Shift Your Retargeting Strategy Into High Gear
Keeping your brand top-of-mind is critical for ensuring customers actually make a purchase. Marketing automation, the automation of repetitive tasks or actions based on your customer’s profile or engagement, allows you to more effectively and efficiently reach your audience to guarantee your brand is visible and keep your customers on the journey to conversion.
Reaching people with Facebook ads after they’ve visited your website, or better yet, performed an action on your website–like clicking a specific link or going to a certain page–is one effective way to influence customers who are actively considering your brand or product. Automating ad retargeting on Facebook allows your brand to react with precision in real time.
Think of the programmatic retargeting process like this: You’re experienced driving a standard transmission and you start your car. Immediately your brain is signaled and you react instantaneously, depressing the clutch and shifting into gear. The brain goes through this kind of experience day after day, learning and getting better at reacting during each drive. That’s equal to how programmatic retargeting works – with every successful action the system can get smarter and automatically target. Automation allows your brand to respond with increasing agility and accuracy after a customer visits your website.
THE INPUT
Like starting a car, an action on your website serves as an input triggering the automation to begin. Looking at a specific page, placing an item in a cart, downloading or clicking on a PDF or other custom triggers begin the retargeting process.
THE SIGNAL
Facebook pixels, a piece of code that can be embedded on your website, capture your visitor’s information and sends a signal indicating an action has been taken. The data transmitted from your website back to Facebook helps determine which ads should be delivered to the visitor.
THE RESPONSE
Ideally, a potential customer who visits your site and then sees an ad on Facebook will remember your product, react by clicking the ad and then ultimately convert. Their conversion may not happen as quickly as shifting from one gear to the next, but by retargeting, your brand stays in their newsfeed and on their mind.
As an example, one of our clients has automation set up for several points actions on their website. We use our Facebook pixel to serve ads to people who have visited a specific page, people who have abandoned their carts to remind them to finish the transaction and bring blog visitors over to viewing products. The conversions on these automated ads are much higher than promoting content to “cold” audiences who may not know your brand from Adam.
Automation doesn’t mean stagnation either; don’t set it and forget it. In fact, it should mean the opposite. By being more sophisticated in interacting with potential customers, you can help them convert by serving up the exact thing they need to see exactly when they need to see it.
