Remarketing or Retargeting: Persistence Pays Off

Search marketing is one of the easiest ways to get (and keep!) your products and services in front of your prospects. Though you may be familiar with the term, most people are not sure what search marketing actually means. The term itself encompasses two processes: search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). The difference between the two is whether you are getting traffic through unpaid or paid efforts. SEO gets your website traffic through inbound marketing strategies (building back-links; social media marketing, content marketing, etc.). With SEM, you buy traffic through paid advertisements and listings.

For this blog post, we want to focus on one area of SEM, remarketing or retargeting. Everyone knows about Google AdWords, and other search engine “paid listings”, usually referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. The latest trend in SEM is remarketing or retargeting. Notice that lately, when you’ve searched for a particular item and viewed it on a website, it starts popping up everywhere on your browser? This is retargeting SEM at work. For example, you have gone to Amazon and searched for a new 50 inch LED TV. You click on one of the links to check out the specs. You leave the Amazon site and head to a new website, but in the sidebar, you notice the TV you just looked at. Afterwards, on many of the websites you land on, you see that TV in the sidebar or banner at the top of the page. Soon, you see ads for other 50 inch LED TVs. How does Amazon keep these products in front of you? By paying Google or Yahoo-Bing to continue displaying the products or services you have searched for and viewed on their website. Retargeting ads can appear on any website in the Google AdWords network – which is … HUGE. Remarketing tailors ads and shows them to previous visitors based on the search terms they used and related products.

Why You Should Consider Using It

Remarketing drives sales, increases brand awareness, and boosts registrations. B2C companies have been doing it for some time now; but the reason it works on a consumer who’s shopping for a TV is the same reason it can work on a plant maintenance manager searching for a specific type of valve. The reason? Seeing (or hearing) a message over and over again creates “top of mind awareness.” Yes, people really do act on remarketing ads; because they were searching for the product in the first place and your brand continues to appear in front of them. Whether you’re in the market for lawn services or industrial safety services, the likelihood that you’ll investigate a brand further increases significantly when that brand keeps following you everywhere you go on the Web. Here are some good reasons for considering a remarketing campaign:

#1 – Engage Customers at the Acquisition Stage of the Buying Journey We’ve talked about the different stages of the buying journey and how to engage customers at each stage. Only five percent of first time visitors to your website convert into a sale. Most first time visitors are there to do research before making a purchase (especially so for industrial customers). Want to grab some of the other 95 percent? Then consider remarketing. Keep your company and its products/services in front of prospects to convert them from a prospect to a sale.

#2 – Reach a Larger Audience Convert additional customers based on their search terms and not only show them similar items, but scale the ads to cover your entire inventory or repertoire of services. By retargeting related search keywords or phrases, you are able to attract a potential customer’s attention who may not have been aware you offered the product or service they were searching for.

#3 – Generate More Traffic to Your Website Consistent exposure to display campaigns increasing search traffic to your site. There is a fine line with too much and too little exposure so make sure you analyze your Reach and Frequency. Setting a Frequency cap will help you to create the right number of impressions per customer. You do not want to badger customers with too many impressions.

#4 – Be More Cost-Effective Search remarketing means you are engaging customers that are looking for what you offer. There are different forms of paid search advertising that fit any budget. You can do straight paid search ads, pay-per-clicks (PPC), cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM). You can pay for advertising that will get your company out there with CPM and straight paid search or you can only pay for ads that convert a search to an actual website visitor with PPC and CPC.

#5 – Cover Your Bases With remarketing for dynamic search ads (RDSA), you can actually analyze the content on your website and generate keywords you may have missed. AdWords and Bing Ads will create ad headlines tailored to the product. RDSA has been found to increase qualified traffic and the conversion rate for those who use it.

Remarketing is just smart. You know why I’m so sure of that? Because it works on me, and MANY other people I talk to all the time! I’m not saying that someone is going to make a capital purchase just because of a remarketing campaign; but if they were already considering the company who was “remarketing” to them, persistence just may be the nudge they need to investigate further: send an an email or pick up the phone. It really is a clever way to reengage prospects and possibly convert them to a sale. You can also launch remarketing campaigns on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. You are able to target audiences on these platforms just as easily as on a search engine. If you want to learn more about what remarketing can do for your business, give us a call!