Capturing the Right Online Audience to Increase Sales

Every brand looking to build an online audience has been through the following scenario:

First: Invest heavily in a giveaway, promotion, marketing campaign, etc. to drive traffic to the website.

Second: Do a happy dance as Google Analytics numbers and website impressions skyrocket.

Third: Marketing campaign ends, and numbers decline. Begin searching for the next great idea to drive traffic to the website.

Fourth: Wish for a way to reach users who have dropped off at the shopping cart or product page, and those like them.

Breaking the Cycle

There are two ways to build your online audience that don’t involve site-specific digital display, content marketing, email, or social media advertising. One is to recapture those who have visited your site through a retargeting campaign. The other is to use data consumers leave in their digital trail to target ads to a specific audience who are likely to be interested in your product.

Re-Targeting Your Online Audience

Conventional sales knowledge tells us that it costs 10x as much to sell to a new customer as it does to sell to an existing customer. Clients who have purchased your products are familiar with your company. Therefore, if they have had a good experience, the customer education and trust building portion of the pitch has already been accomplished. Your job is simply to identify a new or recurring need and then fulfill that need for them.

The same is true in a broader sense when we talk about an online audience: a customer who has visited your site already knows what you have to offer. Hopefully, they have a good impression of your company from your online presence. Through a retargeting campaign, you can follow these individuals to their favorite website or social media platform and present them with an advertisement. These campaigns are budget-specific, and every dollar spent on this effort is marketing to users who at one point were interested in your product or service. The challenge is simply to recapture their interest and push them toward conversion.

For more on how retargeting works, read this blog article by Digital Content Manager Tyler Buscemi.

Programmatic Advertising

But what if you don’t already have a strong flow of traffic to your website? You can actually build your online audience to target your end customer with technology known as Programmatic Advertising. This technique utilizes all available data to make decisions in real time about the advertisement that is delivered to the consumer.  This approach allows us to deliver the right ad to the right audience, in the correct geo-location, on the right scale, on the right device.

For example, if you are selling products in-store for private land hunters to feed and supplement their deer herd, you can reach a targeted audience of users who have researched topics related to land ownership and hunting. You can narrow this down to a specific location and population demographic (men and women 25-55 who live within 100 miles of your store). If your ads are being served in the spring planting season, we can give preference to sites such as The Weather Channel which this audience might be looking at multiple times a week.

How it Works

Programmatic advertising takes into consideration everything we know about the audience based on the individual’s internet consumption habits over time. This information is then utilized to place ads over an exchange to maximize the value of each impression. These impressions are sometimes offered at a premium price, and with good reason: the click-through rates are some of the highest we have ever seen.

Rather than buying a million impressions on one individual website and committing to that over a period of time, a brand can split these impressions across multiple publishers, targeting a particular audience segment.

The key to a successful programmatic advertising effort is to shift funds when and where appropriate to maximize the ROI of your campaign.

Let us Help

At UrgeMedia, our team specializes in helping outdoor brands grow their business. With your set retargeting and programmatic campaign budgets, we can help you connect to end users who are interested in your products. Our microsponsorship strategy can be tailored to fit any budget. If you are interested in seeing how our experienced team can help you reach your sales goals, give us a call at 970.328.8001.