It’s happened to everyone. I guarantee it’s happened to you.

You're scrolling through a site, ready to make a purchase, but you get distracted before checking out and abandon your shopping cart. Later that same day, you see an ad while you’re reading the news or browsing social media. It draws you back to the product page for the item you nearly purchased earlier.

Coincidence? Definitely not - it's a smart form of online advertising, and it’s something your business can use as part of your B2B digital marketing strategy.

What is Retargeting and Remarketing? 

Remarketing and retargeting are terms that you’ll often hear used interchangeably but they aren’t the same thing. 

Remarketing describes the plethora of tactics you can use to reach the same customer more than once. It includes anything you would classify as a follow up. So it encompasses everything from email to social media and even physical billboards. 

Retargeting, on the other hand, is a subset of remarketing specifically using online ads to reach the same prospect multiple times. This includes ads across the Google Display Network, LinkedIn, Facebook ads and more.

If you want to re-engage warm leads and encourage them to continue along the customer journey with you, retargeting is a powerful tool. Combined with marketing automation, it allows you to be super creative, super targeted, and highly sophisticated in your marketing.

Brands love this approach because it presents a spectrum of opportunity. Depending on what you already know about your lead and what you want to achieve, you can:

• Increase a new prospect’s general awareness about your company by serving ads to people that generate an ambient level of visibility around your brand.

• Advertise to people who have visited specific product or service pages and target your ads based on their interests.

• Speak specifically to an individual customer and show them highly relevant ads. These might be based on what you know about them as a person or targeted to the totality of their relationship with your brand (i.e. how they’ve interacted with your ads, emails, landing pages, lead generation forms, social media campaigns etc).

• Take an Account Based Marketing approach. Target ads to stay top of mind and relevant to specific people within a target account or when engaged in a pitch process.

It sounds too good to be uncomplicated but nothing could be further from the truth.

How Does Retargeting Work?

Retargeting can be quite technical in nature but it’s not the overwhelming black belt art people seem to think it is.

Put simply we add a site tracking tag, or ‘pixel’, to your site. This places an anonymous cookie in the browser of every person who has visited your website. Once tagged, you can track your prospects across a network of websites, mobile apps and social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and serve your ads to them.

Another method of retargeting uses segmented lists of people you already have in your database. This opens up a world of incredible targeting possibilities. We can now track a multitude of factors about our customers and use that information to cut our data. For example, you can create a list of people who have signed up to a series of webinars and use ads to follow up with them online. 

List based retargeting also enables you to extend your reach to audiences who look like your highest value accounts on platforms like LinkedIn. Your CRM already contains the data you need. You can segment on job function or industry and target professionals with similar attributes. So why wait for the ideal prospect to stumble on your brand’s content? 

Retargeting Creates a Highly Relevant Customer Experience

Retargeting ads work because of the way they benefit the customer. They allow you to reach out to and remind people who have shown a prior interest. You can then offer them additional information that is both highly targeted and relevant to their unique needs and interests. All of this adds up to a smoother customer experience.

There was a time when consumers guarded their information tightly, refusing to offer those details to even their favourite brands. While we’re still wary of providing sensitive personal details, and perhaps a little burned by data privacy scandals, we’re now used to sharing email addresses and other relevant purchase decision information online.

More than that, when we’re interacting online these days, we understand that there is advanced technology in play that tracks our every movement. The quid pro quo is that we expect companies to personalise the customer experience across all buying and engagement channels. 

Think about it this way: your website visitors have a problem and believe you might have a solution. They know the technology exists to provide them with targeted, personalised content, and they see its use as good customer service. They want you to save them time and energy. Cut through the online clutter and serve them the information you have on the solutions they need.

Tracking how customers are engaging with your brand across your website, email and social channels is what allows you to offer this experience. Use the data you gather to nurture your audiences’ interests and help them overcome any buying concerns. Doing this, you can build awareness and trust in your brand while creating compelling reasons for people to continue to engage. The result can be a shortened buying cycle and deepened relationship that is the basis for building repeat business.

Of course, data privacy and protection is always an issue that brands have to consider. However, when you treat consumer information respectfully, even those individuals who have privacy concerns are often willing to engage. Customers become frustrated when companies abuse their trust or use poor personalisation tactics. If your efforts feel invasive instead of helpful there are plenty of steps you can take to be a responsible data custodian.

