If your business isn’t remarketing, you’re missing a great opportunity. Remarketing (aka retargeting) is a powerful advertising tool for companies, whether they’re retail shops or B2B brands. It refreshes a lead’s memory and reinforces a brand’s message.
What’s more, when you use remarketing, you engage with warm leads, prospects that already have some familiarity with what you offer. Prospects who were interested in your products once are prospects likely to be interested again. So, when your business is ready to add remarketing to its outreach efforts, here are six best practices to keep in mind!
- Set clear objectives. It’s as true for remarketing as it is with any marketing practice: it’s hard to measure success without clear goals. Instead of coming up with a generic remarketing plan and then hoping for some good to come of it, establish super-specific, tangible goals you want to achieve. Examples of clear goals might be a certain percentage boost in traffic, a specific number of new sales in a month or a certain improvement in turning last month’s visitors who didn’t buy anything into new customers. Whatever the case, you want to make your goals specific, both in what you hope to achieve and in what time frame you hope to achieve it.
- Test everything. You’ll see the best results from remarketing when you test every campaign you try. Track results on your PPC remarketing campaign for a set period of time, then change something (the call-to-action, the wording, the landing page for ads, etc.) to see how the results change. Keep conducting these trials and you’ll gain insight into what works best.
- Segment specific audiences. Set up website metrics that collect specific audiences from your site’s existing traffic - people who spend a certain amount of time on a specific product page, people who exit at the call-to-action page, etc. This establishes targeted groups to which you may remarket later.
- Create custom messages. Craft your messages to your established targeted groups. Don’t use the same call-to-action or the same advertising style with every group. Rather, take time to evaluate and analyze the needs and interests of those particular users. This is one of the most useful features of online marketing and advertising. Customized messages greatly improve results, as demonstrated through Google's dynamic remarketing where “clients (saw) click-through rates which were as much as 450% higher.”
- Limit your ads. To avoid annoying followers or turning off your audience, implement limits as to how and when your remarketing efforts will display. For online ads, for example, you can limit the impressions your ads make to fans - allowing them to show a certain number of times a day. Likewise, you’re able to limit the types of places in which your ads will show — so you can prevent your ads from appearing on sites with suggestive, juvenile, profane, etc. content.
- Use remarketing in multiple formats. There is more than one way to use remarketing, so don’t let yourself get locked into the box of thinking it’s only about Google AdWords or only about your PPC campaigns. There is also email remarketing, site remarketing, search remarketing, social media remarketing, etc. Each one presents potential value for converting specific groups of leads into customers.
Does your business already engage in remarketing, and, if so, what types? What other best practices have you seen to be important?