Taking the Use of Customer Retargeting Online

The typical cost of marketing is 100 percent for first-time customers and 33 percent for reselling new products to existing customers. Thus the conventional wisdom: “Your best prospects are your current customers.”

Retargeting is a strategic way for a company to continue the marketing process among current customers that has been in use by savvy marketers for years. What’s newer is the idea of applying the strategy to your Website marketing and related social media efforts. [Chango, a media buying firm, in a recent blogpost—titled “The 7 types of Effective Retargeting”—offers a downloadable infographic that details on- and off-site retargeting tactics.]

Of course, the primary place to begin your retargeting program is your main Website. That’s where the majority of your current customers and prospects are spending time learning about your company and its ongoing product and services. One way to put this strategy in play is to retarget users based on the products they’ve previously browsed on your Website.

Site retargeting (sometimes referred to as remarking by marketing planners) is a strategic approach that serves up a relevant display ad after a user has visited a specific portion of your Website. Adding to this approach is to add another level of specificity based on from where the user arrived on your website. Was it through organic SEO unpaid search engine traffic or SEM paid traffic using Google AdWords for instance? This data is then mixed with the specific products the user reviewed, and new content marketing is prepared somewhere else on the Website as they continue to browse.

Companies specializing in retargeting have taken this approach even further. As Wikipedia notes on its Behavioral retargeting page:

“Some companies specialize in retargeting. Other companies have added retargeting to their list of methods of purchasing advertising. Retargeting helps companies advertise to website visitors who leave without a conversion—about 98 percent of all Web traffic. This is done by displaying ads to the prospect as they surf the Internet via various ad networks that the agency buys media from on behalf of tis business customers.”