What is Remarketing and Why Should You Use it on Social Media?

In today’s marketing world, your company has been given the daunting task of standing out among a world’s worth of businesses.

While you have all of these resources at your disposal to try and accomplish that, so does almost everyone else.

How can you reinvent the wheel on your marketing strategy to reach new site visitors? The answer may be simple, revisit your old site visitors. You know, the ones that got away.

Remarketing can be an amazing asset for turning your whole marketing strategy into a well-oiled machine.

Remarketing Defined

To be put in its simplest definition, remarketing is a tactic of placing ads in front of those that have already visited your website.

The invention of the internet has brought the remarketing ideology to the forefront.

While there were certain ways of retargeting before then, it’s since become a focused portion of any all-encompassing marketing strategy.

It all goes back to the new sales statistics that we’ve all come to know so well. 

Sales rarely happen on the first touchpoint. However, the more touchpoints a client receives, the more likely they are to buy. 

In fact, research has shown that it takes an average of 18 or more calls to form a relationship with a buyer.

Needless to say, giving up after the initial two or three times a prospect visits your site is unacceptable. You need to have a strategy to follow them around and grow that exposure.

While that may sound intimidating, you actually have several tools at your disposal for remarketing.

Cookies

Everyone has heard of cookies at one point or another, but few people actually know the purpose they serve.

Have you ever visited a site, such as Dick’s Sporting Goods, and then found an ad for it on an entirely different website a few minutes/days later? That’s cookies working their magic.

Cookies tie in heavily to remarketing because they attach themselves to your site visitor’s device. That gives you a way to reach back out to them for your retargeting campaigns.

You can customize the way your cookies are used to target those that visited a certain page or portion of your site, such as a product page. That way, you’ll stay in their mind as they consider whether or not to revisit your product.

Google AdWords

The ways that Google ads can help your remarketing strategy are almost too many to name in this small portion of the article.

If you’re trying to reach back out to those that once visited your site, it would be beneficial to use the search engine that brought them to you in the first place.

Google AdWords lets you use your expertise to reach out to those clients with a keyword-targeted approach. You’ve probably spent countless hours researching the keywords your target audience is using, now integrate those into your remarketing.

They also offer various pricing packages to help you accomplish your goals. These include pricing on cost per click, cost per acquisition, and cost per thousand impressions.

Facebook

Social media is a powerful platform, and Facebook has always been a mainstay in that department.

More importantly, Facebook helps you prioritize retargeting as much as possible with its many advertising features. You can be optimizing Facebook Ads to reach new customers, then use a Facebook pixel on the backend.

Essentially, a Facebook pixel is what helps you track the conversion rates from your ads on Facebook, create the ideal audience demographics, and remarketing to your old site visitors.

The Benefits of Remarketing

Now that you fully understand what remarketing is, it’s time to go into specific details on the benefits that it can bring your business.

You now know that installing remarketing as a targeting strategy will help you see a higher return on investment, but let’s take a deeper dive into what installing remarketing means for your business.

Increased Brand Exposure

Being that the number one priority for all of your marketing efforts is to generate sales, you’ll want to keep your company at the front of a potential buyer’s mind.

One of the best ways you can do that is by exposing them to your brand whenever, and wherever, possible.

There could be several reasons why your old site visitors didn’t purchase on their initial visit to your web pages.

Maybe they’re still in the early stages of investing in the type of product or service that you provide and brainstorming a few different options. Perhaps they are waiting until the next payday to seal the deal on a product like yours.

Either way, you’ll want to stay at the top of their list. Keeping a consistent brand exposure will increase the likelihood of that site visitor buying your product when they’re ready to purchase.

Customization of Campaigns

You didn’t get where you are today by marketing in generalities. Your success comes from doing in-depth research, devising a plan based on what you find, and executing it to perfection.

Whether you realized it or not, you’ve set that expectation for your brand among yourself, your employees/coworkers, customers, and site visitors.

That’s a tall task, but fortunately, your remarketing strategy has the customization to deliver. 

Every company is aware of the weak points in their marketing strategy. Your remarketing campaign can give you a second chance on those.

Customize your remarketing plan to increase things like brand awareness, the traffic you’re looking to produce, or engagement among your connections. It doesn’t stop there. You’ll also see higher lead generation and conversion rates.

