Bring Them Back: Target Prospects and Clients with Remarketing

Shannon Murphy

You spend a lot of time, effort and money getting business buyers to visit your website, check out your IT solutions and request demos or consultations. It’s disappointing, to say the least, when qualified visitors bounce after visiting your site. They’re lost opportunities — unless you bring them back.

Remarketing, or retargeting, reminds prospects of their initial interest in your services. It also encourages them to move further through the buyer’s journey (and your funnel) or reconsider your services if they have mentally moved on.

Targeting 3 Key Audiences

Here’s a look at how remarketing can help you with three key audiences: website visitors, warm leads and current clients.

Website visitors. Remarketing is commonly associated with extending your reach to first-time website visitors. Getting a qualified prospect to your website requires investment in content, brand development, earned media, sales outreach, sponsorship or advertising. More often than not, some combination of these investments brings prospects to your site.

The hitch is that few first-time website visitors make a purchase or return. In fact, 97% are lost for good without buying your services or joining your marketing lists.

However, thanks to marketing pixels, you can remarket with relevant content to visitors based on the web pages where they landed, invested time or interacted with your company.

You’ve undoubtedly experienced remarketing when you’ve visited a website to check out a product or company and then encountered an ad for that product or company on Facebook, LinkedIn or other websites. Serving ads to you about items you’ve shown interest in is called dynamic remarketing. As a buyer, it’s a (hopefully welcome) reminder, but as a seller, it can be a powerful marketing tool.

Warm leads. Remarketing isn’t only for pulling new visitors back to your site. It can help move warm leads through your sales funnel as well. That’s because you don’t just have to serve them ads. You can leverage all types of content — blogs, case studies, testimonials, videos, etc. — to help you move prospects through their journeys and toward becoming customers.

In this way, remarketing enables you to deliver the right content at the right time, furthering engagement instead of just extending reach and awareness. Examples might include:

• Serving up a case study to a prospect who visited your pricing page to drive home the real-world value of investing in your solution and that you’ve earned satisfied clients.
• Providing a video with your unique selling points to prospects who have attended webinars so they can see the value of your solution and how it’s differentiated from competitors.
• Reminding prospects about a current promotion or offer that might entice them to buy, especially if they’ve been indecisive in committing.

Current customers. Many partners don’t think about using remarketing for current clients. That’s a mistake. Your existing clients are the most likely purchasers of your other products and services.

In this light, remarketing is ideal for informing and reminding current clients about new and existing products, services and promotions. Significant opportunities exist in:

• Cross-selling, such as offering security on top of your managed IT services
• New product introductions, such as data backup or outsourced help desk
• New offers and promotions, such as discounts on new services or extended terms

Remarketing interactions can help arm your sales and services teams with priority lists for fast sales in all these cases.

Remarketing Content Tips

The content you provide is essential to your remarketing success. With this in mind, here are two tips to help you get the most from your efforts and budget:

• Keep content fresh. As powerful a sales and marketing tool as remarketing can be, many companies undermine their efforts by creating a few content pieces they designate for remarketing and then move on to other things. Swap out your content regularly to focus on the problems your prospects and customers face right now and how your solutions can help them. Help desk tickets and community forums can help you generate content ideas that speak to your audience’s challenges. As you gain more insight into customers’ hot-button concerns, you can refresh the content to generate more leads and optimize your ongoing campaigns for performance and conversions.
• Use video. Some prospects prefer video to written content. If you create videos for your website, use short clips for your remarketing campaigns. Consult analytics to identify your most engaging content. Video customer testimonials, for example, can be worth their weight in gold when served at the right time in the buyer’s journey.

Play the Long Game with Automation

Marketing is all about being persistent and consistent. It takes many touches to make a sale. Depending on your industry, it could be anywhere from eight to 18 or more! Retargeting is a great way to automate some of those touches and reignite the spark of interest your prospect or client has in your solution to drive toward a deal.

Shannon Murphy is chief marketer for Zomentum, an intelligent revenue platform built to help partners discover, sell and manage services. With more than 15 years of tech marketing experience, Murphy focuses on end-user perspectives to develop campaigns, tactics and sales approaches that convert opportunities and drive revenue. You may follow her on LinkedIn or @zomentum on Twitter.