Many entertainment and events brands could benefit greatly from advanced digital marketing techniques that can complement their current efforts. This post is the first of a three-part series on how events and entertainment brands can incorporate some of these techniques to boost their audience engagement, drive sales and ultimately increase revenue.

What is Retargeting?

Retargeting is a digital marketing technique that allows brands to serve display ads only to people who have previously engaged with the brand online. It allows you to maximize marketing dollars by serving ads only to a pre-qualified audience and avoid wasted impressions.

So, how does this work in practice? Let’s say you’re an NFL team. To ramp up ticket sales, why not focus ads on an audience who you know is interested in your franchise? By serving ads to people who have visited your website, you know you can reach those who are most likely to purchase tickets to games. You can also add a layer of geo-targeting to ensure you only reach fans in your area.

Retargeting can also be utilized by professional sports teams in the off-season, not for ticket sales, but to keep engagement high and sell merchandise to the same audience of loyal fans.

Retargeting’s effectiveness is certainly not limited to the sporting world. In 2010, indie rock duo Chester French (Chester French’s DA Wallach is now artist in residence at Spotify) was one of the first artists to take advantage of retargeting to promote an upcoming album. Two years later, the practice is now much more common among both artists and venues looking to promote new albums or upcoming concerts.

Moving Beyond Site Retargeting: Email and CRM

While site retargeting (discussed above) is the most frequently used form of retargeting, there are many other ways to reach out to the people who have previously engaged with you online. For events or entertainment brands with large email databases, email or CRM retargeting can serve as phenomenal supplements to email marketing campaigns.

If you are operating a music festival and use email to keep in contact with your fans, you can incorporate email retargeting which will allow you to serve display ads to anyone who opens your emails, keeping your event top of mind among your email subscribers without deluging them with emails.

CRM retargeting, yet another digital marketing technology, allows you to reach with nothing but an email or a mailing address—even if they’ve never opened one of your emails. This type of marketing could be particularly valuable for annual or semi-annual music festivals, allowing the festival to stay on people’s radar in the lead up to the event.

For conferences or other events with a long list of email addresses, CRM retargeting provides an unobtrusive way to keep in front of that valuable audience.

Moving Beyond Site Retargeting: Search

If your primary marketing problem isn’t finding ways to reach out to your list or site visitors, but rather bringing people to your site for the first time, search retargeting may be the right solution.

Search retargeting allows you to serve ads to people based on their search behavior. For example, if you are releasing a movie, you can serve relevant display ads to people who search for your movie title, your starring actors’ names, different movies coming out around the same time or statements of intent such as ‘what movie to see this weekend?’ The list of potential keywords is limited only by your research and imagination.

Search retargeting is a particularly effective way to market for an event, since you can ensure you get in front of people who are searching for more information related to your event, or are searching for similar event.

Stay tuned for the next post in the series on retargeting for events and entertainment! We’ll be telling you how to optimize your creative to get the best results from a retargeting campaign, and use next generation ads to engage deeply with your audience.

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3. Does Your Domain Say “Trust Me?”
4. How to Survive the Google Penguin Update with Effective Copywriting
5. When to Post on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr for Maximum Effect [Study]

Here’s our weekly roundup of the top articles in political advertising and tech:

1. Obama, Democrats Spent 21 Million on Web Ads So Far
2. Twitter Plays Outsize Role in 2012 Campaign
3. Cookie-Based, Voter-File Ad Targeting: From Exotic to Expected in Six Months

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While online advertising is still a relative newcomer to the political space, it has managed to become a staple of political outreach. In four short years, online spending has doubled as a percentage of total political campaign spending.

Online advertising is a broad and rapidly changing field, and while consumer brands are often quick to try out the next thing in ad tech, political campaigns are historically more risk averse, as one wrong move could result in a failed campaign (and in the case of businesses, may only result in a slow quarter). And so it would follow that campaigns would end up sticking to the basics, and we’d see campaigns using techniques that the ad tech industry thinks of as old standbys.

Surprisingly, this has not been the case. Campaigns are turning toward ever more sophisticated digital offerings, and simple direct ad buys are decreasing in popularity. Political campaign spending on targeted display advertising has increased by 4157% since 2008, while run of network display buys have decreased from 23% of online political spending to a mere 3% of online political spending. In just a short time, there has been a seachange in the way campaigns spend online.

As Colin Delaney of epolitcs noted recently, while it seems are though many in the political space were only just introduced to online advertising, sophisticated online targeting has already become de rigueur.   But as he also notes, this could be a double-edged sword.

