Ready, Aim, Convert with Retargeting and Outreach Advertising

Outreach and retargeting are among the top strategies used by both large and small businesses to facilitate their lead generation, conversion and recapture initiatives. These two methods are superficially similar because they use the same channels to reach out to the targeted audience. The real differences between them however lie in their marketing intentions and goals.

Outreach advertisement is done with the aim of attracting new leads and reaching out to new marketing frontiers. Most outreach messages easily go viral and elicit emotion. Retargeting ads on the other end consists of processes and techniques aimed at recapturing traffic that had previously visited your site but for some reason abandoned a shopping basket or browsed your product pages and then left for other sites.

How Retargeting Ads Work

Research indicates that approximately 2 percent of online traffic converts during its first visit. Retargeting is a cookie-based marketing strategy used by business to reach out to the 98 percent of traffic that leave the your without converting. Most of this traffic leaves behind abandoned shopping carts.

The marketer places an invisible JavaScript tag in the footer region of the website. Whenever traffic comes to the site, it leaves a cookie in the browser which details the activities of the visitor such as the pages clicked, the products viewed and other statistics. Using these behavioral statistics, you can retarget the visitor with relevant ad when they visit other sites.

The Types of Retargeting

Apart from site retargeting where display ads are put on third party sites, there are many other types of retargeting, such as:

• Search Engine Retargeting. In this type of retargeting which is considered behavioral, the visitor will be targeted based on their search engine queries. The traffic does not need to necessarily visit your website – querying is enough to show the search engines that the visitor had an interest in your site.
• Email Retargeting. Whenever a visitor registers on your site and then abandons a shopping cart, an email will be sent to him informing him to come and complete the shopping process. This is effective especially where the abandonment was by error.
• Contextual Retargeting. This retargeting is based on partnership between sites where a visitor leaving one site for the other will find display ads for the previous site on the current one. This is because of shared cookies.

Benefits of Retargeting Ads

Retargeting acts as a reminder to your site visitors of their interest in your products or services, which can help drive them back to convert to a lead or make a purchase. You can also gain insights on how to enhance the functionality of your site so as to attract the customers back.

Outreach Ads

As noted previously, outreach ads are used to enhance brand and product exposure to audiences beyond traditional social media and search engine optimization. It is effective in expanding your target market and builds on strategic partnerships. It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting up or in the business for a long time, effective outreach advertisement can help attract new leads and increase your sales volume.

Types of Outreach Ads

There are different types of outreach programs you can use to promote your brand and products:

• Single Event Outreach. In this type of outreach advertising, you target a particular audience on a one-time basis. It happens in large events where you want to pass a message about your business or products quickly across the audience present at the event without necessarily going into details. There is no customization here and your main goal is to get your foot in the door. Single event outreach uses digital display ads, broadcasting media, traditional print, social media and also search engines to facilitate the process.
• Personal Outreach. This is a more customized approach where you target a specific segment of your audience to create awareness of your products and services. It is usually short term and done on an on-and-off basis or regularly. You can achieve personal outreach through demographic display ads or even guest posting where you provide content to third party sites and link back to your site. Alternatively, you can liaise with webmasters to promote your product for consideration.
• Consistent Outreach. In this outreach process, your target audience is usually high-priority prospects. It’s done, as its name suggests, on a consistent basis and is particularly important in driving sales during slow periods. Besides demographic display ads, you can also execute consistent outreach through email marketing and social media platforms.