers Know the Grass Is Greener on CTV

To see how home and garden brands are taking advantage of Connected TV to reach their ideal consumers, we took a look at our own MNTN Performance TV data. Here’s what we found: 

Spending Calendar

Like the spend calendar diagram above, home and garden brands tend to follow a predictable pattern of Connected TV spending, with bumps in both the summer and winter months, and more consistent spend through the rest of the year.

We also broke down the home and garden segment into the two main categories — improvement and decor — and took a look at how their higher-spend time frames differed: 

Decor Brands 

Decor brands followed a more typical “product based” timeline with their Connected TV advertising. While there was a slight bump in spending during the spring months, around holidays like Mother’s Day, the biggest increase comes at the end of the year around Black Friday and the typical holiday season.

Improvement Brands

Home and garden brands that lean more towards improvement also followed the expected timeline — increasing spend in the summer months, when the weather allows most Americans to finally tackle their home improvement projects. 

Of course, not all parts of the country have the same distinct seasons. While, say, building an outdoor deck in New Hampshire in November would be unwise, that time of year is much milder out in California. That’s why working with a CTV advertising partner or platform with robust audience targeting can be so important for home and garden brands. By factoring those kinds of geographical differences into your audience-targeting strategy for your CTV campaigns, an improvement brand based in colder climes could ostensibly reach DIY-minded consumers in more temperate climates during off months, when competition is far scarcer. 

Goal Breakdown

When looking at home and garden brands on the MNTN Performance TV platform, we found that most advertisers were using CTV for prospecting efforts — around 64%. But brands were taking advantage of CTV’s retargeting capabilities, too, with around 36% running campaigns aimed at recapturing users that didn’t convert the first time. 

Also, nearly two in three (65.5%) of home and garden advertisers on the MNTN platform optimized their goals towards ROAS. This suggests that they see Performance TV as a real means of driving measurable return on their spend, and ultimately trust this channel to deliver on marketing metrics and KPIs that most directly impact bottom lines. 

Performance ‘22 vs. ‘23

We also took a look at the performance and spending of MNTN home and garden brands in 2023 and compared it to data from 2022, to see how the vertical has evolved.  

Overall, home and garden brands increased ad spend for their Connected TV campaigns over that year. With the number of impressions served increasing by 29.7% from 2022 to 2023, it’s clear that these brands are increasing their confidence — and in turn, their investment — in CTV as they increasingly see their desired results. 

Speaking of results, home and garden brands saw improvements in a number of key metrics between from 2022 to 2023. We found that impressions increased by 29.7% and visits by 26.9%, showing that the increase in spend has directly created more interest from consumers. Other metrics that saw improvement during that time period were conversions and even revenue, as seen in the image below. 

Spending Trends for Home and Garden

To truly understand recent trends in consumer spending for the home and garden vertical, it’s important to take into account an event that changed the status quo for a while: the COVID-19 pandemic. The chart below — which tracks the particular category of lawn and garden supplies within the home and garden vertical — shows that while there was fairly consistent improvement each year, the lockdowns of COVID sent that spending into overdrive. (After all, staring at your own garden all day can make you start to see where the flower beds could use some improvement.)

These days, that increase in spending continues. One study found that Americans have spent a whopping 932.77 billion USD since 2022. And for home improvement brands, a trend in DIY projects has exploded, indicating increased consumer interest in personalized spaces — Americans spent $601.8 billion on DIY home improvements since 2022. 

CTV Is the Key to Home and Garden Success

For home and garden brands, understanding the unique buying cycles of their consumers and then leveraging the power of Connected TV to reach them is the surest way to cultivate success. And these advertisers know it — increasing CTV spend by 34% overall translated to tangible results, with significant improvements in impressions, visits, conversions, and revenue.

The key takeaway? The best way for home and garden advertisers to not only reach their ideal customers, but also cultivate lasting relationships that drive sales and growth, is through CTV advertising — specifically with an audience-first approach. These brands should seek to work with a CTV advertising partner with granular audience-targeting capabilities — ensuring ads reach the right people, at the right time, and maximizing campaign effectiveness, regardless of seasonal fluctuations or geographic location. By taking this approach, home and garden brands can build campaigns that last, and ensure their marketing efforts bloom year-round.