The Curse of Over-Targeting

As a rule, online ad targeting is an effective way to reach only the people who are interested in your message. Unlike many traditional forms of media, you need not cast the net too wide and pay for impressions wasted on people for whom your message is not relevant.

However, recognizing the value of online targeting, many campaigns become too eager to serve ads only to the right audience, without having a good sense of what the right audience looks like. Without a solid knowledge of what your ideal audience looks like, you could be targeting messages to the wrong people, based on false assumptions of what resonates.

It’s important to test your messaging to see what is and isn’t working with different demographic or interest groups, and vary your message accordingly. While a targeted approach is often the most effective, you don’t want to run the risk of missing out on an effective strategy because it was deemed off-target.

The Many Faces of Online Ad Targeting

Online ad targeting can be based on interests, political affiliation, demographics, the context of the site where the ad appears, geography and even people’s recent browsing activity.

While it’s often attractive to go after a certain demographic, or interest group, this type of targeting requires more from the campaign. In order for it to be effective, you must already know what messaging is attractive to which group, and that’s harder than it may seem at first blush.

In contrast, targeting based on people’s past browsing activity is often highly effective, because you’re only targeting the people who expressed interest. Retargeting, one relatively simple form of activity-based targeting, allows you to serve ads to people who have visited your site. Another form of targeting, search retargeting, allows you to serve ads to users based on keywords they’ve searched for online. These techniques are effective because the people being targeted have raised a hand expressing interest.

In the end, the most successful strategies will combine a mix of hyper-targeted messaging to the ideal audience, with a wider-net strategy. It’s key to remember that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all digital strategy.

Solar Mosaic is an innovative investment company that crowd sources funding for solar energy projects, allowing ordinary people to become investors and reap the returns of profitable investments in clean energy.  You can read more about what they do in the New York Times.

Solar Mosaic uses ReTargeter to improve brand awareness and recall and to ultimately drive casual web visitors to become profitable investors.

Here’s one of the banners Solar Mosaic was using in their retargeting campaign:

This is far from the worst banner we’ve ever seen. As banners go, this is quite close to the ideal. The branding is there, the call-to-action inhabits a clear and distinctly clickable button, and the copy is concise and descriptive. In most cases, the aforementioned attributes are woefully mishandled, resulting in bad banners.

In this case, there were a few other issues that led us to the conclusion that this banner needs a makeover.

The Branding is There….Or Is It?

While the logo is represented in the left hand corner of the banner, it’s framed in a distinct box, separating it from the rest of the content. Furthermore, its distinct box is also white, which means it could be likely to blend into the background of the sites it appears on.

With respect to the overall color scheme, we find brighter banners tend to perform better, as the pastels employed here may be unlikely to stand out sufficiently to make a strong visual impression on your users.

Banners Are a Balancing Act

Incorporating a photo of a person (more specifically, an attractive peer) is often a good idea in advertising, and banner ads are no exception. We don’t find fault with the inspiration, but rather, with the execution. Photos work extremely well when accompanied by a name and testimonial for example, or when they play a prominent role in the ad. Contrastingly, this photo seems somewhat arbitrary. Lacking is the sense that this man is a peer who has invested successfully and is now suggesting we do the same. Furthermore, the subject is cropped rather awkwardly, with just part of his face visible, and he’s looking out, away from the banner, rather than drawing us in.

While generally you want your copy to be as large and readable as possible, this tagline is overpowering and not well-balanced with the other components of the banner. The sub-tagline, ‘Invest in Solar the Profitable Way,’ is not particularly easy to read due to the lack of contrast between the font color and the background.

Here’s our version of the offending banner: 

Notice that we’ve redone the logo to be a more cohesive part of the creative.  Rather than offset in a separate box, the logo shares the same background, and is located closer to the center of the ad.

In lieu of the photo used in the previous example, we’ve decided to make the solar installations the hero. Using a photograph of a solar panel from the clients’ site, we’ve redone the banner around it. As the solar panels are actually quite stunning, and look quite a bit like Solar Mosaic’s logo, we felt it was a shame not to feature them in a banner.

The tagline highlighted here is ‘Invest in Solar,’ a more active phrase than ‘Solar Power Investments,’ which we believe will be more likely to, well, spur action. While we rarely advocate introducing more copy, in this instance we believe it was appropriate to list a few primary investment benefits under the tagline. We also wanted to be sure not to remove the word ‘profitable’ in the ad copy, as this is going to be the most salient point for investors.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

If you have a banner that needs a makeover, submit it here for consideration.