First, why do Remarketing?
Remarketing is one of the most amazing things to come along in marketing/advertising in a long while – and even in the fast-paced, and ever evolving world of digital – it’s revolutionized the way businesses gain new customers and clients.
Remarketing is a way of targeting people that have already been on a website or web-property you control. When visitors come to your website, you tag them – and then show them relevant ads, as they move throughout the web, for your business – to help them come back, or make a purchasing decision.
Imagine if someone walked into your office or retail space and was interested in your services, but (for whatever reason) had to leave. Then, almost immediately, you could advertise to this SPECIFIC person… as they get in their car in your parking lot and turn on the radio, they hear ads for your products. Two days later they sit down to enjoy some TV before drifting off to sleep and see a great commercial on your service. All of this placed intentionally by you – the company they were interested in – after they came into your business, solely for them.
This is what remarketing allows.
Remarketing is an amazing tool for leveraging the time and money you spend getting people to your website (no matter what marketing methods you’re using) – in that it lets you then show ads to them throughout the web.
According to some sites on the web, including our own research, we’ve found that remarketing can more than double the business our clients receive. And with new advances in remarketing, it’s a great tool for increasing the effectiveness of ALL of your advertising. Because it allows you to continually get in front of people that, in some way, at some point, expressed an interest in your company by visiting your website, it can make a HUGE impact on all of the methods you use to advertise your business and specifically your website (including radio, television, PR, print advertising).
Top 5 Remarketing (or Retargeting) Tips:
1) Know (and Improve) Your Website
Although there are a few different networks, and methods for remarketing, the common denominator among all of them is your website. At its core, remarketing’s power lies in the ability to target visitors to your website. But it gets even more specific. For example – if you’re a real estate agent that covers a few communities or specialty areas – say Port Royal – you can develop a remarketing campaign to present advertising for those visitors to your website that happened upon a Port Royal page or section of your website.
Since your website is both the preliminary way these people will be tagged for “remarketing” and has the responsibility of facilitating the sale via a great landing page having a great website, and continually refining that website, is a key to being successful with remarketing. At Atilus, our mission is to “Grow Your Business Online” and although remarketing/retargeting is an AMAZING tool to do that – before even considering this form of advertising, businesses should take a giant step back and review their existing website, because ultimately spending money on remarketing advertising is pointless without a great website that will make your visitors feel comfortable, knowledgeable about your business, and entice them to contact or purchase from you.
Thanks to VWO for the image.
2) Know Your Audience (Review Your Site Analytics and Talk to Customers)
Similar to the above, knowing your audience is important. As explained with remarketing you get to advertise BACK to existing visitors. You can do this based on what they do on your website (how long they stay, the pages they hit, etc.).
Knowing your audience allows you to much more effectively build out remarketing campaigns.
Continuing the real estate example above – a person who spent an hour on your website, perusing multi-million dollar listings – is probably a far different potential customer than someone looking for a $250,000 home in North Naples. Your website analytics, your understanding of your business/audience is all used to better coordinate a remarketing campaign.
3) Get Specific
Remarketing is so effective because it allows for – and rewards specificity.
Let’s take a client as an example. We have a remarketing campaign setup for a local remodeling company. Their website features an array of service areas. We setup their remarketing campaigns in part by service areas – and then got even more specific depending on the sub-pages visited their audience.
Here is a map of how detailed we’re getting:
Kitchens > Kitchen Counters > Granite Kitchen Counters
Our remarketing campaign essentially tags all of those interested in “Granite Kitchen Counters” (we know this by the pages they visit) and then presents an ad dedicated to Granite Kitchen Counters to this audience once they go off-site. It’s NOT an ad JUST for the company. It’s NOT an ad JUST for the kitchen remodels. Instead, it’s an ad for exactly what they were looking for, which helps garner additional attention, clicks, and conversions.
When our future retargeting visitor is traveling throughout the web, sees this very specific ad and clicks they also get re-directed back to the site, with a custom landing page for those customers interested in Granite Kitchen Counters & Countertops that we developed with the help of their sales team (answering the most important questions about this product/service their customers generally have).
In “getting specific” we’ve been able to bring the cost per lead for this VERY expensive and high-margin service from around $700 (generally) to around $20/lead (in direct remarketing costs) and saved countless dollars on increasing the effectiveness of all of the print and conventional advertising our client is doing.
So get specific. Make your ad match what the user was doing on your website, and make sure you deliver that person back-to the product or service they were initially viewing.
4) Take the Time to Create Great Ads
Remarketing ads can be tricky as they’re generally pretty small, and because we recommend “getting specific” it can make ad design a bit tricky. This major tip can be broken out itself into some general guidelines on remarketing ad design:
5) Monitor & Adjust
Plan, Execute, Monitor, Adjust, Repeat – it’s our basic model and we recommend keeping an eye on your website analytics and remarketing accounts in order to gain insights into your customers’ journey and make your own advertising more effective.
Specifically, we recommend looking at your website analytics at least monthly to gain a sense of what’s happening on your website:
By looking at this you’ll be able to gain insight and create new audiences and campaigns to better target your visitors.
Additionally, monitor your remarketing tools/campaigns. Some things that help to look at include:
Remarketing is a scary concept for some marketing professionals. With so many tools and techniques already out there, and with it seemingly so “high tech,” remarketing can seem daunting. But, it’s much simpler than it seems. With the basic requirements in place (a great search engine optimized website that speaks to your audience) remarketing is a fantastic tool for helping to grow your business.
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