November 3, 2022
Tech companies often fall back onto remarketing because they offer far more complex products and a slower sales process than other industries. So much so that research from Enlyft ranks financial services, computer software and IT services as among the top 10 users of Google Ads.
Remarketing campaigns essentially allow your company to follow potential customers around the web and drop subtle reminders to make a purchase. A technique that helps brands stay at the forefront of customers’ minds in a world filled with intense competition and distractions.
Remarketing involves targeting prospects who’ve interacted with your brand and visited your website. It allows advertisers to track prospects' internet activity and serve ads based on the actions they've taken such as the pages visited, products and services viewed, time spent on site, and much more.
These insights are all possible thanks to website cookies, which save users' information every time they visit a website on their computer or mobile device. Arguably the most common form of remarketing is the Google Display Network, which includes tons of websites and apps. If you use Google AdWords, then you may already have remarketing ads that appear throughout the Google Display Network.
But there's more to remarketing than just Google Display, you can also create remarketing ads through social channels such as Facebook and Twitter. The millions of users on these social channels provide a great platform for reaching prospects. Compared with display ads that scream ‘pushy sales’, programmatic native ads blend in with the content an Internet user is already consuming.
Both remarketing and retargeting share the same goal: to capture leads who have yet to convert. As a result, these two terms are often used interchangeably. However, they use different strategies: Retargeting involves creating ads for potential customers based on cookies while remarketing usually deals with email campaigns that re-engage customers in their inboxes. For example, a remarketing campaign might include emailing a customer after they’ve visited your website and left an abandoned shopping cart.
Remarketing has many benefits, regardless of industry or sector:
Remarketing goes far beyond simply showing an ad to someone that’s visited your site. By implementing one or several of these proven strategies, you can increase engagement, ensure you achieve the highest return on your investment and drive sales.
Creating a sequential or time-based remarketing campaign allows you to move beyond a simple one-step sales process and embrace a more complex customer journey. Most customers wait before making a purchase, especially if the purchase comes with a high price tag or long commitment like an annual subscription.
Lag time is the time between when a customer first interacts with your brand to final conversion. You can see your customers average lag time by going into Google Analytics, under "Conversions" and clicking the drop-down button for "Multi-Channel Funnels". You can then use time-based remarketing campaigns based on how long it's been since customers’ first point of contact and then display targeted, personalised ads. For example, a prospect that visited your site weeks ago might need more convincing. So, you can show them an ad that offers social endorsement, or explains why your product is better than competitors.
Location-based retargeting allows you to target customers who’ve already expressed an interest in a specific location. This is a great opportunity for companies that operate in multiple locations or markets.
When someone visits your location page and creates a cookie, you can track their behaviour and advertise to them, allowing you to target location-specific specials to a very precise, local audience.
As customer’s become more advanced, digital marketing is starting to move from computer-centric (keyword stuffing anyone?!) to a customer-savvy approach. Intent mapping falls naturally into this second category as it focuses on the customer’s intent and how to move them along the sales’ funnel. For example, Google gathers information on users’ behaviour based on the terms they type into the search bar.
Understanding these queries and where they fall in your customer journey can help you determine where someone falls in the sales funnel, allowing you to tailor your remarketing ads and digital content accordingly. Someone who searches for ‘black adidas trainers’ is closer to conversion than another customer that searches ‘men’s trainers’. Take this a step further; someone who searches ‘best deal on black adidas trainers near me’ will probably purchase today, if not in the next hour, and they’re in a hurry to do so.
Targeting high transactional customers with your remarketing campaigns can bring back customers who’ve left items in their shopping carts and help them get over the final barriers to purchasing. To do this, you’ll need to set up every page to collect data on your customers as well as your remarketing audiences. Then arrange these audiences based on their forecasted business value, ranking in order of least likely to most likely to convert. Customers most likely to convert are those that have visited your price page, added an item to their basket, started a free trial or demo but haven’t purchased…yet.
Page/product-based retargeting is suitable for when a prospect views a specific page on your website; Say for example, you’ve launched a marketing campaign for an e-book, you can then use product-based retargeting to create ads that direct people to download your e-book after a visitor browses a specific product page or article on your site.
Not using search retargeting is a missed opportunity for high-volume businesses, but it’s only really useful for sites with at least 1,000 visitors a month. Google's Search Network allows you to display your ads next to search results when someone searches with terms related to one of your keywords. Using Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA), you can customise your search ad campaigns for people who have previously visited your website.
Many companies mistakenly believe that remarketing is only for attracting new customers. But, this simply isn’t true. Remarketing for current customers encourages growth of your company as these prospects have already shown an interest in your product or services so they're more likely to buy another product from you than new customers.
Research shows it's five times more expensive to get new customers and clients than to encourage repeat orders. By targeting current customers, you get the biggest bang for your buck.
There are many ways to retarget current customers.
Now that you're familiar with remarketing and the different strategies, it's time to discover some of the remarketing tools that can make your campaign more efficient and streamlined.
You can start building a remarketing campaign by using a CRM system. CRM systems allow you to manage customer data and upload it to a variety of ad platforms such as AdRoll, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google for RLSA. Alternatively, you can install a pixel/line of code supplied by each of these platforms onto your website. Google Tag Manager makes this easy to set-up.
Setting up remarketing campaigns is pretty similar across all platforms, but, here are a few examples to get you started. Google Ads remarketing campaign:
Adroll remarketing campaign:
LinkedIn remarketing campaigns:
On YouTube, you can remarket with a video, banner or display ad, if a user:
You can also integrate your YouTube ad campaign with Google Display Network.
While it’s easy to dismiss YouTube as a platform for kids, doing so would be a mistake. YouTube is actually the second largest search engine after Google. It welcomes over 1.5 billion logged-in users per month, which presents unique remarketing opportunities. Since you don’t have to log-in to search Google, Google can’t collect specific information about its audience and can only make educated guesses about a searcher’s demographics.
YouTube, on the other hand, has billions of ‘authenticated’ journeys a month, which allows you to target a specific audience more accurately than other search engines. Learn more about YouTube and how you can leverage it to maximise your marketing campaigns here.
Myfix Cycles, a bike retailer, creates retargeting campaigns for three groups of customers:
By targeting these users, the company generated a 1,529% ROI on their ad spend and achieved a 6.38% click-through rate on ads.
CrowdStreet, a SaaS company in the commercial real estate (CRE) funding industry, wanted to update their brand by launching an ABM campaign to target their three unique audiences: sponsors, investors and CRE influencers. The campaign involved email outreach to influencers and digital ads.
eBags automated their retargeting bidding process by using the AdWords Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) tool to create RLSA and Gmail Sponsored Promotions. These promotions aimed to cross-sell related products to customers who had recently bought a product from other retailers. This approach allowed them to increase their revenue by 15%.
Remarketing can provide a great return-on-investment and is often a savvy way to drive sales, boost customer retention and attract new prospects. Once you get the hang of it, remarketing is easy to set-up and typically delivers a higher ROI than prospecting. Find out more about remarketing at Growth Gorilla, the experts in growth marketing.
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