Embrace the Power of Multiple Touches Through Remarketing

Most digital marketing attention is predictably focused on the initial point of exposure with your audience. If you don't get the word out about your brand, you will never be able to convince your audience to become customers. But that first touch should not be the sole focus of your efforts; in fact, remarketing offers a unique opportunity to ensure that your brand stays in your audience's mind for longer.

The Power of Multiple Touches

Most marketers are aware of a simple fact: to convince your audience to become customers, they need to hear about your brand more than once. One study estimates that to even generate a sales qualified lead, you will need to touch your audience 6-8 times depending on your industry. That means not just providing the initial promotion, but follow-ups that get your audience more familiar with your brand and its offers.

Especially if you engage in inbound marketing, some of these touches are naturally baked into your marketing strategy. For example, most of your ads likely lead to your website, at which point you provide visitors with options to sign up and become a lead for further lead nurturing. But what happens if a visitor leaves your site without becoming a lead?

Considering that marketers see lead conversion rates ranging anywhere from 2% to 10%, the vast majority of your visitors likely fall into this category. To stay in touch with them regardless, consider taking advantage of remarketing.

An Introduction to Remarketing

Remarketing follows a simple concept: showing ads to visitors after they leave your website. By adding a few lines of code to your site, you can create ads that accomplish just that.

As you might imagine, remarketing offers a variety of advantages to your marketing efforts:

• Additional touches. As mentioned above, staying in touch with your audience for a longer timeframe ultimately increases their likelihood to convert to leads and customers.
• A focused audience. Because you are only showing ads to past visitors, you are reaching an audience you know to be interested.
• Cost effectiveness. Remarketing ads follow the PPC model, and users who click on them have necessarily visited the website. It requires a significant amount of interest to consciously click on an ad that brings you back to a space you already know, so you know that every click you pay for from a highly interested user.
• Inbound marketing integration. Inbound marketing, above all, is focused on lead generation and lead nurturing efforts. But a majority of visitors do not become leads during their first visit, so remarketing increases the chance of returning - and ultimately entering your database as leads.

The Range of Opportunities

Remarketing is increasingly available on digital advertising platforms. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all use their own version of the concept, enabling marketers to target ads specifically at recent web visitors.

Depending on the network, these ads look and behave differently. Facebook and Twitter, for example, allow marketers to show promotional messages to their audience through ads that appear right in users' news feeds, a more native experience that results in significantly higher click-through rates than 'regular' sidebar ads.

Google offers a similar experience, showing text and display ads to recent visitors both as they perform a search or browse on one of more than 2 million within the Google Display Network. But it takes the concept a step further, offering dynamic remarketing options that show users customized content based on the individual products or services they viewed while on your website.

3 Scenarios of Remarketing in Action

To further illustrate the potential benefits of remarketing to your business, consider these three opportunities:

1. Lead Generation Reminder. After placing a remarketing pixel on your landing page, you can target ads specifically at users who have almost made it into your database. Then, show them ads that highlight either social proof or the core benefit they would receive from signing up to encourage them to return and complete the process.
2. E-Commerce Powerhouse. A discouraging 70% of all shopping carts are abandoned, and most users who abandon their carts do so with the intent to complete the process later. Of course, they then forget about it. Through Google's dynamic remarketing option, you can show your shoppers just what items they were almost ready to buy, which will speed up the process.
3. Lead Nurturing Support. Remarketing does not just help lead generation. Placing the pixel on a conversion page, i.e. a page that your audience lands on after they sign up to become a lead, can turn it into a powerful lead nurturing tool. Now, you can run ads that showcase other pieces of content, or encourage them to follow you on social media for further interactions.

In short, remarketing can enhance your digital marketing efforts in a wide variety of ways. Dynamically pulling in web visitors from the recent past, it enables you to extend the reach of your marketing efforts and ultimately increase the chance that your web visitors become customers.

Does your marketing strategy include remarketing? If not, you may miss out on a significant opportunity. The vast majority of your web visitors are interested in your company, but not quite ready to become lead. Because it encourages visitors who slipped through the cracks of lead generation to return to your website, remarketing can fit especially within your inbound marketing framework. But even when used independently of the inbound philosophy, it can help your business increase both exposure and conversions.