Is Remarketing Right For Me?

Remarketing is one of the most powerful tools in modern digital marketing.

The purpose of remarketing is to drive down your cost-per-acquisition by re-engaging prospects who have visited your website but failed to convert. You can micro-target advertisements based on the prospect’s interaction with your site, potentially bringing them back.

Depending on how you deploy remarketing, it can vastly improve ad ROI.

However, remarketing – also known as retargeting – isn’t the perfect solution in every case. It can increase your ad spend, and requires an investment of time as well. After all, ads must be precisely calibrated to the user’s actions and intent, which takes a fair amount of work.

Let’s shine a spotlight on those times when retargeting isn’t ideal:

1. Your Ad Campaigns Aren’t Well-Established

If you aren’t doing much in the way of PPC ads, starting with remarketing is like diving into the deep end. You want to have some best practices in place first. For example, it’s essential your data analytics suite is working as planned and the data is getting use – refining your campaigns regularly based on user behavior and bid optimization.

2. You Don’t Have Much Website Traffic

Since retargeting is based on user interactions with your site, it won’t do you much good if you aren’t getting much traffic. It’s a wise idea to have traffic generation efforts going across a full portfolio of options, including social media and video, before you plug in remarketing to deepen prospect relationships.

3. You’re Losing Traffic Early in the Process

Remarketing works best when the user has consumed some content and had meaningful interactions with your site. If you’ve got a high bounce rate – people reaching your site and leaving in seconds – there are issues to address that retargeting could make worse. Be sure your traffic is going to optimized landing pages.

4. You Could Be Getting Similar Value With Mailing Lists

Remarketing is powerful, but most businesses should start with more cost-conscious options that can deliver some similar results. If prospects are signing up for your lead magnet, you can move them through the sales funnel by sharing valuable content consistently. Plus, a regularly-updated mailing list can make your retargeting even more precise.

5. Your Revenue Per Sale is Too Low

This is mostly a problem for B2C, but it deserves to be mentioned. If you’re selling low-cost items – whether commodities, information products, or otherwise – you will probably find yourself standing still with retargeting. It’s best used for B2B enterprises set up to manage the long sales cycles, even if advertising costs happen to rise by 10%-20%.

The Secret to Effective Remarketing: Clear, Highly-Precise Buyer Journeys

Imagine a group of people looking at your company website:

• One reaches a landing page and signs up for your mailing list, getting an e-book in return;
• Another goes to your video library and watches an archived webinar for a few minutes;
• A third reads through some of your product brochure, skips to the end, and closes it.

All three of these people have given enormous clues about where they are in the buyers journey and what their priorities are. Based on what content they consume, the order they consume it in, and how much of it they actually look at, you can make detailed inferences about each one.

With remarketing, you have the chance to target each one with ads uniquely relevant to them.

This requires an even deeper and more nuanced view of your customers than usual. Instead of looking at them across a single dimension based on your raw analytics data, you now have the chance to target them based on two sets of factors that overlap:

Their customer segment and their step in the journey.

Imagine a custom homes business that provides some services to contractors and some directly to the public. Within these distinct segments, there may be anywhere from three to eight website interactions that signal a prospect moving forward in their buyers journey.

That means instead of two ads – one for homeowners and one for contractors – you may have as many as sixteen. That said, each ad will only appear for the small subset of users who have the relevant remarketing pixel, so advertising costs don’t necessarily grow much.

For just a little additional ad spend, you create a deeply and meaningfully customized experience. And, of course, your ads can rekindle prospects’ interest by appearing on their trusted platforms.

Remarketing takes time and thought, but it’s easy to align it with your customer segmentation strategy as long as that strategy is already robust. If not, it’s a good idea to revisit it and build it out so that retargeted advertising can become a true value engine for you.