Conversion Rates

Ah yes, the main reason that you’re looking into remarketing tactics in the first place. It gives you a chance to up the conversion rates of your marketing and advertising endeavors.

Higher conversion rates is a fancy way of saying that you get more bang for your buck. 

Remarketing can bring you the satisfaction of knowing your return on investment is higher than that of your competition. 

However, there is always room for improvement. The more remarketing tools you use such as cookies, paid search advertising, and Facebook pixels, the higher your conversion rates will be.

Remarketing is a fickle trend. You need to be constantly looking for new avenues to reach the site visitors of old. 

Who said that remarketing couldn’t be used for those of the customers that have purchased from you? Keeping that brand exposure will lead to your ultimate goal of consistently high conversions.

You Can Target Unsubscribers

Email marketing is a fantastic tool and should be a mainstay in your marketing practices. However, it can feel like all hope is lost when they unsubscribe from your email list.

You might be thinking they don’t want to receive my email notifications anymore, now what do I do?

Luckily, even though they’ve unsubscribed from your email list, your company still has cookies linked to the devices that they use.

That means that any device they use social media on, such as their phone, desktop, or iPad, will give you access. You can still build brand exposure with them almost subliminally.

Once the cookies have tracked them down on social media, now it’s time for your remarketing campaign to do the rest.

You can also target those unsubscribers from the beginning of your remarketing on certain social media platforms such as Facebook.

When you download your email list onto Facebook, you can also put in those of your unsubscribers. Now Facebook will make it a priority to get you in front of that former subscriber’s eyes as well.

You Control the Budget

Before you start your remarketing strategy, have a sit down meeting with your team to go over the budget you’re willing to initially spend on this venture.

Since you’ve never budgeted money to a remarketing strategy before, it’s not a bad idea to start low and add more funding as you see results.

As with anything else in business, you’ll start to notice certain remarketing outlets that have had a higher sales return for your company. Naturally, you’ll want to invest more in those avenues and ditch the ones that aren’t working.

Social media and Google are amazing for budgeting due to the many payment options they have for you.

It’s relatively inexpensive to run ad campaigns on either thanks to the previously mentioned cost per click, cost per acquisition, and cost per thousand impressions payment scales.

It allows you the liberty of paying for the results that you’ve seen, and not paying for results that you have no certainty of seeing.

You’ll also find it helpful to study the analytics behind your tools to increase your chance of spending money where you’ll see the most return. 

Prioritize Your Content

It’s no secret that the content on your site helps establish your brand image among all of your site visitors.

However, before the remarketing analytics, you may have never considered how beneficial it could be to switch up the content every so often.

Think about it, remarketing is all about targeting those that have visited your site without purchasing a product or subscribing. That means that the content on your site at that time wasn’t enough to justify the purchase/subscription for them.

So, if you’re going to put all this effort into retargeting them to get them back on your site, you’ll want to consider what will push them to purchase next time.

In a way, having someone leave your site without purchasing is a failure, but there are always beneficial takeaways from failure.

Use that as a way to inspire your remarketing strategy and expand your horizons.

What was amazing content on your site when you initially placed it there has grown stale. It’s time to prioritize the message you ultimately want your site visitors to take with them when they go, which is you’ll be back.

Target Individual Types of Site Visitors

The old site visitors that you’re eyeing with your remarketing strategy can be segmented into several different categories.

There are those that read one article on your company blog, those that bounced around several pages, and some that visited a product page.

Also, there are also those super warm leads of people who went so far as to add products to their cart before leaving your site.

Obviously, you will want to target each of these site visitors differently. Some, like the “added to cart” people, can be pursued more aggressively than the “one-pagers.”

It’s going to take a healthy mix of remarketing tools to accomplish that feat, but there’s no doubt that you can see ROI from each type.

A generic remarketing message will fall on deaf ears. A message that’s meant specifically for each previous site visitor will grab their attention.

What is Remarketing: A Second Chance

What is remarketing? It’s a chance for higher conversions and building customer loyalty.

Now that you’ve seen the various benefits of remarketing, it’s time to find a company that can walk you through the next steps.

Be sure to read this article on the digital marketing hacks you can integrate to yield a higher return on your efforts.

To kick things off, let’s take a free look at your current digital marketing. From there we can help you figure out what improvements to your company can be made.