Once you know more about who visits your website and what pages they browse, it can be relatively easy to put together a strategy to reach out to those users. Thus transforming warm leads into hot ones and eventually converting people. But how can you best reach out to cold leads—those individuals who have never heard of your brand?

Online advertising is a strong contender when it comes to connecting to users who have never heard of your brand before. From expanding your reach to helping you find more customers, it’s a tried and true method which helps keep one’s sales pipeline full. You simply need to pick the right audience, content and platform to broadcast your message to the world.

Identify your target audience

The key to a successful campaign targeting cold leads is picking the right audience. As you can have the best advert in the world, but shown the wrong people, it will yield little results.

So before you launch a campaign, consider who you’re talking to, as this will allow you to personalise your message. Think about the age range, your audience’s location, their profession and interests. What challenges are these people facing, and how can your product or service help them? In addition, look at who’s visiting your website, buying your offering and analyse your competitors target audience. Even if your aim is simply to bolster your presence within a particular sector, it’s important to have a built-up profile of who you aim to be talking to.

Create one or multiple distinct persona’s whom you can reach out to. And don’t hesitate to be specific when building up a profile, as targeting anyone over the age of 40 is far too broad. Specificity will allow you to avoid spray marketing tactics and, instead, tailor the message and call-to-action to speak directly to a user’s pain point.

Using exported data about your website visitors from Leadinfo, you can easily create lookalike audiences on LinkedIn. This feature allows you to reach new potential leads which closely resemble your current client base.

Consider your messaging and content

The goal of your paid campaign targeting cold leads is to build a connection with and spark their interest. So forget the sales pitch and focus on building a genuine connection. One way to do this is by giving your audience something to relate to by telling a story. Alternatively, share a message that ignites conversation, engages emotions and gets the audience thinking about your brand.

One way to do this is to include high-quality visuals in your paid campaigns. Humans are visual creatures, and we are more likely to remember an image over text. So, whether it be an introductory video or a photo which represents what your brand stands for, use imagery to build up memorability in your audience’s mind.

Lastly, don’t forget to link your ad back to your website so that users can further explore who you are, what you have to offer and how you are unique compared to your competitors.

Decide which platform to place your ad

Your target audience and the overarching goal of brand awareness will shape which platforms you choose to advertise on. As you don’t need to advertise everywhere. Pick and choose which platform your users are most active on and will use for search queries.

Whatever medium you choose, from Google Display Network to YouTube video ads, tweak your messaging to reflect the purpose of the platform while ensuring visual consistency. Thus, enabling users to subconsciously keep building up their familiarity with your brand.

Measure your success

Many of us are familiar with conversions as a metric of success. However, that’s not a worthwhile metric to analyse for online advertising aimed at cold leads. So once you have placed your ads, here are some key performance indicators which indicate whether your campaign was a flop or not:

• Total number of impressions
• Reach
• Click-through rate
• Mentions
• Percentage of branded search

Keep optimising

The above is also a learning process which you keep refining as you go along. If some users are less inclined to click on your ad, try tweaking it by changing the format or medium. Don’t be afraid to capitalise on demographics where you seem to be popular and stop efforts where your message is not resonating.

The key to a successful online campaign that is aimed at new leads is ensuring your message matches your audience and their needs and reaches them by being visible on the channels they frequent. With these elements in place, you’re odds of increasing new audiences increase exponentially.