Remarketing is a powerful tool indeed.
Thanks to today's incredible data collection technology, pinpointing precise audiences with the right messaging at the right time is easier than ever before.
It still requires good strategy behind it, though.
Remarketing can fail if it's not targeted right, if the ads aren't appealing or memorable, or if you're focusing on the wrong platform.
One mistake marketers tend to make with Google Similar Audiences and Facebook Lookalike Audiences is using advertisements that are, frankly, kind of lame.
Remarketing is a perfect opportunity to use the best of what you've got.
Your best copy, your best imagery, your spiffiest infographics.
You already know these people are into your company and into what you do.
They're the kind of leads that are pretty close to turning into sales.
Invest in them.
A recent article from Hootsuite explains how to amp up your remarketing ad campaigns.
Use your best assets
Similar and Lookalike Audiences share the power of making average marketers look better, but they can make expert marketers look prolific.
Determine what area of content creation you can leverage in your campaigns.
Whether it’s video production, long-form written content, infographics, or email marketing, you’ll want to use these platforms when advertising to your remarketing audiences.
For example, if you’re a video creator you can explore Google Similar Audiences through YouTube ads, using the Customer Match feature.
To do this, create a YouTube campaign with one or both of the In-Stream and In-Display ads set up. It’s advisable to make separate ad groups for each format.
This is what In-Stream ads look like:
[image source: Hootsuite]
This is what In-Display ads look like:
[image source: Hootsuite]
Next, you’ll import a customer list to AdWords—this can be from your email list, past website visitors, mobile app users, or YouTube users (these are the categories to choose from in AdWords > Shared Library > Audiences).
Once this information is uploaded into your AdWords account, you can open your YouTube campaign, click + REMARKETING then add your remarketing lists.
[image source: Hootsuite]
And if you like making Facebook videos, you should send these to your Lookalike Audiences through Facebook’s video ads. Just be sure to add captions to your Facebook videos, since 85 percent of videos are watched with the sound off.
[image source: Hootsuite]
Marketing your Facebook video ads to a lookalike audience is fairly straightforward.
As with AdWords, you’ll start by compiling Facebook’s version of a Custom Match Audience, called a Custom Audience.
You’ll do this by going into your Audiences tab in Ad Manager, clicking the Create Audience dropdown and selecting Custom Audience.
Then, you’ll go through the five part process of adding your customer file and creating the audience.
If you’re trying to get more views to a blog post or ebook, then paid advertising might be an area to explore.
As Claire Pells points out in her article, 5 Reasons to Promote Your Blog Posts With Facebook Ads, you can help a piece of content gain significant traction by remarketing to customers on your email list who didn’t read your post.
In fact, she purposely targets these customers on Facebook about a day after sending out the email newsletter.
Pretty smart, eh?
Anyway, regarding Lookalike Audiences, make sure the custom audience you use comes from visitors of that particular blog post, rather than generic website visitors.
You can obviously also use Google Similar Audiences to market blog content to new consumers on AdWords—just be careful, since AdWords costs can rise quickly.
For information regarding consumers of specific blog posts on your site, you can consult Google Analytics as well as read through on-page engagement metrics (comments, pingbacks, shares).
You can find more strategy ideas for Google and Facebook ads over at Hootsuite.
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