Utilising retargeting in digital marketing strategy

| May 21, 2015

Is your business taking advantage of advances in marketing online? Olympia Newman explains retargeting and what it could do for you.

As every business owner knows it’s far easier, and cheaper, to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

We invest in customer relationship managers, call centers, and email lifecycle strategies all to retain the highly valuable, known quantity of the current customer. This same principle can, and should, be applied to your digital marketing… and this is where retargeting comes in.

Retargeting is simply the process of serving ads to specific people based on their previous activity on your website. The magic of retargeting lies in ‘cookies’. A retargeting pixel is added to certain pages on your website, and once a person lands on a page with this embedded pixel they are ‘cookied’ and therefore marketed as your retargeting ‘audience’. Then as your audiences roam the internet, you are able to show them specific ads once they visit publishers or networks of websites with whom you have an existing advertising relationship.

Although it is important to know how this method works, don’t let the technicality of ‘cookies’ and ‘audiences’ turn you off. Retargeting is actually deceptively simple. If you’re not familiar with cookies, other than the chocolate-chip variety, there are plenty of great retargeting platforms that take care of all the mechanics for you, leaving you free to focus on the marketing strategy. Some of the bigger retargeting services include AdRoll, Chango, ReTargeter, and Google (who call it remarketing – just to confuse everyone).

Whether you’re aware of this tactic or not, there’s a good chance you’ve already been exposed to it before. E-commerce businesses have been particularly keen early adopters of this technology and have utilised it to their advantage. I know I’m not the only one who has sneakily looked up a red jumper on an online retailer, only to have it follow me around the internet for the next 24 hours. The website, in this case a retail store, has captured your activity, looking at red jumpers, and has then served you ads based on this activity.

With the digital marketing landscape getting increasingly competitive, retargeting essentially gives businesses an opportunity they rarely get – a second change to make a first impression. By marketing to people who have already had exposure to your website, you are not only reinforcing your brand, but also increasing the likelihood of your ads performing positively. By leveraging your own audience data, you are only buying advertising impressions for those users who have already shown an interest in your brand. This gives you a lower cost per impression (CPM), better click-through-rates (CTR) and generally a better conversion rate. This all combines to make retargeting an extremely cost effective tactic.

But retargeting can be used for much more than just following customers who have abandoned their shopping carts. Whether it’s cross-selling a TV subscription service to someone who landed on a page about TVs, or up-selling a subscriber with a discount to extend their contract, there are a myriad of inventive ways marketers can apply this technology. No matter what the strategy, having the ability to extend the customer relationship means businesses are able to maximize the value of every website visitor, not just the ones who sign up to buy.

As frustrating as that red jumper consistently following you around the internet can be, the prevalence and gusto that online retailers have ultilised retargeting is surely a testament to how successful this advertising method can be. Now that this technology has been made even more accessible through remarketing platforms, there is no reason why marketers shouldn’t be investing in this tactic. With its stellar performance metrics and sound marketing strategy, retargeting is an extremely powerful and effective tool – so why not take up these advantages.

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