As a business owner, you come across consumers interested in your product or service all the time, whether it be online or in person. However, the number of those potential leads naturally outweighs the actual number of those who convert and buy in. Perhaps they weren’t serious about the purchase just yet, or they continued to shop around. Whatever the reason may be, what you can learn from that as a business owner is that one first impression doesn’t always do the trick when it comes to converting customers.Because of this, companies should assure that they’re top of mind whenever possible. One solution to this is remarketing, also known as retargeting – it’s a way for you to once again expose your brand to an audience that has already shown interest in your product or service. This is done through ad creatives placed on third-party websites, like Facebook, that target your previous website visitors.As a consumer, you’ve likely experienced these remarketing ads after browsing an ecommerce site, for instance. You leave the site, start browsing elsewhere and boom – there’s the jacket you were just looking at, tempting you to give in and buy it. This doesn’t only work for ecommerce sites, however. Companies, including B2B, use various remarketing platforms to attract prospective buyers.Now that you’re familiar with what remarketing is, let’s dive into how you can use it for your brand to convert leads the second time around.

How to Remarket Your Ads

First, you’ll want to establish who you’ll be retargeting. For the most part, your remarketing audience will be previous website visitors, although you can target based on email address and profile ID via Facebook (more on that in a bit). When it comes to retargeting your website visitors, you’ll want to understand their behavior in order to serve them the most relevant ad.Let’s say you’re a B2B company using Google AdWords as your remarketing platform. You see that users often visit a particular service page, but some never actually submit your contact form to get in touch with you about using your brand. You can use AdWords to target your ad to visitors of a page (your service page) who did not visit another page (your contact form submission page). That way, you weed out those who have already converted and stay top of mind to those who didn’t as they browse other sites online.If your demographic spends time on Facebook, you can target them separately through Facebook’s own ad platform. Someone would visit your website (or a particular page), leave, eventually go on Facebook and would once again be exposed to your brand by being served your remarketing ad. Another method you can use in this platform is to upload a spreadsheet file of email addresses and target those consumers’ Facebook accounts. Some examples of emails that would be helpful to target include people you’ve met at networking events or potential customers who have inquired about your product / service but never made a purchase.

Where to Remarket Your Ads

Remarketing ads, depending on how they’re served, can have a reputation of being overbearing. If you’ve been exposed to them, you probably know that some can get fairly repetitive, possibly even turning you off from the brand. But, that doesn’t have to be the case. That’s why platforms have frequency capping that allows you to show up on your target market’s screen only a certain number of times per day. This eliminates the annoying factor and makes for an effective campaign.Now comes the question of where you want your consumers to see your remarketing ads. We’ve already discussed Facebook as a placement, but what other third party sites will be the most favorable to place your ads on?Through Google AdWords, you can refine your targeting to only appear to your website visitors who visit certain other websites. You can either specify these placements by selecting the individual sites and / or sites that fall under a general topic. If you’re targeting architects, for example, you may want to include sites like architectmagazine.com or webpages that relate to the topic of Architecture.If your website doesn’t get that many visitors, to the point where visiting your site ­and another specific site would result in minimal impressions, it’s best to just not filter though placement targeting. Rather, have your ads appear anywhere at first, with frequency capping that won’t annoy users. Then monitor what websites AdWords has been placing your ads on and exclude any if necessary.There’s no better market to target than those who are already interested. Ultimately, your remarketing ads will be a reminder to potential leads that your product / service is available to them whenever they’re ready to buy in.Want to launch your remarketing campaign, but not sure where to start? Get in touch with one of our digital marketing experts so we can establish the best custom plan for your business.