When developing a remarketing strategy, it is important to consider different ways of reaching a variety of audiences. With this in mind, I recommend linking your remarketing and social media presence through Facebook audience targeting.
There are 3 areas that should be considered: standard audience targeting, similar audience lists and remarketing to mail lists.
1) Standard Audience Targeting
To get started with Facebook remarketing you need to generate remarketing code from within your Facebook account. This code is known as a custom audience pixel. This code needs to be placed on every page of your website. If you already use Google remarketing, you will notice the process is almost identical.
Once you have placed the code on your site, create audience rules to create lists of users. This allows you to target anyone who has been to your website or mobile app previously on Facebook with an advert. For example, you may want to target anyone who has been to your site with an advert on Facebook reminding them to come back, or you may wish to do something similar for user who have been active on your app.
You can also exclude audiences. One applications of this would be to exclude previous purchasers from seeing your Facebook ads.
This could work particularly well as we head into the festive season. Consumers will be researching and purchasing for the next few months leading up to Christmas day. Facebook remarketing could be a good way to push specific messages to users who have been to your site whilst they are social networking. For example, one idea could be to target anyone who has been to your site but hasn’t purchased. With ads promoting your delivery status, e.g. a week before Christmas, you remind consumers they can still purchase from you using click and collect.
I recommend trialing a variety of cookie durations with your remarketing campaign. Users will behave in different ways at different time periods after visiting your site, and may also be swayed by different offers or messages. Due to the heavy research before and during the holiday season, you may wish to start collecting users now and then target them in a months’ time when you have a fantastic black Friday promotion.
You may also want to look at segmenting your user lists into specific groups. For example, if you are a shoe manufacturer you may wish to separate users who look at formal shoes from those who are look at trainers. These users might behave differently and therefore you may wish to tailor the ads to suit each category of user.
2) Utilising Existing Mail Lists
If you have a list of email addresses or phone numbers, Facebook provides you with the ability to retarget those users on Facebook. This provides opportunity to use Facebook to compliment your email marketing strategy. There are various ways you could use this:
– Encourage those people who have signed up for something on your site to like your Facebook page. This gains you more likes on your Facebook page from people you know are interested in your offering.
– Use Facebook to cross sell. For example, if you know someone has purchased a magazine subscription from you in the past, use Facebook to remind them of your products in the lead up to Christmas.
– Target these users with specific offers. For example you could use Facebook targeting to target people within the list of email users who fit your ideal customer profile and could target these with specific offers or promotions.
3) Similar Audience Lists
This is an exciting feature that allows you to find people who are similar to users in your Facebook remarketing lists.
For example, you could create a similar remarketing list to your mail lists. This would allow you to easily identify users who could be interested in your brand. Target these users with exciting ad copy that pushes the unique reasons they should consider visiting your site. Once they have visited your site, remarket offers and promotions to entice them back!
You could also create an audience based on your conversion tracking pixel. This means you can target people who share similar interests to people who have purchased from you previously.
Similar users could be a really good feature to use when you have an added incentive for people to visit your site, such as Black Friday or during the Christmas sale period. This could be a way of increasing visitor numbers when you have a shorter purchase cycle.
It is really important to ensure you tag your URLs using the Google URL Builder. This will ensure you are tracking your paid Facebook activity clearly in Google Analytics.
The benefit of doing this as well as using Facebook conversion tracking code is that you will be able to see stats on how users who come through Facebook behave when they land on your website. For example if you don’t immediately see a direct response from your campaigns, but users tend to be new visitors who spend a long time engaging on the site, you may wish to attribute a level of value to them and adjust your marketing activity accordingly.
(featured image by Emilio Küffer/Flickr)
