B2B Startups Need to Leverage Retargeting

For those not familiar with retargeting, it may take a moment for the concept to take hold. For nearly all of media history, mediums that attracted a certain demographic of readers, viewers or listeners could sell advertising to those who targeted that same demographic. The internet added a new twist by giving people new ways to segment demographics. Google leveraged users’ search terms (key words) as a way to identify a target demographic while Facebook collected seemingly everything about each user: age, gender, address, like-clicks, relationship status, etc.

But despite these advancements in data collection for demographic targeting, retargeting firms like AdRoll, Triggit, and TellApart may have created the most intelligently targeted form of advertising yet. They are completely medium agnostic and use almost no data. Instead, they use cookies to tag users who have visited their clients’ websites. This form of advertising appears to deliver better results than either Google key words or Facebook demographics. You’ve probably noticed this already if you are in sales. You research a company and suddenly you see its online advertisements seemingly everywhere. The one downside to retargeting is that it can be a little creepy—as if you are being stalked—if the advertiser gives you too high a volume of ads relative to other advertisements you see.

Most of what has been written about retargeting has focused on increasing sales for B2C businesses. But retargeting also looks very promising for B2B businesses, especially startups and high growth companies. Think about it. Newer B2B businesses invest heavily to get potential customers to visit their websites. But unless the target customers enter their contact information, the target person disappears into the proverbial ether. Newer B2B businesses compete in a crowded marketplace, not because they have many direct competitors but because their target customers have so many different investment options available to them but can only pursue a few. After investing heavily to create a website visit, retargeting ensures the visitor won’t simply forget about your business within the throng of others. An occasional advertisement can do the job.

We’ve just started using retargeting at Ultriva. Initially, the hits were low because we only recently started dropping the retargeting cookies on our visitors. But as time has moved forward, the impressions have begun to increase. So far actual click-through statistics are low but we realize these were the visitors who left our website without leaving their proverbial business card behind.

If you are in a growing B2B business and you are not using retargeting already, this is your chance to deliver targeted advertising to individuals who were interested enough to visit your website but not ready to do more at that time.