This blog post is part of “The Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation.” blog series.
Retargeting is like playing with a dog that really love to play. Loves to play so much, that when your finished it follows you everywhere until you play again. The dog’s persistence may get you to play again, but eventually you might become annoyed and think twice before playing with it again. Retargeted ads – those ads that follow you around all over the internet after visiting a website, can be like dogs that don’t know when to go away. Wouldn’t it be nice if they knew when you were ready to play and when you wanted to be left alone? One way to improve your retargeted ads is to “train” them with an Inbound Marketing program. Inbound Marketing, or attraction marketing, can make ads less invasive, more inviting, and more effective by putting the right ads in front of the right people at the right time. Here’s how to train your ads and improve retargeting with Inbound Marketing:
First, develop your buyer personas.
Developing buyer personas is a fundamental inbound practice and the first step to improving your Retargeting ads with Inbound Marketing. A buyer persona is representation of people who would look for your product or service, and contains values, pain points, demographics, life events and anything else that influences action. If you understand your customers and their motivations, you can better appeal to their wants, needs, likes, and dislikes, and better direct your Retargeting ads.
Next, map your buyer’s journey and website content.
After you develop your buyer personas, you need to map your buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey, or the research process people undertake when solving a problem, will help you determine your Retargeting logic. The buyer’s journey is comprised of three stages “awareness,” “consideration,” and “decision,” which parallels the sales funnel. Once you know your customer’s buying journey, you need to determine what pages on your align with the stages of the buyer’s journey. Knowing this will help you determine which stage your site visitors are in and what pages they will likely want to see to see in order to get to the next stage. For example, someone that had downloaded our ebook “Alaniz Guide to Press Distribution,” is probably in the consideration stage because it is an educational overview of press distribution. Mapping your buyer’s journey and website content is critical for the last step – incorporating your buyer’s journey into your Retargeting logic.
Finally, incorporate your buyer’s journey into your Retargeting logic.
Once you know your buyer personas and have mapped you buyer’s journey and website content, you are ready to complete the last step – incorporating your buyer’s journey into your Retargeting logic. The biggest pitfall of Retargeting is that it can be redundant, pushy and perceived as invaluable because the ad served is no longer relevant. Incorporate your buyer’s journey into your Retargeting logic, almost completely eliminates these pitfalls because you can serve ads that help people complete their buyer’s journey. For example; if someone visits our “Digital Marketing Services” page and our “Agency” page, we can infer that they are deciding whether or not to use our digital marketing services, and can send them a retargeted ad that will help them make their decision – like an offer for a free digital marketing consultation. People naturally gravitate towards something that is relevant and helpful, like an offer that helps them complete their research process. In order to do this successfully, you should create offers and site pages for people at all stages of the buyers journey to represent in your ads.
The next time you start a Retargeting campaign, consider improving it with inbound marketing. Retargeting and inbound marketing work together to put the right ads in front of the right people at the right time, and can make a very powerful combination. If you would like to learn more about inbound marketing and how it can improve Retargeting, please feel free to contact me. I am more than happy to help.
This blog post is part of “The Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation.” blog series.
