Re-marketing, sometimes known as re-targeting, lets marketers send more relevant and timely messages to their customers based on their previous online behaviour by using behavioural advertising technology.
Traditionally re-marketing has been used by consumer marketers and has remained a fairly undiscovered area in the B2B sector. However, as technology develops there is more opportunity for B2B marketers to take advantage of the tactic.
Re-marketing generally covers two camps. One is explicit re-marketing. This is re-marketing based on registration data using email, telemarketing, SMS and postal touch points.
The other is implicit re-marketing, is using data collected about your site’s users to deliver more relevant advertising campaign messages. Implicit remarketing is the most useful for B2B marketers.
Re-marketing tactics
Re-marketing is proven to have high success rates. This is because the user has already expressed an interest in the product or service or interaction with another part of the campaign.
Historically, it was not feasible for most B2B marketers to re-target their marketing, as their landing page traffic/site traffic would have been prohibitively small. However, as technology has developed marketers are able to capture data not just on the client landing page/corporate site, but also on across the existing display campaigns. This has resulted in the potential audience base for retargeting to grow, making re-marketing a much more viable prospect.
In order to capture and refine users, a cookie is used to identify a browser or device. The data from this cookie can be used for a variety of marketing activities:
1. Site re-targeting: Identifying the pages or sites a user has visited, allows media planners to gain a better understanding of the behaviour and intentions of customers. Technology can then be used to direct marketing spend efficiently.
2. Customer re-targeting: By analysing the interaction with marketing, customers can be anonymously segmented into pools – e.g. people who dropped off the order process or visited a particular product page or watched a pre-roll video for the advertiser’s campaign. These users have shown that they are interested in what the advertiser has to offer and can be delivered the right message.
3. Exclusion filtering: If a user has completed the order process they can be put into a segment of ‘new customers’ and excluded from seeing further marketing, this can considerably improve the efficiency of an advertiser’s campaign.
By using the re-marketing techniques described, campaign planners can have a clearer view of who is interacting with campaigns. This insight can ensure that marketers get the right message to the right person.
Display re-marketing
Marketers can now place a large focus on the value of data and how consolidating, retaining and re-messaging that data empowers them to deliver better results.
Re-messaging users after they’ve visited a client’s website using display advertising is still a hugely effective way of delivering results. Marketers are now working with their technology partners to find ways to build their data pools and place greater value on the users they are trying to re-message.
It is now possible to track most online activity, resulting in a lot of data which can be used to gain insight into campaigns. Data stored at the client level enables marketers to segment the data into valuable profile categories. In the B2B market (where site traffic can often be limited) it allows the marketer to use additional data they have built up over time to offer custom re-messaging.
Benefits of remarketing
- You will increase the reach of your campaign at a much lower cost than what you would be paying on premium business websites, sometimes up to a tenth of the cost.
- You will magnify your campaign, thus making it seem larger to your customers and prospects than it actually is. Customers will be able to see your campaign on portals and more generic news and service-based websites increasing your reach.
- You will be able to tailor your message to your audience, thus making it more relevant.
- You will be able to exclude people that have already converted / are already your customers, thus reducing wastage on your campaign.
How to get started
The best way to get started with re-marketing technologies is to get in touch with your media agency who can guide you through your options. They can give you a holistic view of how re-marketing can work for your search and display campaigns and how you go about implementing it. Individual ad networks or search engines can only give you a view on the re-targeting they can offer within their sphere of influence (audience base), not across the entire campaign across media owners, ad networks and search engines.
Top tips
- The greater the number of visitors the more effective retargeting can be. A good starting point is 50,000 or more visitors per month from search.
- Look at how long a consumer is the sales cycle. The longer the customer is in-market, the more effectively you can retarget.
- How valuable is a customer/lead? The more a customer is worth, the more you can pay to influence them to return to the site.
- Can you track / integrate reporting of my retargeting and search together to understand interaction effects? The more touch points you can evaluate, the better you will be able to understand the effect that re-marketing has on your marketing efforts.
Contributors: Hanne Tuomisto-Inch, online communications director, Banner, Petra Studholme, paid search manager, Simply Business and Lewis Sherlock, head of agency at MIG
