Why Remarketing is The Key to ROI

When you hire a company to do your marketing today, they should always talk to you about remarketing. Yes, I’m sure I’ll get comments on this, but hear me out. You’ve got to take advantage of the technology available today. This isn’t 2001, when you divide your spending by the amount of leads, then declare success or failure. In today’s competitive marketplace, if you simply broadcast that you have stuff to buy, you are likely to not see the ROI you want online. You’ve got to take a holistic approach. Before the days of the internet, if someone came into your store, looked around, tried on your shirt or check out your products, but then left without purchasing, there was no way to guarantee you’d ever see them again.

However, remarketing allows you to reach out to those prospects who are on the fence. When someone browses your website but doesn’t convert, it’s now possible for you to pop up again in their field of vision through the power of remarketing! You can target them with your advertising on other websites, messages, and even email, and hopefully staying top of mind will eventually lead to a sale or having them do something that is a goal for you.

This already sounds like a pretty great marketing tactic, right? It is, but there are ways to build a remarketing strategy that can take your efforts to the next level and get even more conversions from interested prospects. Here’s how you do it.

1. What Do You Want?

As with any great marketing campaign, an effective remarketing strategy starts with goal setting. What are you trying to do with these ads? This will depend on the kind of business you run. If yours is an e-commerce shop, selling relatively inexpensive items, you might be looking to get someone to make a purchase.

However, for those who run businesses with longer sales cycles—for example, a B2B consulting firm, or insurance that someone will keep for a long time — your ideal conversion might not be a sale. Instead, it might be getting someone to give their email in exchange for access to a free ebook.

No matter what kind of business you run, it makes sense to set really specific goals for each remarketing campaign. Rather than creating one ad that you hope will serve various audiences, it’s best to establish a handful of specific goals and then create different ads that speak to each goal.

2. Fish Where the Fish Are…

Remarketing can be done via search engines like Google or through social media sites like Facebook. Once you’ve established your goals, you can begin to think about the  platforms make the most sense for your ads and how to best place your ads on them.

The major benefit to advertising on social media is that you are likely to get likes, shares, comments, and reposts from interested people (and since you’re retargeting your messaging to those who have already been to your website, you know they’re already interested in your brand!). Search engine marketing, however, will follow your customers across any websites that are ad partners with the search engine you do business with. This means that your audience will be greeted with your advertising across the web, not just on the social media site you’ve selected.

There’s no need to limit yourself to one platform. There’s often a huge benefit to being seen multiple times by your audience. Most people need to see a brand five to seven  times before they even decide to engage with them (let alone buy something), so the more times you can get your name and products in someone’s field of vision, the better.

3. Define Your Audience

Once you’ve come up with your set of goals, you can begin to define your audience and see what they are most interested in. Let’s say you own a pet supply store that has both a brick and mortar and e-commerce presence. There are a number of ways, then, that you can and should break down your audience.

You can segment and target based on location. The people who have visited your website and live within a certain radius of your store can be targeted with advertising about your actual store. These ads, of course, are not relevant to people living on the other side of the country, so those folks should instead be targeted with advertising specific to your e-commerce offerings.

Those who have visited your store and browsed your pet options, you can retarget with messaging specific to their specific pet options. You can even retarget customers who have taken specific actions on your website. For example, you can set your campaign to only show to customers who have put items into their cart on your site and then left  without completing the purchase.

The goals you set for each campaign will effectively be aligned with a specific audience. Defining the audience for your campaign early on ensures that your advertising is only being shown to the most relevant people, meaning you’ll get the greatest ROI on your campaign.

4. Get Creative

Once you’ve set goals and decided on your target audience, it’s time to settle on your creative. A huge part of creating great content is understanding your audience and speaking to them in your brand’s voice and tone.

There are also tools that help you to optimize your approach when it comes to content. Each platform has its own ways to “assist” in building ads and using the assets you have. Just be aware that you need to pay attention to which ads ultimately pay off. Some of the platforms make it very easy to spend money. Pick one or two ways to remarket on each platform, run them, then analyze. Don’t do everything at once.

5. Test, test, test… track, track, track.

The final step is to get your ads up and running! Fortunately, advertising platforms provide detailed analytics so that you can accurately measure the results of your campaigns. The analytics allow you to measure engagement and conversions on each ad. Armed with this information, you can tweak your strategy as you go.

If there are certain ads that aren’t doing well, consider changing up the creative. If there are certain websites where retargeting is not effective, you can ask that Google not show your advertising on those sites any longer. Being willing to pivot and change tactics along the way is a huge part of finding long-term success with your retargeting efforts.

Remarketing is an incredible opportunity for you to recapture the attention of consumers who have already shown interest in your brand. When you take things step-by-step and develop a real strategy for reaching out to various segments of your audience, you can create campaigns with a great ROI.