Obsessed with B2B marketing? You should be a PRO member! Join now at 25% off (or 50% off for teams).

Reaching online audiences has never been easier or more affordable. Programmatic ad buying options give advertisers access to 95% of Internet users, with more than 40,000 audience attributes and characteristics from which to target.

In short, your best prospects are readily identifiable and reachable.

But even the right audience can be hard to engage.

The key to making your audience care is relevance. Here are ten tips for maximizing relevancy.

1. Tap into users' passions

Get to know your audiences. Create profiles and personas. Go way beyond demographics. Engage with them around the issues they care about, and understand their pop culture.

Various tools and methods that can help you are right at your fingertips. Make use of audience insight features offered by Facebook, Twitter, and other networks. Follow current conversations.

Use analytic listening tools to monitor relevant topics, but engage only when it feels authentic. Your online-display ad partners have access to numerous psychographic, life-stage and other audience insights after a campaign has run, so make sure you ask for it.

Whether it's a favorite YouTube celebrity, addicting gaming app, emerging social media channel, legendary movie quote, or preferred cause, determine what your audiences find iconic, entertaining, and obsessive—and then make the most of it.

2. Layer in context and content targeting

Align with a topic that's aligned with or connected to your business, product, or service, and capitalize when your audience is already teed up to be in the right frame of mind for your message. Studies have shown that content/context targeting produces higher click-through rates than behavioral targeting.

3. Use native placement

If it looks like news, it must be news, right?

Native ad units blend in with the look and feel of a publisher's website as if it were organic content. Be willing to embrace multiple formats (varying lengths of copy, video, images). Limiting yourself to a few predesigned units will limit your results.

Nativo and Sharethrough are network solutions that provide scalable options across many publishers. Try one if you haven't already.

4. Format your content into a list

Lists allow readers to quickly scan for relevancy. Buzzfeed is one of the fastest-growing online publishers of recent years, with access to more than 200 million unique visitors per month. It has homed in on the most popular content and specializes in list, quiz, and infographic creation and sharing. Buzzfeed programs often show lifts in click-through rate and brand-affinity measures.

5. Be timely

Much of today's online inventory can be bought nearly real-time, so harness breaking news or trending topics to your advantage.

6. Use influencer marketing

Enter your email address to continue reading

Reaching Audiences Is Easy, Engaging Them Takes Relevance: 10 Tips

Don't worry...it's free!

Already a member? Sign in now.

Sign in with your preferred account, below.

Did you like this article?
Know someone who would enjoy it too? Share with your friends, free of charge, no sign up required! Simply share this link, and they will get instant access…
  • Copy Link

  • Email

  • Twitter

  • Facebook

  • Pinterest

  • Linkedin


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Pam Atkinson

Pam Atkinson is a VP and the director of connection planning at Crosby Marketing, where she leads the strategic planning, negotiating, and buying of digital, mobile, broadcast, print, outdoor, and promotional media for consumer and B2B programs.

LinkedIn: Pamela Atkinson