How to put together an effective remarketing strategy

Remarketing is an incredible marketing tool. Before the days of the Internet, if someone came into your store, browsed, even picked up and actually considered a product, but then left without buying, there was no way to guarantee you’d ever see them again. .

However, remarketing allows you to reach prospects who are on the fence. When someone browses your website but doesn’t convert, it’s now possible for you to pop up again in their field of vision through the power of remarketing! You can target them with your ad on other websites, and hopefully staying top of mind will eventually lead to that desired conversion.

This already sounds like a pretty cool marketing strategy, doesn’t it? It is, but there are ways to create a remarketing strategy that can take your efforts to the next level and drive even more conversions from interested prospects. Here’s how you do it.

1. Set Goals

Like any great marketing campaign, an effective remarketing strategy begins with goal setting. What are you trying to do with these ads? It will depend on what kind of business you run. If you have an e-commerce store that sells relatively inexpensive items, you might want to find someone to shop around.

However, for those who run businesses with a long sales cycle – for example, a B2B consulting firm – your ideal conversion may not be sales. Instead, it’s getting someone to give you their email in exchange for access to a free eBook.

No matter what type of business you run, it makes sense to set really specific goals for each remarketing campaign. Rather than creating an ad that you hope will serve a different audience, it’s best to establish a few specific goals and then create separate ads for each goal.

2. Decide Where You Want to Advertise

Remarketing can be done through search engines like Google or social media sites like Facebook. Once you’ve set your goals, you can start thinking about which platforms are best suited for your ads.

The major advantage of advertising on social media is that you are more likely to get likes, shares, comments and reposts from people who are interested (and since you are retargeting your message to people who are already on your website). You know they’re already interested in your brand!) However, search engine marketing will follow your customers to any website that is an advertising partner for the search engine you do business with. This means that your audience will be welcome from your ads across the web, not just the social media site you choose.

There is no need to limit yourself to one platform. There is often a huge benefit to having multiple views by your audience. Most people need to see a brand seven times before they decide to engage with them, so the more times you can get your name in someone’s field of vision, the better.

3. Define Your Audience

Once you have come up with your set of goals, you can begin to define and segment your audience. Let’s say you have a clothing store that has both brick and mortar and e-commerce presence. So, there are a number of ways in which you can and should break into your audience.

You can segment and target by location. For people who have visited your website and live within a certain radius of your store, you can target them by advertising about your brick and mortar location. These ads are, of course, not relevant to people living on the other side of the country, so those people should be targeted with advertising specific to your e-commerce offerings.

People who have visited your store and browsed your menswear options, you can retarget with a message specific to your menswear choices (and you can target those interested in womenswear with those offers). can do). You can also retarget customers who have taken specific actions on your website. For example, you can set up your campaign to show only customers who have put items in their carts on your site and then navigated without completing the purchase.

The goals you set for each campaign will naturally align with a specific audience. Defining the audience for your campaign early on ensures that your ad is only being shown to the most relevant people, which means you’ll get the highest ROI on your campaign.

4. Set Up Your Creative

Once you’ve set goals and decided on your target audience, it’s time to settle on your creative. A big part of creating great content is understanding your audience and speaking to them in the voice and tone of your brand.

There are also tools that help you optimize your approach in terms of content. If you’re running your remarketing campaign through Google, you can use responsive ads. With Responsive Ads, you input your various creative elements – different headlines, copy and images – and Google runs them in different combinations to know which ones are most effective. From there, they’ll run the best performing ads on your behalf to give your ads the best chance of success.

5. Run your ads and track results

The final step is to get your ads up and running! Fortunately, advertising platforms provide detailed analytics so that you can accurately measure the results of your campaigns. Analytics allows you to measure engagement and conversions on each ad. With this information, you can tweak your strategy as you go.

If there are some ads that aren’t performing well, consider changing the creative. If there are some websites where retargeting is not effective, you can ask Google to no longer show your ads on those sites. Being prepared to move forward and change strategies along the way is a big part of finding long-term success with your retargeting efforts.

Remarketing is an incredible opportunity for you to attract the attention of consumers who have already shown interest in your brand. When you take things step by step and develop a realistic strategy to reach different segments of your audience, you can build campaigns with a great ROI.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Paid Search.