Marketing and Digital Marketing are understood and used regularly by brands and businesses of all sizes looking to increase sales or heightened brand awareness. Remarketing, on the other hand, is a little more complex and not as widely understood and used. Yet, remarketing is one of the quickest and most effective ways to reach, engage and convert customers or clients.  

What is remarketing?

In simple terms, remarketing is the act of sharing ads, information or messages directly with people who have already shown interest or engaged with your brand. In sales, these people are considered ‘warm leads’ and actively pursuing them have been proven to lead to a higher conversion rate. In comparison, a ‘cold lead’ will take longer and therefore, cost more to reach the final conversion point.

First-time website visitors will rarely purchase or book on their first visit, although it can happen. While a regular cold targeted ad will target and appeal to people in the awareness phase, remarketing works at the interest and engagement stages of the sales funnel. 

Remarketing gives you the ability to remind interested people of the products or services they’ve browsed and can provide this highly relevant audience group with more compelling reasons to click and convert.  

Where does remarketing happen?

Remarketing can be done across a wide range of platforms including Google and YouTube advertising, social media advertising including on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, and even in Email Marketing. 

All of these tools have the ability capture and track an individual’s information and behaviour. Sometimes this ‘tracking’ happens within the platform itself, while other times it’s in conjunction with other apps or tools – see below.

How does remarketing work?

You may have noticed pop-ups and alerts to “accept cookies” when you visit a website for the first time. A ‘cookie’ stores a small amount of information about your behaviour on that website, such as the original source of your visit and any pages and/ or products you have browsed. 

To do this, a simple code has been installed on the website. For example, you can embed a Facebook pixel on your website to identify customers who have visited your website previously. You can also see how this user has engaged with your website – whether they have viewed a product, added to cart, or made a purchase. 

Other remarketing platforms, such as Google, operate in the same way, allowing markets to track specific engagements and conversions to determine relevant audiences to remarket to. 

How do you run a remarketing campaign?

There’s a bit of work to do before you can run a remarketing campaign. Basically, you need people to have either visited your website, clicked on an ad or searched you on Google. Here’s a quick overview of what’s involved:

1. Create and run your initial marketing ad, sales or other campaign, targeting your ideal audience or customer. 
2. Set up a way to capture their details and/ or specific behaviour by installing a pixel, remarketing tool and/ or code. 
3. Once the first interaction or action has happened and is recorded, create a new audience group or list made up of those specific people.
4. Create and run your remarketing ad or campaign targeting this new audience list. 
5. Don’t forget to exclude customers who have already purchased or converted from your remarketing audience! 

What are the benefits of remarketing?

• The benefits of remarketing are numerous and incredibly impactful, and include: 
• Increase in sales and bookings
• Lower advertising costs 
• More personalised content and communications 
• Improved relationships with your customers
• Increased brand awareness and trust

Top tips for remarketing success:

1. Develop a strategic digital marketing plan to identify your target audience and any audience segments that hold potential value for your brand - learn more in this blog
2. Maintain and/ or update your lists regularly - don’t use the same one for years!
3. Remove users from a list and/ or create a new list once they have purchased
4. Test a variety of creative and copy to see which performs the best 
5. Create different and tailored information to the first ad - remarketing ads should enhance and add on to what they’ve already seen rather than being repetitive.

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