Three Things To Know About Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
opens IMAGE file Have you ever noticed that the internet somehow seems to know your innermost thoughts? For example, you start shopping around for flights to Jamaica for spring break, and then all of the sudden you have ads for cruises, and hotels, and resorts…ALL IN JAMAICA! How do they know that you need a hotel in Jamaica? You never told anyone you were going to Jamaica; you didn’t even book your flight yet. Yet somehow, the internet knew that you would need a hotel room and rental car for your spring break vacay. Well, we know how the internet knew: retargeting!
Retargeting involves advertising to consumers after they have interacted with an initial advertising campaign or other trigger. This form of digital marketing helps you focus your campaign on the consumers who showed even a glimmer of interest in your product. Perhaps they visited your website, clicked on a link in an email, opened up your email in the first place, or signed up for a free promo you were offered. Any of those are examples of initial interactions a consumer may have with your brand. Once they have that initial interaction, you can target them again, but now you understand where in the buying cycle they are.
Often people need to interact with a brand a few times before making a purchase. Retargeting allows you to connect with those people for the second and third, and fourth interactions until they convert to a paying customer. Retargeting, in its most basic form, puts a tag on a webpage. When you visit that webpage, in simple, non-technical terms, it attaches to your browser and it tracks your web activity. When you land on a site that has advertising slots, it “knows” your interests from past activity and presents you with similar ads that match your behavior and history on a webpage. This data helps our media partners know where consumers are in the process.
Retargeting does not have to be through a single channel. You can start your campaign with email, but retarget with banner ads or social media ads, and vice versa. The beauty of digital marketing today is that your audience often uses and pays attention to multiple channels. This means that brands have a wide variety of options to choose from to decide how they will market.
Launching a Retargeting Campaign: A Few Tips:
1. Spread your campaigns across multiple channels. In our world, consumers are on multiple channels, often at the same time! Your retargeting strategy should reflect that knowledge of our highly technical and diverse world. Retargeting campaigns need to be diversified across social media, video, display, banner, and email. When you focus on only one channel, you miss out on all of the other places your same customers spend their time.
2. Segment your remarketing lists. When you are retargeting audiences, we recommend segmenting your list of targeted audiences by behavior. For example, if a web user is about to check out, but then doesn’t, they should be on a different retargeting list than those who clicked around on product but never made it to the cart page. These two scenarios represent two different web visitors at two different parts of the buying process. You need to treat those two different camps of people differently and market appropriately to each camp at the stage of the buying cycle that they are currently in.
3. Failure Is Not The End. Sometimes your projected outcome is not nearly how the audience responded. You may feel like your retargeting campaigns are a failure. People and their habits change daily, and you need to learn how to fail fast and move forward. Learn from your first retargeting campaign and improve from it.
Retargeting is yet another way that companies can stand out above the rest in the giant world of digital marketing. Utilizing consumer behavior data can help you be smarter with your marketing dollars and make a big impact on your profits. At Data-Dynamix, we understand the ins and outs of retargeting and utilizing data in a strategic manner to foster positive marketing campaign results. We understand digital marketing channels in extreme depth so that we can provide the best options for our partners and clients!