Session 26: What is Remarketing?

In session 26 of A Marketing Podcast, it’s time to talk about what is ReMarketing. I get into the strategic approach to ReMarketing and the different ways to apply remarketing strategically. I also discuss what it takes to setup remarketing and how to use your remarketing lists withing your advertising campaigns.

Session 26: What is ReMarketing?

Today’s session I answer the question What is ReMarketing? I focus on:

* The strategic approach/reasoning behind remarketing

* Some strategic examples as to how to use remarketing

* How to setup remarketing in your website

* How to apply remarketing within certain advertising channels

* The big gotcha – that many advertisers fall into, and how to avoid it

* Monitoring and reporting remarketing campaigns

Remarketing vs ReTargeting

Somewhat interchangeable terms, but there is a slight difference to be technically correct.

Remarketing is about marketing to a list that you’ve developed outside of a specific campaign. So through general traffic to your website you generate a list to market to. So you’re remarketing in this instance to someone who’s already visited your website.

Retargeting however, is what you do when you build your lists from your website during a campaign, and typically a very specific list. For example, if your advertising a specific promotion and have a landing page for that campaign, if you generate a list of users from those who visited that landing page, and then advertised within the same campaign to that list, you are re-targeting.

For what it’s worth I use the term remarketing to cover both and we can worry about the semantics later.

The strategic approach/reasoning behind remarketing

It’s pretty simple really, when advertising your number one objective is to reach potential customers. Not as “many people as possible”. And the best way to reach those that we know are interested in our product , in some way shape or form, is by using remarketing.

So What is ReMarketing?

Understanding that remarketing creates lists of people for us to advertise to from visiting our website (or a particular page) we know that people on those lists are interested. Maybe not ready to buy, but more interested than someone who has never heard of our product/service before. It’s remarketing that allows us to do that.

Some strategic examples as to how to use remarketing

Basic Remarketing List

Most basic example is that we build a list of people to advertise to who have visited our website at some point in the past. This establishing a list of people who are familiar with our brand and and will, as a side affect, require less impressions to get back to our site and ideally perform a conversion (or sale).

This approach works well if you’re just getting started with advertising online, as it’s the first step towards targeting people we know are somewhat interested in our product or service. So we’re targeting organic traffic (the traffic that found its way to our site without us advertising).

Retargeting as Part of an Inbound Campaign

Notice I said retargeting – so we’re talking about advertising more to a list of people who have been driven to our site from an already active advertising campaign. This works great with inbound marketing campaigns as we usually have an offer attached which a potential customer may not be ready to accept, but with a little time and persistence through some additional advertising.

In this case it makes sense to provide an additional offer or totally different yet related offer as we know our initial offering didn’t do the trick. At the end of the day whether to advertise a new offer, and additional offer, or even the same offer again will take some trial and error and monitoring to identify which ...