What is re-targeting?
Have you ever been to a website and then you find banners from that website follow you everywhere you go on the internet? This is re-targeting or re-marketing.
How it works?
When you go to a website, like Amazon, they put a cookie on your computer and as you browse through Amazon, they pixel you, they will be able to read the products that you checked out. Later they show you ads of these products on other websites.
Now re-marketing has grown. There are many companies that help you do this. Now there are major players like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram etc that allows you to re-target people directly from within their platforms. There are many advantages to this.
Re-targeting not only works on e-commerce sites. You can utilize them in your blog. Let’s say someone read your blog on ‘Marketing funnels’. Now you know that this person is interested in it and you can follow them around, maybe send them an eBook about marketing funnel. Then you can pixel them on Facebook. This way you’re telling Facebook that the person bought an eBook about marketing funnel and that this is a warm lead. Maybe we can push him to a webinar or buy a product. The idea behind this is that you have a funnel where you’re moving people down and you are able to do that with your ads as well. A lot of people (98%-99%) visiting your website aren’t going to get converted in the first shot. So you have to follow them around and know where they are at in the funnel.
If one out of 100 visitors on your website buys something, then you’re luckier than the average website. So re-marketing turns all the people who said no to yes.
Show them something unique
The key factor when doing re-marketing is to show something unique. If someone comes to your homepage and they do not get converted, when you’re doing re-marketing campaign do you think you should send them back to your homepage? No. If they didn’t convert from you’re homepage then it’s better not to send them back there again. You’re way better of re-marketing them to a unique landing page.
The rule of seven
If you go to a random stranger on the street and ask them “Will you marry me?” the chances are that you get turned down. But if you ask that person “Hey! I think you’re cute. Would you like to go on a coffee date?” Let’s assume they said Yes. The coffee date goes well, then you go on a few more dates, then you move in together and then at a later stage if you ask them to marry you, there is a much higher chance they say yes. Why? Because they got to know you. You built trust with them. Re-marketing works in a similar way. Someone comes to your website, they don’t buy. You re-market them and they keep seeing your ads everywhere. The rule of seven says if someone sees something seven times, they are more likely to buy it. They get comfortable with you, you educate them through blogs, social media contents, emails and then you ask them to buy it, they are more likely to get converted.
Traffic Temperature
There’s a cold, warm and hot traffic.
Let’s put this into context. If people have never heard of your brand before, that’s cold traffic. And you might want to drive them to your blog post that gets them to slightly to learn about you and give them some value. It need not be just your blog, it could also be an eBook, webinar or even case studies. You can pixel them as well. You can re-target them with Google or Facebook and you can build a smart audience or look alike audience who have visited a specific section. Best case scenario they get converted. They now get into the warm section and you can get them paid for a service o product at the end of the day.
One of the key strategies with re-marketing is segmenting who you’re going after. You can segment your audience based on your traffic region so that you can decide on how much to spend based on location.
Look-alike audiences
Let’s say someone visits your blog and it’s about content marketing. Well, then you want to find more of these people because you’re selling a content marketing course and you had maxed out the list of re-targeting audience. Now what you can do is, go to Facebook and tell them to go and find people on Facebook that have similar interest to these people who have visited a specific section of my sight and in this case, it is content marketing and you can go out there and find people. You can build an audience based on a 1% look-alike which is usually around 2.5-3 million people and it progresses from there. The Facebook algorithm is getting better to look alike. If you want to go after the cold audience, you can go after the look-alike in addition to targeting different cold audiences that you might have.
What platform should you opt?
There are many re-targeting platforms to choose from like Google, Facebook, AdRoll etc. But almost all of them don’t have the inventories as Google or Facebook does. If you’re starting off just use Google and Facebook. Once you max those, you can get on to the others but Google and Facebook are going to be the majority of your impression, inventory, clicks and traffic. The other platforms make you feel like it’s all sunshine and flowers. But they are not.
You can also upload your email list on Google and Facebook and target those specific people. Imagine if you have a buyers list of everyone who purchased already, you can make a look-alike of that buyer's list and you can hit the re-target for that list and hit them with higher ticket offers.
So with that, we can conclude by saying re-targeting helps you build longer-lasting relationships with your audience, give people more opportunities to buy your service and product.