Reasons you might need to Remarket

One of the latest tactics being employed by marketers recently is that of remarketing.

remarking with google

This is mostly thanks to the rollout of the targeting method by Google Adwords back on June 25 2013.

However, not everyone is familiar with remarketing and whilst there’s plenty written online about it, I thought we’d take a look at why a business might need to remarket and how they can potentially gain from it.

The most common reason of all for needing to remarket is that you simply need to refocus on who your target audience is. Hopefully that doesn’t mean you need to change every single product you sell and every single page on your site, but something far simpler and quicker.

Having said that, any remarketing plan should have time spent on it to ensure that this time, you’re marketing to the correct people and for the correct reasons. Otherwise, you’ll make the same mistakes as before and you’ll indeed have to go down a much more long-winded route to securing visitors.

Customise campaigns

Google’s Remarketing function allows you to customise campaigns with attention-grabbing offers or persuasive words, which get the customer viewing your site and actually buying something, rather than leaving it in the basket or losing interest. You can tailor each advert with particular products which are relevant or the same as what they have bought (or almost bought) in the past. Essentially you need to identify who your market is, perhaps by checking out the data in Google Analytics for your site, and target them with things they’ll be interested in.

Sometimes you may have to target your audience by being ultra-specific with your advertisements, but just be sure the audience is at the centre of everything you do, regardless who you’ve decided who they are. Take on board these three common reasons for businesses needing to remarket and you may be able to apply one – or several – of them to your own business.

Needing to secure more customer loyalty

If you’ve had customers who have repeatedly ordered from you in the past, but have lately not been quite so loyal, it may simply be that they are strapped for cash or haven’t got a need for your services any more. However, it doesn’t hurt to target these customers as your products and services may not be at the forefront of their mind. This could be for several reasons, a long time may have passed and you haven’t kept in touch with newsletters and special offers (why not?), or a competitor may have tempted them away with a better deal.

Offer those customers great value in your ads or you won’t win them back, it’s that simple. Google Remarketing doesn’t care what your reason for remarketing is, but your customers will. If they can clearly see that your ads are desperate, or you’re begging for their custom, they’ll be put off and the advert will have done the exact opposite of what it was meant to do. Be informal, pleasant, casual, and let them feel as though they are welcome back whenever they feel like it. Don’t bombard them with too many adverts or they’ll feel like they’re being sold to, rather than spoken to.

Needing to persuade customers to go through with a sale who have abandoned their basket

We’re all guilty of it. How many of us have shopped on Amazon, filled up our baskets with too many things and consequently not actually bought anything? We all lead busy lives and all too commonly don’t get paid enough for our efforts, so basket abandonment is one of the most frequent habits of all. Sometimes, however, there is a clear reason why a basket has been abandoned.

You could be charging too much for postage, or charging too much for the product itself. You need to entice these customers back in with offers and discounts which will get them keen to do business with you, and you have to ensure your ads make it clear that people will receive great benefits if they return to you. Even if it’s just a 10% discount on a particular item, lots of people could see this ad and be persuaded to go with your company. There may not be a huge influx of customers, because you’ll need to give more of an incentive than that, but it should still provide a small increase in revenue in the short term.

Seasonal changes in stock

There are loads of seasons: Christmas, Summer, Halloween… and plenty of one-off events as well which require one-off purchases. You need to be on top of all the different events, special days and seasons in advance. If you leave it until Christmas Eve to remarket and run an ad campaign on your new line of Christmas jumpers, you’ll receive very few orders compared to how many you’d get if you ran the campaign at the start of November, when the weather is starting to get rather cold.

Once again, grabbing the attention with a brilliant offer is paramount to securing a sale. Even though we’re in a global recession right now, people have historically always been interested in getting a discount where they could.

There’s no real mystery to remarketing, it’s simply a highly targeted form of advertising, but getting it right could make all the difference to your profit margins.

Photo Credit: net_efekt