Retargeting: What It Is and How to Use It to Drive Sales
Here at FieldTest, we want everyone to be able to effectively run digital marketing campaigns, that’s why we developed the simplest way for anybody to promote their brands through slick, high-performing digital ads. Still, not everybody is completely familiar with all of the terms and techniques involved in digital advertising, and that’s ok! FieldTest is here to help guide you through the process and help you run the most effective campaign possible.
We’ve discussed the stages of your sales funnel and the unique strategies that we use in each phase, but today we want to really drill down into one strategy in particular that creates a lot of confusion for our clients, especially ones who are a bit new to the world of digital advertising: Retargeting. Retargeting is a technique used when we take the data provided by your top of funnel campaigns and narrow that pool down to only those intenders who have hit some kind of triggering event. These events can range from things such as placing an item in the shopping cart, signing up for a newsletter, or even making a one-time purchase. We set up these qualifications because they are the single best indicator of an intender who is interested in becoming a repeat customer. By narrowing down the targeting pool to just those people who have completed a highly-qualifying action we vastly increase the conversion performance of this stage, this is why retargeting is the cornerstone of the action phase of your campaign!
Of course retargeting isn’t just effective as a specialized targeting strategy alone, we also recommend our clients maintain a distinct creative strategy in retargeting that really drives home the conversion messaging. That means sales, discounts, or other offerings intended to give your intenders that last push over the edge into becoming long-term repeat customers. If you want a good breakdown of how this creative approach affects sales, give our action phase explainer a read. In it we discuss how offering even a modest discount such as 10% off a specific product or free shipping can increase your total sales exponentially. This is also the time to be extremely selective with your ad units. This is not the time to go big with large-scale banners across major mastheads, quite the opposite! It may not seem right at first but your best creatives at this stage are smaller, more affordable units such as mobile 320x50s and 300x250s. Remember, the name of the game at this point is to hit your customers with the intrusive thought that they just have to buy your product, not to impress them with your best and most beautiful (and also most expensive) creatives. By mixing these specialized creatives and enticing offers with the pinpoint accuracy of retargeting you set yourself up for truly incredible sales numbers.
Now if you think this means that all you have to do to run a high-performing campaign is turn on your retargeting, you’re sadly mistaken. As effective as this strategy is it is not a set it and forget it deal. You see, retargeting only selects people who have triggered an event up-funnel and without solid upper funnel ads to drive traffic it’s only a matter of time until you will run out of new people to run through retargeting. Think of retargeting as your campaign’s engine, the part of the marketing stack that drives the majority of your sales. Your upper funnel marketing is the fuel being fed into that engine, keeping it running and pushing your revenue higher and higher. Without a successful upper and mid-funnel marketing effort you’ll find your campaign out of fuel and broken down on the side of the road, metaphorically speaking.
Now that you understand what retargeting is and how it‘s used, you're all set to go forth and make some high performing ads that will help drive repeat customers. We hope this makes you feel more comfortable to set up high performing digital ad campaigns with the confidence to try new things and explore new strategies, knowing you’ll drive home the sales in retargeting.