Remarketing is definitely an excellent opportunity for businesses. This type of web marketing strategy can increase conversions and sales and optimise all content to generate the best ROI.
But what about for start-ups? Is remarketing suitable for these companies with limited marketing budgets? And what can you do as a leader to stand out from the crowd? Here’s a comprehensive study to help you understand how to use remarketing to your advantage.
What is remarketing?
Remarketing, or retargeting, is based on a straightforward technology: when a user visits your website, they are instantly identified through cookies installed on their computer or mobile device. So, when the user leaves the site, you have the option to relaunch it via a system of advertising, called retargeting, on other sites that are part of the Search or Display networks used by Google or on social networks or by email.
There are therefore several communication media that can be associated with this principle of remarketing, and in particular emailing that allows you to target identified visitors by offering customised and adapted messages to encourage them to return to your site or to go and buy the products they would have spotted during their visit. Some advertisers also use a video for their remarketing strategy, for example by connecting their ads to their YouTube channel.
Google, is of course positioned as the main player in this type of marketing thanks to the opportunities it offers advertisers in terms of paid campaigns, AdWords included. Some social networks also stand out, as is the case for Facebook or LinkedIn. These networks, in addition to promoting specific visibility, also offer exciting targeting opportunities in order to manage their advertising budget in the most relevant way possible. Other tools like Adroll or Hubspot provide turnkey solutions that are complete and rather practical for companies starting out.
Remarketing for start-ups: benefits and limitations
On average, 96% of visitors to a site leave without any commitment and 70% add a product to their cart without going through the purchase process. It will, therefore, be easy to understand the interest of a business, regardless of size or industry, to address remarketing. Bigger conversions, better web traffic, more engaged visitors, optimised content, and more. The benefits are numerous and have the ability to impact the turnover of the company directly.
But we must also understand that a remarketing strategy must fit naturally into a global marketing strategy, and notably a coherent and well thought out sales funnel. This is where the primary interest of this strategy lies: to be able to operate precise targeting and adapted campaigns in order to have the best chance to complete the different levels of objectives of your funnel.
However, the cost of a remarketing campaign can quickly add up for a company that has just started. And sometimes it’s hard not to get lost in the many Google Adwords opportunities or industry vendor proposals. Fortunately, these campaigns generally based on a cost per click are more easily controllable from a budgetary point of view and allow to control amounts committed.
Setting up your remarketing campaigns: 7 tips to get the most out of it
For a Startup it is therefore essential to optimise your remarketing campaigns to get the most ROI, and for that, there are some tips to know before you embark on the adventure.
#1 Bet on analysis
We’ve talked about it before: remarketing is very closely related to your sales funnel. That is why it is essential to have an idea beforehand and on your goals in order to adapt your campaigns accordingly. For that, you will have to ask yourself several fundamental questions:
- What users are you looking to convert?
In concrete terms, your users may simply consist of visitors to your site who have not taken any particular action, but for greater efficiency you can also focus on more specific users. Examples include: visitors having completed their shopping cart without actually paying for it, readers of your blog not having subscribed to your newsletter, people who downloaded your mobile application without using it or visitors who would not have had the opportunity to visit a specific and important page of your site during their visit.
For a start-up, it will always be more interesting to go for a dynamic remarketing campaign, that is to say, fully exploiting the behavior of users in terms of navigation, rather than standard remarketing, less targeted and therefore less relevant.
- What actions do you want this target to take on your site?
The second question you will be able to ask yourself is the type of engagement you want your target users to engage with. Are we talking about a purchase? Download? A click? This is an essential criterion for your strategy because it will make it easier to set up your campaigns later and to refine your funnel gradually.
- What path are these users likely to take?
The more you know about the behaviour of your targets, the more you’ll be able to restart them in the most efficient way possible. Of course, retargeting campaigns can be adjusted with analytical statistics that you can compile over time, but the fact remains that a pre-study can save you time and money.
Ask yourself how your retargeting campaigns would be most effective? This can be through Google campaigns or a presence on social networks or by imagining a completely automated email campaign for example. Thus each goal set will have a dedicated and adapted action plan.
In addition, you can consider remarketing campaigns on your own customer databases. For example, we can imagine an email campaign to revive customers at the end of their subscription contract or to alert them of an update on a product already ordered previously.
#2 Start small to see big
When you start remarketing, the possibilities may seem endless: it is important not to get lost in order to optimise your budget and resources. Rome was not built in a day and your marketing needs to be thoughtful if you want to make the most of it as quickly as possible.
Do not think too big or too complicated at first: start by focusing on a part of your target, preferably the one you have identified as the easiest to reach or the one that will have a real and proven interest for the products you offer. Your first remarketing campaigns will allow you to test your campaigns and messages, and refine them as much as possible at a low cost on a restricted target. Then, it will be easier to broaden your scope and apply these same principles to other segments of your target to expand your reach and consequently develop your results.
There are numerous remarketing possibilities, so it will be easy for you to find new ideas and new ways to reach your targets.
#3 Choose your landing pages
When setting up your campaigns, be sure to pay close attention to the landing pages available in your ads. Indeed, it is always more relevant to offer Internet users pages really adapted to their needs and their navigation, rather than providing them with a general link to your homepage.
In addition, the more you customise your destination pages, the more you can collect accurate and segmented statistics based on the different behaviours and segments that characterise your target.
#4 Be creative in your campaigns
The creativity and originality of your advertising is also essential to the overall effectiveness of your remarketing campaigns. As a start-up, you cannot afford to develop all your efforts for an advertisement that would ultimately be uninviting.
You can use attractive visuals or work on your messages so that your ads stand out from the competition that can prove fierce on the display networks. In this context, it should also be noted that the more relevant the analysis you have done in advance, the more consistent your messages will be with the targets.
As a start-up, you almost naturally benefit from a young and innovative image. Why not take advantage of this advantage to accompany your communication in this direction? Creativity will allow you to stand out and attract the attention of Internet users.
#5 Set a maximum occurrence frequency for your campaigns
To optimise your campaigns and budgets, it is absolutely necessary to include a certain ceiling in the frequency of appearance of your ads. Indeed, the yield of your campaigns and your overall ROI will tend to decrease if they manage to repeat themselves for the same visitor. And by the way, too much repetition of the same message can eventually cause some irritation to your visitors.
In the same logic, make sure not to offer the same ads to visitors who have already made a purchase on your site. In general, it is better to adapt your messages as much as possible to the different profiles of Internet users.
Apart from campaigns linked to Google’s Search or Display network, social networks also have excellent opportunities to propose to a start-up with regard to its remarketing strategy.
Social networks play a central role in the web use of Internet users: they generally connect daily and have an almost emotional relationship with these media. This is particularly the case with Facebook.
Thus social networks allow you to access your targets in an indirect way but just as effective. And, moreover, some networks offer not only to personalise your advertising with attractive and personalised visuals and messages, but also to go very far in targeting your prospects.
Feel free to study selected networks for your campaigns, allocating a limited and determined budget at first to get your hands on the various features available.
#7 Conduct results-oriented monitoring
As with any web marketing strategy, monitoring is an essential performance criterion. But beyond the purely statistical follow-up, we invite you to consider a follow-up oriented on your results for your remarketing campaigns.
In fact, knowing how many sales your campaigns have generated and what has been the real ROI of your efforts is particularly important for your company, and especially for a start-up that has to save resources and time in general.
If your goals are related to the number of subscriptions to your newsletter for example, do not hesitate to estimate the financial gain that this represents for your company in order to have a more concrete and practical analysis of your conversions.