If you’ve been on the internet at all over the past few years, you’ll have encountered the remarketing strategy. You know when you search something online, and it kind of feels like Google is listening or watching because you then go on another website and you suddenly see ads for the thing you’ve just been looking at?

That’s remarketing in full effect.

It’s the same with brick and mortar businesses who have signs out on the street for people who are walking past. On the boards, you’ll see advertisements for whatever is inside while trying to get people to come in. That’s also remarketing.

Of course, this might now seem like a dated concept, but the truth is that remarketing is as popular and as beneficial as ever, and if your businesses aren’t using it, then you’re seriously missing out. Today, we’re going to explore everything you need to know about remarketing, as well as five ways you can start incorporating it into your business.

What Exactly is Remarketing and How Do You Use It?

In short, and hand in hand with what we spoke about above, remarketing is the act of marketing a product or service to somebody who has already been exposed to that product, service, or business in some way.

Because the customer is already aware that you exist, you’re not reaching out for the first time, but instead reaffirming your existence and keeping yourself relevant in the minds of potential leads, thus making them more likely to come and purchase from you.

In the online world, this means increasing your conversion rates, which of course is very important for profits, and this is all fully possible using your preferred ad service, whether that’s Google Adwords, AdRoll, or Facebook Ads.

How it works is that a customer goes onto a website and accepts the cookies; a little pop-up box we’ve all seen from time to time. These cookies then connect to the ad program that will then show relevant ads based on the cookies they see from other websites.

So, if a customer has been onto your website, and then goes off elsewhere, if you’re running remarketing ads, you’ll appear on other websites they visit, including their social media profiles, making it far more likely they’re going to come back.

However, remarketing takes a lot more than just making ads and running them through an ad program; although technically speaking it is just that. It takes strategy and organization to get the best results. Below, we’re going to explore five key strategies you can start implementing for the best results.

Method #1 – Divide and Conquer

It’s easy to set up and run ads that apply to everyone. That’s just a single set of ads rolled out to people, but this isn’t really effective in the slightest, and you’ll be lucky to get more than a few responses. Instead, you need to divide up your target audience using segmentation.

Your business will attract people from different categories, such as gender, location, income, age, interests and a whole lot more. This means you need to be creating different ads to suit these different target audiences to maximize your success rates.

For example, you’ll market to an 18-year-old female from the US far differently than you would a 50-year old male from London. This means your ad copy needs to reflect this, as does the imagery and visuals you’re using, and the websites and pages where you’re showcasing the ads and implementing your remarketing strategy.

Another example would be a pet food company creating ads for their business, except dividing them between people who have dogs, people who have cats and people who keep fish. Be precise, concise and accurate.

The more appealing and visual you can make your ads, and the more suitable you can make them for your target audience, and the more directly and purposefully you can place them on relevant pages (more on this point below), the better your results will be and the higher your conversion rate will become.

Remarketing, like all kinds of marketing, revolves around the concept of finding what works and then tweaking it in all areas along the journey to make sure you’re maximizing the results. With this in mind, make sure you’re looking at all aspects of your ad to make sure you’re creating the best image and the best results possible.

Then, in the future, make sure you’re not running the same ads, but are instead tweaking them, perhaps even A/B testing them, to highlight the features of your ads that work and then applying them to get even better results every time you run them. Rinse and repeat.

Method #2 – Offer Discounts or Money Off Vouchers

When you’re remarketing a product, as we’ve already established, people know about your products or services, but for some reason, they didn’t want to move forward with the sale. In most cases, this reason will be monetary.

“However, using remarketing methods, you’ll be able to remarket while offering someone a coupon voucher or a discount of some kind if they make the purchase now. For example, you could have typical remarketing ads displayed on the next few websites they visit, however, on the final ad, you could display one where they get this money off, perhaps as a percentage or free shipping.”

For a lot of people, this can be enough to give them all the incentive they need to purchase because they feel like they’re getting a good deal. However, you’re going to need to refer to the points below to make sure you’re using this method is the most effective and productive way where you’re targeting the right people in the right places at the right time.

Method #3 – Choosing the Right Places

One of the best ways to strategize your remarketing efforts is to make sure your ads are being displayed on pages that are best suited for your customer base. After all, if you’re marketing sports equipment, it’s probably best to advertise on other sports-related websites, instead of something like books.

