Are you remarketing yet? Have you cottoned on to one of the best and easiest routes to boosting conversion rates and driving sales? The intelligent way to re-engage customers and prospective clients? The great way to maximise on your current advertising spend?
Remarketing needs to be in your digital marketing mix – if not you’ll be doing your competitors a favour when they scoop up all the opportunities that could have been yours.
What is Remarketing?
Let’s begin with the basics: what is remarketing? In its simplest form, remarketing is a clever way to keep your business or brand visible to people who have visited your website, or used your app, and not taken the desired action. For example: they looked at a product on your app but didn’t make a purchase, or they visited your website but didn’t give your business a call or fill out a contact form. These desired actions, or conversions, are the goals of our advertising efforts and spending.
Businesses often end up spending a lot of money driving traffic to their websites or platforms, hoping that when users land on their pages they will purchase what’s on offer. However, these days consumers have a lot more resources to first do research, compare yours to other offerings and consider their purchase before making it. Getting them onto your page the first time is not guaranteed to end in a sale – in fact, this buying behaviour leads to a higher percentage of your first time visitors not making a purchase.
This is where remarketing comes in. Remarketing allows your offering, call to action, or ad, to follow that visitor around the internet, making sure your brand is visible and at the top of the customer’s mind when they are ready to commit. Remarketing allows you to deliver a visual ad or reminder of your offering, so the customer does not have to begin their search for your site or product again, and accidentally end up on one of your competitor’s sites.
Ultimately maximising your return on your current advertising spend.
How Does Remarketing Actually Work?
To get to the nuts and bolts of remarketing, we first need to talk about cookies.
Unfortunately not the delicious, yummy, baked kind: similar to the way every website you visit gets added to your web-browser’s history, websites also create “cookie” records for your browser. This web cookie helps websites to recognise and identify your individual web browser. Google and Facebook use the information in cookies to also determine what your interests are and what ads you may be interested in.
This may seem a little creepy to you, but cookie and interest-based marketing means that the ads and content shown to you online will be of more interest to you. Without it, you would be bombarded or overwhelmed with ads and messages about products or brands you have zero interest in. Cookies help to customise your online experience to your personal needs.
Lately, there has been some news and recent debate around privacy, cookies and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), but that’s a big topic for another day.
What you need to know right now – and what you need to know to improve the success of your business – is that remarketing uses cookies to offer website and app owners the opportunity to show targeted messages or ads to people who have visited specific products or sections of their site or app.
We call those specific people a remarketing audience: a list of people that have visited the specific section of your site/app in a specific time, that did not complete a specific action. That’s a lot of specifics to be sure, but that’s how targeted and personalised remarketing can be.
How Can Remarketing Help My Business?
This is where Bastion & Flowe come into the mix. Our remarketing strategy can serve up an ad tailored to a potential customer or “lost user” (a consumer who visited your site but didn’t make a purchase), with something you know they have already shown an interest in. This allows you to reconnect with consumers when they have more time to think about your offer, at specific times of day, when they are spending time on Facebook or Instagram, or even when they are nearer to your store.
Remarketing clients have reported an improved ROI (return on investment) of up to 60% on their current lost users. Remarketing ensures you, and your brand, are there when the customer is ready to buy and thus preventing your competitors from intercepting the sale.
Still not convinced? Not sure how remarketing could be applicable in your business? How about a practical description of remarketing in action? Let’s use the story of Joe’s Plumbing:
You know you have a leaking tap at home and you need a plumber. During your day at work you Google “plumbers in my area”. A Joe’s Plumbing Google ad comes up as the first result and you click on it (you should know Joe paid Google for that click). Just as the website opens, you get distracted: your phone is ringing and you’re now late for an important meeting. Plumbing needs will have to wait – you leave the tab open in your browser with every intention of calling Joe when you get back to your desk.
You’re back at your desk but your day hasn’t got any calmer. In a flurry of online activity, while busy with emails, you accidentally close the tab. Not the end of the world, you tell yourself, you can just find it again later.
It’s later now and you are back at home, scrolling through Facebook and guess what pops up in your feed? An ad for Joe’s Plumbing! It says: “Still looking for a plumber, why not book a callout on our website now!” And that’s what you do, the reminder comes at the perfect time (plus if you listen carefully you can actually hear the leaking tap in the other room), and you book a call out.
Without the well-timed remarketing ad there is a chance the customer in the story may have ended up forgetting to search Joe’s Plumbing by name, and ended up giving the business to another local plumber.
This same principle could be applied to any businesses that advertise online – the real moral of the story is, that if you are not using remarketing in your digital marketing mix, you are missing opportunities and your competitors will probably thank you for it.
