Retargeting Techniques To Reach Your Customers

If you’ve ever visited a website to look at a product and left only to have an ad for that product show up later, you’ve experienced retargeting. A retargeting campaign keeps your product or brand top-of-mind when a visitor leaves your site without purchasing. These ads not only encourage the visitor to come back and look again but can remind them of an abandoned cart and allow you to tailor offers and discounts to prompt conversion. For small businesses, this is a particularly scalable and efficient way to boost sales and drive profits. 

Displaying highly relevant ads is much more effective than using a burst approach, hoping you attract an interested consumer. And, with retargeting ads, relevance is everything. While a random ad may occasionally spark some interest, one tailored to your interests and activities is less intrusive and much more likely to get you to come back to the site. When done correctly, retargeting is the way to keep potential customers thinking about your business offerings. 

Putting Retargeting in Action  

While retargeting is a great marketing strategy, traditional advertising is still crucial. Radio is an excellent way to create brand awareness and is highly effective in lead generation. From lead generation, you can then effectively implement retargeting.  

With radio ads, you can access an engaged and loyal audience to encourage visits to your site and then use email marketing or social media to retarget those potential customers to prompt a return visit or remind them about their abandoned carts. Those cart reminders are particularly critical since 75% of website visitors add products to their shopping carts then leave the site without purchasing. Cart abandonment is a common issue impacting revenue, particularly for small businesses, but strategic retargeting can help.  

The Benefits of Ad Retargeting  

Retargeting has a 1,046% efficiency rate, making it more effective than all other ad placement strategies. It offers a host of benefits, including: 

• Needs no email or phone number. 
• Creates brand awareness by increasing visibility to more users more often.  
• Improves user engagement. 
• Increases ROI and conversion.  
• Counteracts one-size-fits-all messaging of traditional ads, delivering value tailored for a specific consumer. 
• Pushes leads through the sales funnel faster.  
• Feels less invasive because of the relevancy. 
• Allows businesses to focus on those that have expressed some interest, saving time, effort, and budget.  

However, to know how beneficial any strategy requires establishing and monitoring KPIs and metrics to track success. Analytics not only helps you optimize your ad spend but helps you determine whether you’ve targeted the right customers. Improper retargeting is more than a waste, it can alienate prior or potential customers, such as marketing to someone who previously booked then canceled a honeymoon trip when the wedding was called off. Continuing to market a honeymoon trip in this instance is not only ineffective but causes the consumer to remember your brand for all the wrong reasons.  

Choosing Your Best Platforms  

Retargeting is typically a digital approach. It works best as part of a multi-channel strategy paired with traditional platforms like radio. However, for small businesses, retargeting may be a completely new strategy. The following are some examples for those new to retargeting to illustrate how it can be used with various platforms. 

Search Engine Marketing

Offered by search engines like Google and Bing, this advertising service enables businesses to display ads on search results. A properly structured Google Ads or Bing Ads account is set up for individual campaigns with their own ad groups consisting of their own ad text, keywords, and landing pages. Search engine ads are triggered by keywords. Individual advertisers join auctions to bid on relevant keywords that allow their ads to be served up to users when they enter that keyword.  

Social Media Marketing 

Social media marketing like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook ads, reminds consumers about your products with several ad formats. It works by dropping cookies to report when someone views a product, adds it to the cart, or purchases something. Those cookies then notify your retargeting partner when the visitor goes to another platform. Relevant ads will be shown to that visitor based on their prior activity.  

Email Marketing  

Email marketing is a cost-effective way to increase your marketing ROI. Email retargeting is based on the emails your subscriber opens, and based on those results, you can display ads across various display networks. For example, you can use email retargeting after a customer makes a purchase to encourage another purchase within a short time period. It can optimize your effectiveness across channels while reducing send frequency.  

Reach the Right Customers with the Right Retargeting Strategy 

We all visit websites, show interest in the products, then ultimately decide to think it over. Once we leave the site, that business wants to reclaim our interest and have us return to the site to make a purchase. They do that by reminding us what we are missing by displaying ads across multiple channels. They are using retargeting. 

Ad retargeting can strengthen an already robust ad campaign. For help with your ad retargeting, our sister company, 2060 Digital, handles all facets of digital marketing. Retargeting is highly effective when paired with a strong marketing medium like radio. There are many platforms from which to choose that can complement a multi-channel strategy, from Google Ads to social media marketing on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to email marketing. A retargeting strategy can benefit businesses with increased brand awareness, ROI, user engagement, and conversions.