Think about how your customer is thinking while they’re browsing online and think about how it works for you when you’re shopping. You might be doing a bit of browsing, maybe reading some blog posts before coming across something you like the idea of.

You do some research, find your website and products, think about it and decide to dwell on it and maybe come back later, then you return to browsing. Now think about the mindset of a customer interested in your products and think about where they have come from and where they’ve gone.

Likewise, you can use your analytics and insights to actually see where your referrers are, helping you to identify the journey your customer is on, ultimately allowing you to remarket your business in the most effective places.

However, it’s good to get creative with the pages you’re choosing because there are so many hidden opportunities out there. For example, you may be selling running shoes and sports equipment, and you may want to focus on marketing in sporty places rather than bookstores.

Nevertheless, if you’re tagging pages on a bookstore with sports books, then this might still be relevant, and you may unlock a little goldmine when it comes to your conversion rate.

Method #4 – Choosing Who Not to Target

Hand in hand with the point above, as part of your strategy, you’ll want to make sure you’re choosing to target people who are interested in buying your product. These people should be your priority because you’ll need to do less convincing and more selling!

For example, try not to target people that have only accessed your homepage and then bounced off. In fact, anybody accessing your website for a few seconds or minutes and then leaving without really interacting with your content should be left to their own devices. After all, you’ve got bigger fish to fry.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember you’re not going to please everyone and not everyone wants to be a customer or will be interested in your products, and that’s OK. Instead, try and focus your attention and budget or people who actually want to be a part of your business.

This means choosing people who heavily interact with your business, view products, and sales pages, come in from landing pages, and some of the other pages and strategies we’ve mentioned in this article.

Method #5 – Targeting Near Shoppers and Abandoned Carts

Some leads will have been so close to becoming profitable customers and may have even put items in their basket or shopping cart, but at the last minute pulled out and decided, for whatever reason, not to make their purchase.

However, using instant remarketing, you can affirm your customers that they should go back and complete their purchase. This is an ideal strategy to implement because these are all customers that were so close to making a purchase and may just have needed a little nudge in the right direction, which you can do through your ads.

All you need to do here is to set up your remarketing ads to target people directly after they have left your website, and then following them for several websites that they visit thereafter to make sure they’re reminded they have items in their shopping basket just waiting to take out!

One of the most important things to remember here is that these are customers who had already put items in their baskets, meaning they were more likely to be converted into paying customers. This means you should invest more of your budget into these customers because they’ll need less convincing and are more likely to purchase someone who wasn’t interested at all.

The Continuous Process of Remarketing

Remarketing can be very effective if done correctly, but you need to make sure you’re analyzing and tweaking your strategies to make sure you’re benefitting from the best results. It’s simply not good enough to continuously keep reposting the same ads in the hopes that they’re working.

Even if your ads are super effective and are working really well, you still need to look at your analytics to make sure they’re performing to the best of their ability, as well as highlighting what works and doesn’t work.

You can then take this information and apply it to anything, such as your brand, accuracy in defining your target market or audience, and making and creating improved ads for your future marketing campaigns.

We live in a world where big data rules in the marketing industry, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be applied this to your own business. In some cases, when properly implemented, you won’t even need to make adjustments to your landing pages because you’ll still be able to convert people coming in using your remarketing strategies.

The Recap

Just to recap everything that we’ve learned today and what you should be applying to your business;

• Make sure you’re creating separate, dedicated ads for different groups of people in your target market (known as segmentation)
• Use remarketing ads to offer certain customers money off in the form of a discount to increase someone’s chances of buying into your products or services.
• Make sure you’re being defined and targeted with the pages you’re choosing to run your ads on.
• Likewise, you need to ensure you’re only targeting the people it’s worth targeting that have a chance of turning into a profitable customer.
• Finally, you’ll want to utilize your website analytics to then target people who are leaving their shopping baskets after already putting in an item.

Summary

As you can see, from a business perspective there’s a ton of opportunities you can enjoy when it comes to your remarketing strategy, and there’s no reason why you can’t experiment and get creative with the approach you take.

It’s important to remember that your business and customer base is different to every other business in the world, which is why you need to trial and test to figure out what works best for you, and what methods dramatically enhance your conversion rates.

 

About the author: 

Adelina Benson is a marketing specialist and writer at AcademicBrits.com. She develops marketing strategies for established businesses and start-ups and helps to plan strategies for advertising campaigns. In her free time, she loves to blog to help people reach their full potential.