Targeting strategy to attract new and returning customers through digital marketing and content.
The best kind of customer is the one who comes back after making a purchase. While most businesses focus on new customers, it’s hard to find prospects, convert them into customers, and retain them. However, repeat or returning customers are the best as they know about your brand and products. Hence, they trust your company and are more likely to recommend your small business to others.
Remarketing and retargeting are marketing strategies that bring people back to your business. These strategies benefit small businesses with limited marketing budgets, and paying for databases and expanded reach can be prohibitive. With remarketing or retargeting, you advertise to people who have already interacted with your brand in one way or another. This could include visiting or browsing your website, interacting with your social media posts, or even opening and clicking through an email message.
In the next sections, we’ll discuss what remarketing and retargeting mean, how they are different, why these marketing strategies are useful for small businesses, and understand how to implement one or both approaches into a comprehensive marketing strategy.
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What is remarketing?
The terms ‘remarketing’ and ‘retargeting’ are often used interchangeably, but they differ significantly. While both are examples of targeted advertising, they aim at different customers.
Remarketing is initiating contact with your existing customers to encourage their engagement with your brand again. These people have already made one or more purchases from your business.
Remarketing can be especially useful for upselling existing customers, getting them to add related items to their purchases, or subscribing to services relevant to their past purchases. Remarketing might consist of on-site tactics, such as popups or interstitial pages, and off-site marketing techniques, such as paid ads and email marketing.
Incremental sales boosts can tremendously impact small businesses' growth and profitability. Additionally, remarketing can help strengthen customers’ affinity for your company or products if you recommend relevant items and offers.
What are some common remarketing strategies?
Digital display remarketing: Considered one of the most common remarketing strategies, digital display remarketing involves showing paid advertisements (display ads) to people who have visited your website through other sites. Browser cookies, Google, and other ad providers help businesses target their website visitors with supplemental ads or messaging as they browse the web.
Search remarketing: Once you know customers’ interest in the offered products and services, you can leverage search ads to reinforce your company’s value and relevance to their search. This strategy helps easily target those who are somewhat familiar with your brand.
Video remarketing: Video remarketing is another great option, primarily through online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube.[1] It offers an opportunity to provide interested customers (who have visited your site or interacted with your brand) with more in-depth information on your business and the product or service they are interested in. It's a great remarketing strategy as video content captures the interest of your website visitors for a longer time than blog content.
Email marketing: This marketing strategy offers you an opportunity to engage with customers who have not made a purchase or interacted with your site for a while (let’s say three to six months since their last visit/purchase) or customers who have placed items in the cart but not completed the purchase. Properly targeted email marketing, with customer-centric and relevant offers or information, is considered a top remarketing strategy for SMBs.
What is retargeting?
Both retargeting and remarketing aim to re-engage people. While remarketing focuses on reaching and re-engaging current or existing customers, retargeting aims to convert prospects into customers. Perhaps they have visited your site or followed your social media pages but haven’t chosen to do business with your company yet. Retargeting is one of the most effective ways to convert a prospect to an existing (hopefully repeat) customer.
Retargeting is especially useful for small businesses that need new growth. While you may have reached prospects in one way or another, they don’t have hands-on knowledge about your products or brand since they have not yet made a purchase.
Retargeting gives you more insight into their preferences and actions since you already know what products or pages the customers are interested in. This information can be used to tell you what they care about and what follow-up ads or messages are more likely to drive conversion. You can leverage this information to create ads and messaging that include these details and reinforce the product or service's value to inspire customer action.
Retargeting strategies
Retargeting strategies are frequently similar to remarketing strategies. For instance, on-site marketing options, such as pop-ups or interstitial pages/ads are common. These often include an offer or promo code for a discount or even a gift with a purchase for new customers. That last part is key in retargeting, as these offers would be for new customers only, whereas the remarketing version might not have an offer or may have a different message.
Retargeting can also take place off your company’s website. Some social media platforms, such as Instagram, allow companies to retarget individuals who have clicked through an ad for a particular product but haven’t made a purchase. You can show similar products or offer a discount for a limited duration to encourage early sales. Other off-site retargeting strategies might include display and search ads, mailers and flyers, and email marketing campaigns.
Retargeting vs remarketing: Key differences
The simplest way to break down the difference between retargeting and marketing is as follows:
Retargeting: Perfect for new customers/leads (people who are not yet customers)
Remarketing: The right choice for existing customers (aimed to upsell or re-engage them)
Consider these scenarios to understand specific examples of when to use each type of marketing:
Scenario #1: An individual has scrolled through your Facebook carousel ad and even clicked on a specific product page to learn more and see more images of the item but ultimately did not add any items to the cart to place an order.
Scenario #2: An individual who is already a customer has clicked through an ad or search result and landed on your website. They may have even browsed specific products or watched a product video, but ultimately, they did not purchase that visit.
In scenario #1, the person has never purchased from your business, making this an ideal opportunity for retargeting. Your retargeting could include a special offer, discount, or an invitation to learn more about your products/services through videos, articles, downloadable white papers, etc.
In scenario #2, the person is already a customer and familiar with your brand, products, or services. As a result, this is a prime opportunity to leverage one or more remarketing tactics, such as upsell offers with relevant products/services.[2] You might also consider offering these existing customers an extended offer if it fits your business (for example, 14 months of service for the price of 12, discounted shipping on the next five orders, etc.).
Next steps
Both retargeting and remarketing are valuable tools for small businesses, and the option that makes the most sense for your company will depend on your goals, your audiences, and where you believe the most valuable or potential is. Do you want to put most of your marketing efforts into converting new customers, or does maximizing the return from your existing customer base make sense? That is almost certainly a deeper discussion, and your answer may land somewhere between both.
In cases where you aren’t sure or want to put some extra expertise and resources toward your retargeting and remarketing efforts, you can find outstanding support through our digital marketing agencies directory. With numerous digital marketing agencies across multiple industries and fields, you will certainly find several firms to help you craft a strategy and campaign that delivers significant performance and achieves the KPIs you have in mind.
