The Importance of Retargeting in a Marketing Campaign

Retargeting may sound familiar but not something you have explored within your marketing efforts. This marketing tactic leverages paid advertising to go after consumers who have shown an interest in a product that is similar to yours or who perused that product on your website and left without purchasing. For example, if you were shopping online for a coffee maker, and afterwards you see other ads for coffeemakers or coffee beans on social media or online.

There are numerous reasons why retargeting should be an essential component of every marketing campaign.

Reaching out across multiple platforms

Retargeting can help you reach prospects across multiple platforms to increase your chances of enticing them to or back to your website for conversions. These platforms include Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads and cover a lot of channels that include mobile platforms.

Identifying how to improve advertising approaches

Having the ability to track prospects and gauge their reaction to seeing your product elsewhere in an ad can tell you if your ad is effective or not. Your campaign performance can then be improved based on these responses.

Keeping costs down

In marketing, it can be more cost effective to follow up on recent website visitors than it is to advertise for new users and traffic. You know that this group is already interested in your product or service, and therefore more likely to convert. The costs relate to lower time, money, and effort spent.

Influencing purchase decisions

By following these prospects from site to site with your ads, you can remind them of your value. In turn, this can influence their return to your website and help close the deal on a purchase. Your influence can be more compelling as you filter and personalize these ads to match visitors’ needs, motivations, and behaviors.

Raising brand awareness

Even if you don’t make a sale out of each retargeting effort, you are still raising brand awareness, warming up cold traffic to what you might offer them. This can incrementally add benefits over time that may spread your brand to others and build further credibility.

Gaining deeper insights

The retargeting process includes multiple reports that provide detailed data about prospect behavior. This helps you better understand your target audience to help improve campaigns and overall messaging across channels.

Improving campaign results

Research shows compelling results for companies who leverage retargeting strategies. The click-through rate of a retargeted ad is ten times as likely to make a conversion as that of a typical display ad.

Nurturing customer lifetime value

As you move prospects through each stage of the marketing funnel towards conversion, you can then use retargeting to enhance customer lifetime value by continuing to influence them to convert and make more purchases.

Since you know what each customer has previously purchased, you can use retargeting to suggest products that complement other items. Or, knowing the time of year your customers previously made purchases, you can introduce retargeting campaigns to remind them it’s time to purchase again.

Getting Started

From serving as a digital reminder to potential customers and raising brand awareness in the digital marketplace to focusing your advertising spend for better ROI and enhancing your overall marketing strategy, retargeting works.

To get started, you can explore platforms that facilitate the launch of retargeting campaigns, including Google Ads, Retargeter, and social media platforms like Facebook Retargeting. These platforms walk through the retargeting process and create targeted ad campaigns that align with your audience and what you know about them.

Like other aspects of your marketing strategy, by addressing your audience’s specific needs, retargeting can increase your traffic and sales with targeted content. The tactic also requires practice, time, skill, and investment so proceed carefully to ensure anything you do provides a significant return.

See how to get started with targeting with our “5-Minute Audience Targeting Primer.”