7 Types of Retargeting Ads You Still Haven't Tried Yet

As long as I can remember I've been a picky eater. 

Probably just as long, my very ethnic father has been trying to rid me of the ghastly trait, claiming:

"You just have to keep eating the things you don't like little bit, by little bit. Eventually you'll develop a taste for it."

I guess he figured that, by repeat exposure, my palette would eventually let its guard down and, as much as my tastebuds hate to admit it, his theory makes sense.

Even in marketing, this kind of "retargeting," is a powerful tactic that can help businesses turn the most reluctant prospects (or as I like to call them, professional picky eaters) into qualified leads.  
And contrary to what many may think, retargeting is even more effective for B2B companies than it is for B2C, but let's start with the basics. 

What is Retargeting?

Have you gone to a company's website, left without buying anything, then started seeing ads for the company (if not a specific product) everywhere else you went online? Those, my friends, are retargeted ads. 

98% of users do NOT convert on their first visit, but retargeting ads like these allow businesses to bring more of them back to their website to make take action. 

Even if someone is interested in your product, they are likely to leave without purchasing immediately, but with retargeted ads marketers get the boost in traffic and leads they crave and consumers get a little reminder to take action.

25% of consumers even enjoy this, but like all forms of paid advertising, you need to approach retargeted ads strategically. To achieve this, here are seven types of retargeting ads you still haven't tried yet. 

1. Buyer Persona Retargeting

To get a high ROI from paid advertising, your targeting has to be on point.

Some agencies will tell you to use industry specific targeting, but here at IMPACT, we tend to recommend taking it a step further with buyer persona targeting.

It's all about quality over quantity. With industry targeting, you'll likely get more clicks, but by specifically targeting your buyer persona, you'll get better quality traffic. (What good is the click if it's coming from an intern when your persona is a CEO, right?)

What can you do?

In order to target based off of persona, you have to make sure to have detailed buyer personas. You'll need this demographic information to set up your retargeting campaign on many platforms.

Not sure how many buyer personas you need? or what each should have? Our Buyer Persona Kit can help. 

2. Segment Visitors By Stage in the Sales Funnel

One awesome feature of most retargeting platforms is the ability to target visitors based on pages they've viewed and align with different sections of your marketing and sales funnel.

This targeting allows you to create distinct ads for each stage in your funnel, in turn ensuring that you deliver the right content at the right time for the person at hand. 

Here the three main stages of the sales funnel:

Source: endocreative 

• Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU): People who visit pages related to general information rather than your specific product. For instance, these prospects may have visited your blog and left. A good retargeting ad for this stage would be for an eBook, ideally one that's similar to the content they visited previously.
• Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU): These are people who visit pages related to your product, but only at a consideration level. For them, you can run a retargeting campaign that drives them to relevant offers that make the case for your company (i.e. case studies, webinars, demonstrations, etc.)
• Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU): People who visit pages related to your product that indicate they are at the decision making stage (i.e. your consultation page or pricing page.) Use retargeting to send visitors to a landing page that offers a free demo or consultation.

Retargeting at different funnel stages is one of the ways that inbound marketing and paid advertising work in harmony. 

3. Account-Based Retargeting

This might be too advanced for companies that aren't well-established, but it can be very powerful for landing deals with the ideal firms you want to do business with. 

Getting in with valuable accounts is extremely competitive, so smart marketers need to take advantage of all opportunities to stay one step ahead of the competition. 

Demandbase offers a great account-based retargeting service, as does LinkedIn. 

4. Cross-Channel Retargeting

Social media users and website visitors are looking for different experiences on each platform so the same marketing message and approach won't resonate across every channel. Cross channel retargeting allows you to account for this by creating unique messages based on the site that they appear on.

AdRoll, for example, allows you to run ads across Facebook, Twitter, and mobile, adjusting the content as needed for each platform.

While having ads on multiple platforms makes it much easier to be in the right place at the right time, don't bombard your prospects. Experiment with different time intervals and platforms to identify where and when most visitors convert. This will save you money and prevent you from annoying people when they simply aren't interested. 

5. Use Facebook Custom Audiences

A lesser-known benefit you can gain by advertising through Facebook is custom audiences. With Facebook custom audiences you can upload a list of email addresses or phone numbers and they'll deliver your ad to those people when they're on Facebook. Using this service, you can also build audiences from the people that visit your website or from those who use your mobile app.

One of the primary reasons to retarget based on email address is so you can target people at different stages of your marketing funnel.

You can export leads, MQLs, SQLs, and opportunities, then develop a personalized message to guide them towards the next stage in your funnel. All of this is done without any need for web visit correlation.

Services such as GoChime can automatically update your custom audience list based on your contacts in HubSpot or other marketing automation software. 

6. Email Retargeting

Hopefully you're already running email campaigns to nurture leads and keep them engaged. Email retargeting is a powerful way to complement these campaigns and make them even more effective.

Creating an email retargeting campaign that corresponds with a specific drip campaign is simple.

All you have to do is add a retargeting code into the HTML or signature of your emails and the leads that open your emails will automatically start seeing your ads across the web. 

This goes hand-in-hand with retargeting segmented visitors, except it's based on the emails they open instead of the pages they land on. Consider running the two methods against each other to figure out what works best for your business.

7. Customer Retargeting For Brand Loyalty

Advertise to existing customers may sound like a waste of time and money, but it's not.

An easy way to keep your customers happy and engaged is by advertising offers for "freemium" products or add-ons. Upselling with accessories or new features to helps increase the lifetime value of current customers, while the freebies will go in for "delight."

The key here is that your offering provide new or additional value to what customers already have. No one is going to respond if they think you're just advertising a product or service they've already seen.