Marketing in the 21st-century is more complex and technical than ever before due to changes wrought by digital marketing. One of the most sophisticated changes challenging marketing professionals is technical and building a remarketing strategy is just one example of the digital tools designed to boost market performance.
As you see in the image above, remarketing involves sending an ad to a user’s phone or another device selectively based on a prior visit to your website. Since a prior visit signals interest in your brand, advertising reminds visitors about your brand, thus increasing conversion.
Sure, bringing people to your website is easier than ever but few visitors convert. Average conversion rates across the US were a measly 2.57% of visits in 2020. This low conversion rate wastes time and resources used to drive the visit in the first place. In fact, 96% of first-time visitors aren’t ready to make a purchase. Remarketing targets visitors who already visited your website or social media platform, hence showing an interest in your brand. That makes these warm leads and, like any good salesperson, you don’t abandon warm leads but enact tactics to encourage conversion. By remarketing to these people – reminding them of the time they spent on your platform – you build your business by enhancing performance.
Today, I’d like to share aspects of remarketing strategy you can use to benefit from this awesome tool to drive sales.
What is remarketing strategy?
According to Google, remarketing is:
a way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app. It allows you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences as they browse Google or its partner websites, thus helping you increase your brand awareness or remind those audiences to make a purchase.
Social media platforms also offer options to remarket to website visitors in your advertising. In the case of Google, remarketing works by selectively showing ads to prior visitors, which involves adding a snippet of code to your website that attaches to visitors. For social media, most platforms require adding a pixel (formerly a small 1px by 1px image, now simply a code snippet) to your website pages. In either case, you set up remarketing at the time you create ads by identifying the code snippet used.
Building a successful remarketing strategy involves choosing the right type of remarketing and implementing the strategy by inserting codes and creating events related to your strategy.
Advantages of remarketing
A remarketing strategy delivers a variety of benefits to your brand resulting in higher conversion rates and a higher ROI. Below are just a few of the many advantages of remarketing
Convert more leads
A lot of energy and other resources go into attracting customers to your site, so when they leave, all that time and money was wasted. A remarketing strategy offers a second chance to convert visitors once they left your website or social platform. Moreover, retargeting often reaches prior visitors at the right time as they’re searching for other options to satisfy their needs or searching other platforms for information.
But, the advantage of retargeting isn’t limited to undifferentiated visitors. You can build a list of high-value visitors, such as those who added an item to their cart then abandoned the purchase. You can also set up remarketing based on visits to certain pages in your advertising strategy. And, don’t forget that you can target them with personalized ads, too.
Reinforce your brand
Like everything else in marketing, conversion is only one metric (albeit an important one). You also want your target marketing to value your brand and remarketing is a part of building favorable attitudes toward your brand.
By delivering targeted content based on their individual customer journey, you ensure they think of you in a positive light rather than a brand that doesn’t care for anything except closing a deal at all costs. Through social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok you target those most interested in your brand with advertising that meets their needs. Whether you increase awareness via natural or paid advertising, the goal is the same – to get into their minds and form positive associations. Once this happens, you’ll find that consumers are more loyal due to the simple fact that they think of you more often.
Remarketing is flexible
A one-trick pony only works once. After that, it’s effectiveness is blunted, and the same applies to inflexible marketing methods. Remarketing doesn’t apply since you can create ads for numerous platforms, from social media sites to YouTube videos and Google search results.
As a form of digital marketing, you can outsource remarketing strategy as you would any other digital project. In fact, most digital advertising agencies offer packages including remarketing as part of their advertising. The opportunities are endless, and it’s this potential that is powerful for brand expansion.
You cut costs
Money is always an issue, especially when there isn’t enough to go around (which seems a perennial part of marketing regardless of firm size) and you have competing demands for available funds. Cutting costs is essential, yet it’s hard to do without impacting quality. Remarketing strikes a perfect balance between saving money and maintaining a high level of quality while producing high ROI.
Remember that the people you advertise to are already interested, so there’s no reason to invest as many resources for a conversion. The money you keep you can spend on other essentials to keep the company ticking over.
In a case study, we find remarketing produced an ROI of 1300% and an increase in average order value of 13%. while decreasing costs by 34%.
Types of remarketing
Remarketing isn’t a monolithic strategy but involves choosing between different retargeting options and advertising types, such as display, search, or social. To simply today’s discussion, I’ll focus on Google remarketing strategy options, since social offers a less robust remarketing solution.
Standard remarketing
Standard remarketing works on ads placed in the Google Display Network (GDN) and selectively shows ads to prior visitors to your website. This matches much of our conversion in earlier sections.
Dynamic remarketing
Dynamic remarketing is a step above standard remarketing and produces superior results by matching ads to the pages visited prior to seeing the ad. Thus, if I visited a page for black dress shoes, rather than seeing a general ad for Zappos or an even more general ad for a department store, I see specific ads for black dress shoes. Since these ads are more targeted, they likely produce more interest and drive a future visit.
Video remarketing
Video remarketing shows your ads to folks who interacted with your videos or YouTube channel. This strategy words by showing ads on both the GDN and YouTube.
Customer list remarketing
The most selective tool of all for remarketing, customer list remarketing involves uploading lists of clients or subscribers when crafting ads. When a person on the list is signed in to Google, they view your ads across multiple Google products such as search and gmail.
Final thoughts
While remarketing might represent a complex strategy that’s new to your marketing, about 71% of firms use remarketing. I hope this post convinced some of you to give it a whirl next time you set up an ad campaign. If you have questions, please ask them and I’ll try my best to give you an accurate, detailed response. Also, if you have suggestions for a future topic, please let me know. And, as always, sharing my posts is appreciated.
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