What Is Remarketing and How Does It Work?
Heard of remarketing as a marketing tool but not sure how it works?
Remarketing can be a very effective advertising tool and something that can help give you more bang for your buck across all your marketing efforts.
What is Remarketing?
Remarketing (also called retargeting) is when you continue to market to one of your website visitors after they have left your website. You have the ability to follow and advertise to them as they surf the internet and to keep your company top of mind. You can also use forms of email remarketing where users receive an email after taking a certain action, like shopping cart abandonment emails used by e-commerce sites, but here we'll be focusing more on ad based remarketing.
How Does Remarketing Work?
In order to start a remarketing (also knows as retargeting) campaign, you would need to sign up with a company that offers remarketing services. Google Adwords and Facebook are two of the biggest companies offering remarketing services, though other platforms like Twitter also offer remarketing. You can also use a third party platform like AdRoll to manage your remarketing campaigns and will also give you access to multiple remarketing platforms. Sharpspring is a popular example of a marketing automation service that ties in with your email marketing.
If you're new to online marketing you can also hire a web marketing company like 3Bug Media to setup and manage your remarketing campaigns across multiple platforms.
1- A visitor comes to your website. When they arrive on your website, the remarketing code you have on your site drops a tracking cookie onto their computer and can now track them after they leave your website.
2- Once they leave your website you now have the ability to serve ads to these users as they surf the internet. The ads can be in the form of text ads, banner images or even video. You can also use marketing automation that triggers emails to visitors based on actions they take (or don't take) on your website.
3- Where the ads show depends on what remarketing company you signed up with. If you signed up with Facebook, you can serve ads on Facebook as well as third party platforms they have partnered with. Same with Google Adwords, you can serve ads across Google products as well as thousands of partner sites through their Google Display Network.
4- A recent visitor to your website sees your ad, which reminds them of your company and why they were there in the first place, and a percentage of them click on the ad and return back to your website.
How Does This Help You?
Visitors that come to your site are added to a remarketing list, which is determined by the parameters you set. You may want to build a list for every visitor to your site or maybe people that visit certain pages of your site. You can customize your remarketing lists as you like and set how long you would like to remarket to them.
Once you have these lists created you now have a second chance to turn some of those visitors into customers through targeted advertising.
You may offer a discount offer on a product, a reminder of the product or service they were last viewing on your site, or just a reminder of your brand so you can stay top of mind.
The nice thing about remarketing is that it doesn't matter how the visitor got to your website, you now have a second chance to convert those visitors into customers. Remarketing is a great way to squeeze some extra ROI out of your existing marketing activities.
While remarketing isn't a highly scalable because it depends on previous visitors to your website, it typically offers a better conversion rate and ROI that other online marketing
How Do You Get Started With Remarketing?
If you want to create a remarketing campaign for your business you can either sign up directly with a company like Google or Facebook or you can work with a web marketing company like 3Bug Media to setup and manage your remarketing campaigns across any of the remarketing platforms you would like to use.
If you have questions about remarketing for your business and how to get started, you can contact us here.
Gary
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