If your B2B company is like most, your online marketing strategy revolves around bringing traffic to your site – through SEO and/or PPC ads – and then using content to convert them.
While this kind of conventional approach may produce some results, it will also inevitably fall short of the number of leads you could secure every month.
That’s because it’s missing one extremely powerful method: retargeting marketing.
What Is Retargeting Marketing?
Retargeting marketing is an approach that uses cookies to “follow” your website’s visitors, so you can advertise to them again, long after they’ve left your website.
It’s an ingenious way of addressing the frustrating problem of bounce rate because no matter how great your website is, some potential customers are always going to leave before converting.
Maybe they want to consider other options first. Maybe they just got distracted. Maybe they’ll be back, too, but that’s not a “maybe” most marketers are willing to accept.
A lot can happen before their return. Namely, a more aggressive competitor could lure them away. With retargeting marketing, you’re able to advertise to your visitors on other sites. This leverages an important concept known as effective frequency.
This was first introduced to the public all the way back in 1885 when Thomas Smith published his book, Successful Advertising. Back then, Smith proposed that a prospect needed to see a company’s advertising 20 times before they would convert.
While that shouldn’t be taken as a hard-and-fast rule, the logic still holds: the more a prospect is exposed to your company, the more likely they are to become a customer.
How Does Retargeting Marketing Work?
As we touched on above, retargeting marketing utilizes cookies, which run on JavaScript. All you have to do is place a tiny unobtrusive line of code – often referred to as a pixel – on your website to “follow” visitors once they go elsewhere.
Now, to be clear, this cookie won’t tell you where they go. There’s no invasion of privacy. It also won’t interrupt their web surfing, either. These kinds of cookies have become so commonplace, that there’s a good chance more than one is being used to retarget you right now. All these cookies do is tell your retargeting provider when a visitor is on a site that can display your ad.
In the world of traditional retail, this would be like if you perused the selection at a shoe store and didn’t buy anything. But on the way home, some of the billboards you passed changed to display the pairs you had tried on. Your vehicle wasn’t affected, nor was your path home. The retailer was just able to take another try at advertising their inventory.
Retargeting Providers
So, how do your ads wind up on other sites?
The answer is a retargeting provider, companies that work with these other sites, paying them for space in return for the right to display their clients’ ads.
Popular retargeting providers include:
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
- AdRoll
- ReTargeter
All you need to do is create an account with one of these providers and they’ll make sure your ads show up on their network of sites.
The Secret to Retargeting’s Success
Aside from effective frequency, there’s another important reason that retargeting marketing makes a prospect 70% more likely to convert.
That’s because these ads only show to people who have already visited your B2B company’s website and, thus, have shown some level of interest.
You probably pass dozens of billboards every week that don’t remotely stand a chance of converting you because you’re not remotely interested in what they have to offer.
But the hypothetical billboards we brought up earlier would as they’re only displayed to you because you were in the company’s store looking at their inventory.
In other words, your ad spend isn’t wasted on people who haven’t shown any interest in a company.
Using Email and Retargeting Marketing Together
Retargeting marketing is usually most effective with prospects who just need a little nudge or a reminder that your company is ready and willing to help theirs.
Other prospects require a bit more before they make a decision. This is when email marketing is absolutely vital.
By leveraging both in your marketing, you don’t have to worry about any prospects falling through the cracks.
At Hushly, our platform will fill your email-marketing funnel with the addresses it needs. This is also helpful for retargeting campaigns, as many prospects may return to your site a second time without buying. Our platform will give you their email, so you can continue to follow up.
Request a demo today to see our powerful solution in action.