Retargeting and Marketing Automation

With the acquisition of Perfect Audience at the end of 2019, our partner Sharpspring took the exciting step of integrating retargeting and display ads in its platform.

In the context of Sharpspring’s already impressive core marketing automation functionality, this provides powerful retargeting lead generation and lead nurturing capabilities.

Sharpspring’s dynamic lists mean you can retarget your advertising using any number of relationship indicators and clues as triggers to automatically update segmentations. 

• The integrated CRM data makes segmenting your lists and retargeting on job function, company and industry simple.

• Dynamic lists can be defined based on behavioural triggers - such as the prospect downloading a white paper, filling in lead form or clicking on LinkedIn Promotion.

• They can also be defined by a threshold lead score, allowing you to move prospects into new retargeting campaigns based on their evolving level of interest.

Being able to tightly narrow your focus on your ideal audience is one benefit. The integrated analytics and attribution that allow you to easily measure your performance across all channels and prove ROI is another. When marketing budgets are being squeezed to the point of having to justify every expenditure, multi-touch marketing attribution and end-to-end ROI are powerful allies.

Lead Generation

Retargeting allows you to capture more leads by serving ads to bring unknown web visitors back to your site. It also lets you use your current customers as the key to unlock new audiences, expand your reach and find new, quality leads. 

After all, audience tracking means you already know who your best customers are. You also know key factors, like what they're interested in and what their problems are. Sharpspring with Perfect Audience allows you to extract actionable value from your customer intelligence and leverage tools like Google Customer Match, Facebook Lookalike Audiences and LinkedIn Matched Audiences. For example, you can build a list of existing customers and use LinkedIn to find people with similar profiles, based on their job role or industry sector.

Account Based Marketing

Using marketing automation and retargeting can facilitate your Account Based Marketing strategy and keep your company top of mind with your target accounts. 

Imagine how valuable it would be to generate awareness of your brand among the key decision makers at an account before ramping up your personal outreach program. Or perhaps you’re in the middle of a pitching process and would find it useful to be able to promote content to the decision team that addresses their concerns.

Our clients are able to roll out these hyper-personalised, extremely relevant campaigns based on the contact lists stored in Sharpspring’s integrated CRM.   

Customer Experience

Integrating your paid advertising with your content strategy amplifies your results and improves the customer experience. 

Using PPC (pay-per-click) ads to promote content allows you to be seen by and engage with your potential customers. Retargeting powers up the process. You use ads to promote highly relevant content to the right people at the right time, and nurture your prospects through the customer journey.

As audience engages at various touchpoints, our clients can track their activity through our marketing automation platform. You can use those behavioural triggers - like visiting a landing page but not filling out the lead capture - to build dynamically updating lists in Sharpspring. You then use those lists to assign prospects to whatever remarketing campaign is relevant to their interests. 

Email Marketing

It’s easy to fall into the trap of taking your relationships for granted. And that’s precisely what many B2B marketers do when a lead opts in to their email marketing list. 

Adding new subscribers to your list shouldn’t be viewed as the end goal. Email marketing generates a wealth of audience feedback in the form of click throughs that can help you be proactive in deepening your relationship. Use that data to better define your marketing segmentation and serve more targeted advertising. The end result is something that reinforces your branding, keeps people engaged and focuses their attention on the value you have to offer.

In Conclusion

While understanding the finer points of retargeting can often feel too overwhelming to be exciting, it’s honestly not as complicated as some people like to make it sound. 

Marketing automation and retargeting not only an integral part of delivering the personalised, highly relevant experience your customers now expect. It’s also a fantastic way to manage your ad spend effectively. If you want to get better at digital advertising quickly while spending less, spending it better and being able to track your ROI, this is the discipline for you.

At 1827 Marketing, we combine sophisticated technology with marketing expertise to enrich the customer experience. Creative campaigns, marketing automation and digital advertising all come together to enable dialogue and deepen relationships through all the stages of the customer journey.

Book a demo to learn more about using your marketing budget effectively. We'll show you how to deliver the right content to the right person in the right place and at exactly the right time, and how to do that at scale.