Let’s assume you’re familiar with marketing funnels. Traditionally, you would get someone’s contact details and then email them or call them to introduce them to your brand and familiarise them with your products and services. Then, you would entice them with something of value to draw them further into the marketing funnel. For example, you could invite them to a free workshop or seminar or offer them a free trial to experience your services. Then, you would go in for the sales pitch, and so on and so on… That’s the traditional marketing funnel. Let’s rewind back to the start… what if you didn’t get their contact details? How would you get in touch with them to kick off the process of familiarising them with your products and services and building trust in your brand? Well, you probably couldn’t do anything without at least their phone number or email address… right? Well, not anymore…
Even if you have not heard of retargeting – you’ve almost certainly experienced it on Facebook or Google. Imagine building relationships and trust with your website visitors and potential customers, without ever getting their contact details. Being able to continue the familiarisation with your products and services, making them feel comfortable with you even after they’ve visited and then left your website. Retargeting allows you to gently push your target visitor audience back to your site by educating them with content that follows them (in a non-creepy way).
What is retargeting and how does it work?
When someone visits your website, a cookie is placed on their computer or device. With the cookie placed, ads relating to the pages your visitor clicked on will be shown to them wherever they go on the internet. Google and Facebook offer retargeting systems that go as far as allowing you to create multiple retargeting ads to capture audiences at any point in your marketing funnel. You can do this using a marketing pixel, which is a small snippet of code that allows third parties to track user behaviour.
What are the objectives of retargeting?
Broadly, retargeting allows you to build relationships and trust. Earn the trust of your site visitors and potential customers by making them feel comfortable with you. More specifically, retargeting objectives depend on how likely your target audience is to convert. For your cold leads, the objective of retargeting is to create brand awareness and familiarise your visitors with your product or service. For warm leads, the objective of retargeting is to educate and create deeper interest in your brand. For your hot leads, the sole objective of retargeting is about creating a sense of urgency, which drives the sale.
Retargeting: For use at all levels of the sales funnel
When should retargeting be used?
Retargeting is excellent if your marketing funnel intends to increase brand awareness and drive conversions. Let’s consider this scenario: someone visits your website, but they don’t buy anything. Your retargeting system gets to work, and your website visitor keeps seeing your ads everywhere. They feel like they know you, and therefore, would be more open to learning about your products and services than they would from someone who they don’t know. Your retargeting system then offers them a lead magnet, something of value that draws them to your website’s landing page. Offering something valuable to your target audience for free is an excellent way to retarget warm traffic, as long as it’s specific to what they seem to be looking for when they visit your site. Retargeting allows you to personalise your approach with visitors anywhere along the marketing funnel by delivering them value tailored to their interests.
When should you avoid retargeting?
Not everyone who visits your website will fit your target audience. If you sell services in Australia, then there isn’t value in retargeting someone in Italy. Setting the location boundaries is an important aspect of retargeting. Frequency capping is another factor that many don’t consider when setting up the retargeting ads. Being retargeted 16 times for a product that you no longer want to buy is not okay. This will lead to customer fatigue and probably waste a lot of ad budget.
Hot Tip: Get creative and be personalised with retargeting!
Retargeting takes personalised marketing to another level. If someone visits your home page on your website and leaves, then don’t send them back to your home page using retargeting. Instead, use retargeting to push them to another area of your website, perhaps your client testimonials page or one of your recent blog posts.
For e-commerce websites speak to your marketer about dynamic remarketing. This will show your prospect the exact products that they looked at. How good!
Whilst it sounds obvious, most digital marketing agencies don’t take the time to personalise the experience. Ultimately, it comes down to going the extra distance to maximize the return on your digital marketing investment.
