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April 10, 2019

Anna Ruth Williams

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Partner

Now, before you get any ideas, this blog isn’t about religion…well, not exactly. If your religion is converting website visitors into sales, then you are in luck – this IS about religion.

Retargeting (aka remarketing), the often-controversial practice of online advertising served to users who have already visited your website or are a contact in your database (like a lead or customer), shouldn’t really be controversial at all. Retargeting pixels, the code that tracks behavior in order to enact retargeting, do not collect any personally identifiable information, such as names, addresses, etc. In fact, all targeting is done anonymously. And for those of you now thinking, ‘yea, but is it General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant?’ The simple answer is yes if you made sure to roll out these simple steps last year. In fact, if you are still skeptical, Digiday reported that retargeting actually grew in the wake of GDPR’s introduction last year. And the reason why is because it’s a powerful tool that relies on repetition and building trust.

If you stop and truly think about your own B2B buyer’s journeys of late, you’ll know that any purchase decision over a certain dollar amount requires more convincing than just one or two touchpoints, more like 7 to 10. We preach a lot about this process in our last few blog posts…for a refresher, click here and here. So, think of retargeting as one of the last pieces of the puzzle, which pushes your users further down the funnel to convert after touchpoint 6 or 9. Below are the top 3 reasons you should start your retargeting campaign yesterday:

1. You can kill the competition. Retargeting is usually paired with a prospecting segment (theoretically you are reaching new users with prospecting). You need remarketing to keep building brand awareness, trust and familiarity in front of your target audience. For example, we recently executed this type of campaign for client Coronet in order to capture users who did not convert or sign up for the product after initial exposure. This was vital since there was a large chance these prospects were considering a competitor as well. By running these ads, Coronet was guaranteed to be seen more frequently than competitors who were not.

2. You can resurrect a lead that left your site the first time. Were you aware that 96% of the people who visit a website will leave without ever converting to a lead or sale? Taking it even further, customers who see retargeted ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website. I’m not really sure there’s much more to say here except to give an example. Our client IRONSCALES executed a retargeting campaign in order to stay frequent and relevant in a short time period in front of users who did not initially convert. Retargeting with a content piece was a great way to provide useful information to a user and collect their contact information so they could enter a more sophisticated nurture flow.

3. You can bring customers back from the dead. Whether these are former customers or current customers, retargeting can work to get them back in the game after they’ve grown tired of your thought leadership content or e-blasts. If executed with the right messaging, why not target those already following you and introduce a new product or service, upsell an existing client (the best kind of sale, right?) or bring back those former customers who forgot just how amazing you really are? A good example of this in action is StayWell’s annual Patient Catalog campaign. The company publishes this every year so by targeting former purchasers Alloy was able to increase awareness to former buyers. These users were way more likely to buy again than a prospect unfamiliar with the brand who needed to complete a full buyer’s journey cycle before purchase.

Now that I’ve overused puny death-related double entendres and have convinced you that retargeting is a good idea, you might be wondering if there’s a best practice regarding the cadence of these types of the campaigns. The short answer is any time is a good time. But, if you are constrained by a tight budget or bandwidth, we recommend running these in tandem with broader-reaching efforts that may not be scaling frequency effectively, such as:

  • Another paid advertising campaign that is driving a lot of website traffic (think 500 users/month +)

  • To micro-segment current site users based on pages visited or content viewed

  • When there’s a high number of new users to a site – indicating that these users need to be brought back to the site to further consider buying decisions

At Alloy we’ve consistently seen an above average win rate for our B2B tech clients’ retargeting efforts. Contact us to learn how to integrate this strategy into your current PR efforts or click here to learn how utilizing our entire Alloy Methodology can help your B2B tech company’s reputation thrive and its sales pipeline prosper.