With retargeting being over a decade old, you’d think it would have more traction by now. In fact, roughly 46 percent of all web marketers believe it is the most underrated, under-utilized web marketing technique out there. Social media has made it easier than ever for web marketers to integrate retargeting into their marketing campaigns.
Retargeting: A 10-Second Introduction
For the uninitiated, retargeting is the practice of focusing display-advertising resources on either previous visitors to your site (site retargeting), or towards web searchers seeking out products and terms similar to yours on major search engines (search retargeting). However, the problem is not that retargeting is hard to implement, but rather that most web marketers don’t know how to make it work with their already existing web marketing efforts.
5 Ways to Implement Retargeting With an Existing Marketing Campaign
Target Competitor Terms & Brands – Any marketer that has been around for a minute or two will tell you about pros and (mostly) cons of engaging a competitor’s customers directly. Retargeting lets you engage with competitor terms, products and customers in an indirect way through display advertising.Leverage Search Intent – On the search retargeting side of things, you can actually leverage search intent to build campaigns through powerful keywords. In other words, you can monitor keyword searches that relate to your product or brand and target those customers through their search habits.Use Social Media Tools – Use the power and size of popular social networks to retarget previous site visitors and/or potential customers interested in your brand, product or industry. Through a combination of social media and search analytics, you can combine forces to reach a massive amount of current and potential customers.The Power of Recency – Recency is the key component of any retargeting campaign. This is largely because the time window between someone searching for your site or seeing your display ad varies widely from campaign to campaign. You must work within a retargeting platform that lets you monitor the recency of each campaign. Without this, your retargeting campaign will lose traction quickly.Reach Consumers When Their Search Activity is Dormant – It’s no big secret that the paid search landscape is massive. The problem is that it’s still very limited in a variety of ways. The reality is that most people searching for your targeted terms on any given search engine may not land on your site anytime soon. Retargeting allows you to target specific users when they’re not searching at all, which will make your campaign much more efficient in the long and short run.
The Future of Retargeting
Analysts all over the web are predicting the future of retargeting, and it’s looking bright. Learning to leverage traditional search and combine it with social display advertising and targeting efforts will determine the success and/or failure of many companies and marketers going forward. In fact, we’re actually seeing a lot of that now as companies develop entire retargeting campaigns around social platforms. In short, social retargeting is and will continue to evolve at breakneck speed. There’s no better time to jump on the bandwagon.
