Even with the best strategy in place, there may come a time in your digital marketing campaign when you need to take it to the next level. You may be seeing results, but you may not be seeing the desired results. Or, you’re getting impatient and want to see the results that will eventually happen naturally happen much sooner. It’s time to see your ROI. So, what’s that extra oomph that you can add to your digital marketing campaign to drive those results? What’s it going to take to push it to the next level?
Inbound marketing and retargeting campaigns go together like peanut butter and jelly. Bonnie and Clyde. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Throw in some PPC, and well, you’ve got yourself a trifecta of awesomeness. They all mesh together well, and are quite complementary when used appropriately and at the right time in your digital campaign’s life. There’s your extra oomph, ladies and gents.
So, when is the right time, you ask? And why are retargeting and PPC campaigns potentially just what your campaign needs? It’s time to stop begging your marketing team for results when the answer has been right at your fingertips the entire time.
Timing is Everything
In dating, investments, and yes, even marketing, timing is everything. You don’t want to start dating someone when they’re still married (but that’s a different blog article entirely – yikes), don’t want to sell your shares until the opportune moment, and you don’t want to start a retargeting or PPC campaign until you already have a solid foundation to build upon.
A retargeting campaign works best in conjunction with inbound and outbound marketing and other demand generation techniques. Why? Ask any inbound marketing agency. Let me paint you a picture (I’m not as good as Pablo Picasso, but pretty close just FYI):
- Step 1: You know that retargeting is a powerful branding and conversion optimization tool, so you decide to implement it first thing in your digital campaign.
- Step 2: Conversions will now increase thanks to retargeting! Fantastic.
- Step 3: But wait… where’s all the traffic to convert? And I don’t really have anything to convert them with…
- Step 4: (Sound of crickets)
So you see, there is a hole here, and one that demonstrates why retargeting, PPC, and inbound marketing go together like peas and carrots (Forrest Gump, anyone?).
Inbound marketing, since it is a practice that heavily involves content marketing, is great for driving traffic organically, among other benefits, and PPC (which is essentially buying clicks to your site) can also be used to drive traffic. Yet, retargeting is known for its success with conversion optimization. Thus, your best chance of success is using one or more tools to drive traffic (such as an inbound campaign and PPC) and then implementing retargeting to get the most out of said generated traffic (and then follow it up with some strong sales enablement to really close the deal). You can’t get conversions without traffic, and you can’t get traffic without some sort of inbound strategy. It’s all intertwined, really.
So, to make it simple, the right time to implement a retargeting and/or PPC campaign is when you have a solid inbound strategy already in place. If you have quality premium content ready for leads to convert on, a fully built funnel ready and just waiting to nurture your leads throughout the buyer’s journey, and an already sound and proven inbound strategy, yet you just aren’t seeing the results you need in terms of conversions and, most important, quality lead conversions, it may be time to add in that extra oomph, especially if you are going after an extremely niche or narrow target market. Because, when it comes down to it, what I always tell my clients is this: I care more about how we’re doing in terms of leads and sales qualified leads generated than I do about traffic. That’s not to say that I don’t care about traffic or think that traffic is important; I do. The more traffic you get, in theory, the more leads you should get, and the more leads you get, the more qualified leads you should get. Not to mention what traffic can do for your SEO. Yet, if your traffic is consistently doing well and growing, yet your conversion percentages aren’t increasing at the same rate, that’s when retargeting and PPC may be just what you need.
Why will it work and how?
It all sounds quite good, I know. But, as a business leader, your job is to be skeptical, and at the end of the day, you need to ROI. Traffic? Leads? Content? Who gives a shit if it doesn’t add to your bottom line, right? So here’s why you should give a shit:
Retargeting works by basically tracking people who have already visited your site. When they leave your site and begin browsing other sites, a relevant ad for your brand is served to them to push them back to your site to convert. That’s where your inbound strategy and content creation comes into play: better have something to lure them back with! If you lead them back to a terrible website with no helpful or relevant content; good luck. That's why it's important to have a solid foundation to build upon before introducting retargeting ads into your digital campaign.
Why does this method work? Because you’re spending your time advertising relevant content to someone who is already aware of your brand and had recently shown some type of interest in you or your offerings, making them a more qualified lead, and someone that you will be more likely to convert than a brand new visitor still doing their initial research. As for those brand new visitors that visited your site, were doing research, but weren’t ready to convert? You won’t lose them into the dark, wide abyss of the World Wide Web anymore. You’ll stay top of mind with retargeted ads and raise your chances of getting them to convert in the future.
An example of retargeting in action:
Yours truly has a slight love for shopping, and whenever I restrain myself from buying a pair of shoes or a purse (pat myself on the back), I move on with my life and hop over to, say, Facebook to check what’s going on in the social media world. BOOM there’s an ad from Nordstrom for the exact pair of shoes I was just looking at. Damn, foiled again. Every. Time. It’s a sign… yes, I will buy those shoes. It works, people!
Retargeting is a powerful tool, but it definitely works best if it’s part of a larger digital strategy. Utilizing an optimal and synergistic mix of inbound and outbound marketing, content creation, PPC, retargeting, and sales enablement is the ultimate way to push your digital campaign next-level and start kicking ass and taking names (on form submissions, duh).
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