One of the harshest truths about the online marketplace is that most site visitors are never going to make a purchase when they first visit your website. Multiple reports have proven this.
For instance, Episerver (now Optimizely) reported that a whopping 92% of buyers do not buy during their first trip to a website.
This goes a long way to showing the importance of audience retargeting campaigns.
Retargeting involves targeting potential customers who have already interacted with your brand in some way.
For example, they visited your website, and your tracking pixel picked them up.
It’s even possible they browsed through your relevant products and added some items to the cart but didn’t initiate the checkout process.
Whatever the touchpoint, retargeting is an effective way to bring those prospects back to your website.
And one of the best places to run your retargeting campaigns is on social media sites.
So, here are three actionable tips to help brands level up their advertising through audience retargeting campaigns on social media.
1. Target Audiences With Specific Messaging
It’s not enough to go after any and all prospects who have interacted with your brand.
Or at least, it’s inefficient to target them all with the same strategy. You must get granular and perform audience segmentation for the best results.
Think about where the leads came from, i.e., the source of the traffic. Consider which pages the prospect visited.
What was the level of the interaction? When did they last visit your website? You can check out your analytics tools for this.
Using these and other parameters can help you place your audience into smaller segments that you can retarget with more relevant and personalized ads.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms allow you to upload or create custom audience lists for your specific ads.
Let’s say you’re an SaaS business owner providing several solutions like a keyword research tool and a dedicated landing page builder.
Retargeting the people who visit your website with the same ads is simply not the best use of your daily budgets for advertising.
Instead, group the audience based on the specific website page they visited. Then, retarget them with ads focusing on the relevant product online users showed interest in.
Similarly, you can create a list of users who visited your pricing page and retarget them with promotions such as discounts and free trials.
You can also double down on this audience segment compared to others as part of your strategy as a marketer.
The bottom line is you should never use the same ad messaging as part of your retargeting efforts.
As a final tip, don’t just rely on retargeting on social networks. Complement it with other promotional strategies like email marketing and public relations campaigns.
With the right marketing emails, you can nurture your relationships with potential buyers who haven’t converted after the ad click just yet.
Leverage excellent PR services and you can ensure you have a great brand reputation that prompts people to click on your social media ads in the first place.
2. Create Eye-Catching Ads and Test Them
The ads in your retargeting campaigns should be eye-catching. This will help ensure your target audience focuses on your ad in the first place.
Besides, eye-catching ads generate social media engagement, from Instagram likes to Facebook comments and shares.
The first ad people will see as part of your campaign should be the most engaging—there should be less priority on branding elements and more on the scroll-stopping factor.
So, you can add humor or an attention-grabbing element to your ad.
For instance, Mailchimp uses a surprised owl’s face to stop people from scrolling. They do this before informing viewers about their software.
You can easily test whether your ad stops social media users on their tracks by asking people you know if it works.
But you shouldn’t just see if your ads make people stop and look. Each eye-catching ad will have another goal, apart from getting people to look at it.
For example, top-of-funnel ads may be created with the marketing objective of user engagement in mind, whereas ads later down the funnel may be more focused on reaching that conversion goal.
So, you must also check if each eye-catching ad serves this other intended purpose.
The solution: Conduct A/B testing.
To start, determine the metrics that you want to test for. If an ad retargets website visitors, a good metric is website return visitors.
Then create variations for your retargeting ads. We’re not suggesting creating dozens of ads with different fonts to target people, no.
There are three major elements you can change to identify the best-performing ad:
- Ad creative. You might want to resequence the clips of your ad video or enlarge your image. You can outsource the work to a video editor or graphic designer or do everything yourself with vital tools such as Canva and Skitch.
- Caption. Does storytelling work better than inciting Fear of Missing Out? You can write the copy yourself but if you have many ads to produce, this can be time-consuming. This is where AI can help you. Generative AI tools don’t just help you scale content creation. They also ensure your copy fits your brand standards and resonates with your target audience.
- Audience. You can edit your retargeting audience options to see who responds best to a specific ad.
Meta allows you to simultaneously run multiple variations with different ad creatives, captions, and audiences.
Then, you just need to check how each ad variation performs according to the metrics you set.
With this strategy, your marketing department can objectively determine the best ads that will work for each stage of the sales funnel.
Once you’ve found the best-performing ads, that doesn’t mean you should leave them on forever. You’ll need to test them every now and then to see if they still serve their purpose.
3. Limit The Frequency of Your Ads
Marketers use a content calendar to ensure variety in their organic social posts.
That same variety should be seen in your ads as well. Ad fatigue can reduce the effectiveness of your social retargeting ads.
Even if you have catchy visuals, people will just get annoyed if it’s the fifth, sixth, or nth time they see the same thing.
Plus, you want your ad frequency to be as low as possible to ensure your cost-per-acquisition doesn’t go as high.
Ad frequency is the average number of times a unique user sees a particular ad:
So, consistently check your social media ad insights. If your frequency exceeds four, it’s probably time to create a new ad.
You’ll increase your “result per buck” when your audience retargeting campaign contains new material.
This tweak will make your social media remarketing campaign look fresher in the eyes of social media users. Additionally, you get to keep your ads updated with factual information.
In Closing
Retargeting campaigns make sure you never leave money on the table.
If you run them correctly, you’ll maximize your ad spend, lowering your cost per acquisition while boosting actual conversions.
You learned three tips to perform digital remarketing effectively on social media.
Target specific audiences with specific messaging. Also, create eye-catching ads that serve their purposes. Finally, limit the frequency of your social ads.
Make sure you’re consistently remarketing with new content so your audience doesn’t get annoyed.
Follow these tips as part of your retargeting strategy. You’ll turn prospective customers on social media into paying clients and even into evangelists, driving rapid growth for your company.