How Remarketing Works and Why It’s a Strategy You Can’t Ignore

The internet is a busy place and it’s increasingly difficult to grab anybody’s attention for more than a few seconds. Remember the 3 minute culture? That seems like a luxury now, doesn’t it.

Even if we just consider social media channels, look at what we are up against in the fight for attention and engagement. They are being bombarded by posts from their friends, videos to shock, amuse and entertain, links to news items and other articles, promises that they can learn the secret art of this or that. Let’s not forget the reality that is “content shock”. The content arms race has led to enough content being produced to feed the world 20 times over; i.e. the internet is flooded with content.

When it comes to any form of digital engagement with people quality is more important than quantity. Pictures are better than words. Pictures with words are better than pictures on their own. Videos are better than pictures. Now, at least on Facebook, streaming live videos are better than recorded videos AND videos that are watched to the end are much more valuable than videos that are not viewed to the end.

Content marketing is only one way of skinning a cat of course. What about the ability to target specific types of people through paid advertising? Marketers can now target potential customers in a variety of ways. They can use Google Adwords to put themselves in front of people searching for specific terms in Google. Surely if somebody is searching for “domesticated penguins” they are already a hotlead for the penguins we have reared to cook and clean around the house on Wednesdays?

Likewise, social channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn allow us to target specific demographics with our boosted posts.

These are definitely smart steps in terms of putting ourselves in front of those people who may want to buy what we sell. On the other side of the coin, the average Joe has logged onto his LinkedIn or Facebook account because he wants to connect with his peers. He may purposely ignore advertisements and may not want to be sold to. No form of digital marketing is perfect but targeting the most relevant people online makes perfect sense.

Marketing is marketing is marketing is the truth and just because the arena changes many of the rules are the same as they always have been. Let’s take a bricks and mortar business. Who is more likely to buy from us: somebody who fits the demographic of our customer but who has been walking past our shop window for months without ever even glancing in our window OR somebody who came into our shop, had a look around, paid particular attention to two or three items and then left without purchasing.

Somebody who has entered our shop is a warm lead. If we knew what they came in for, what they looked at, whether or not they actually made their way to the till before changing their mind, how powerful are these insights for selling them something further down the line.

Now take this idea to the digital world. Welcome to remarketing…

One of the wonderful things about the internet (or not so wonderful for some who are sensitive about privacy) is that we all leave some kind of footprint about our interests, our friends, the sites we visit and the things we purchase.

Remarketing takes advantage of this concept to the fullest. Take Facebook’s remarketing mechanism, known as Pixels. We can get some code from Facebook, called a “pixel”, and embed this into our website. What this does is ensures that when somebody visits our website, they pick up a Facebook cookie that monitors their actions on the site. Further down the line, Facebook uses the intelligence it has gathered to allow us to target people who have behaved in certain ways on our website.

That is a really clever concept. A business may have plenty of potential customers on Facebook, some of whom have visited their Facebook page and many who have not. To be able to target other Facebook pages that have been on our website, shown an interest in our products and intelligently advertise to them – that is gold dust.

Google offers a similar remarketing opportunity. Google gives marketers a tag that they can embed into the code of their website. Again, this tag allows Google to monitor the activities of users who visit the website (or use a mobile app).
The insights gleaned by user behaviour on the website or mobile app can be tapped into later when paying for targeted Google Adwords.

Apparently, 90% of internet users are included in the “Google Display Network”. This means that whenever and wherever we browse, Google can most probably target us with relevant advertisements. Using the information gained from remarketing tags, Google can feed us with advertisements for businesses that we have already visited or bought from online.

Nobody knows the future no matter what they tell you but trends can be identified. As technologies such as augmented reality apps come more to the fore, and wearable technology for example, the way people are engaged online will continue to become increasingly more interactive and rich.

However if we want to have our 3 seconds of attention, enough to get somebody to click on a link (or say the name of our site or blink twice while looking at our site) we have to do all that we can to home in on the people that are most likely to buy the service we offer and to buy it from us.

As trends go, remarketing is bang on for the money. To ignore it is almost like leaving business growth to chance.