There are currently over three billion active users on Facebook and Instagram every month.
Three BILLION!
If you are using these social media platforms just for posting about your business, adding a few memes and interacting with your followers, you may be missing a big slice of your potential market.
Integrating a remarketing campaign into your social media strategy will keep your business in front of people who have already shown interest in your products and services. It can help build your brand, generate leads and ultimately attract more sales.
So, what’s remarketing?
You’ve probably already experienced remarketing without knowing you were being remarketed to!
Let’s say you visit the website of a car yard to look at the latest Toyota Camry. You didn’t sign up for anything, fill in any forms or download anything. You simply had a look around.
Next thing you know, ads for that car yard and the car you were looking at keep popping up all over the place; when your search the internet, visit other sites, as ads on Facebook and when you scroll through Instagram.
It can feel a bit creepy at first, but marketing does entail following your customers around. Welcome to the world of remarketing!
How often do you see your website stats and wonder why many people are visiting, but not taking any action? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to get their attention again once they’d left your site and ideally attract them back to complete the action you wanted them to take?
Remarketing does exactly that! It identifies potential customers and then 'remarkets' to them through a systematic series of social media advertisements that lead them to re-connect and buy from you.
The power of social media
There’s no denying, Facebook and Instagram along with other social media platforms have become powerful marketing machines. With people spending on average two hours a day scrolling through social media, it’s no wonder clever marketers are jumping on the remarketing bandwagon.
There is nothing that matches the power of social media to be able to accurately identify an audience and then deliver targeted messages in a timely manner that will lead them to your business.
It’s an effective (and cost effective) way for your brand to stay at the forefront of your potential customer’s mind during that two hour window. When used strategically, social media retargeting becomes an incredible tool for reaching your warm market and converting them into customers.
How social media remarketing works
Social media remarketing starts when your customer or potential customer visits your website. On a very basic level, you can set up cookies and then target those potential customers with social media posts or ads that keep reminding them of your brand.
At the next level, the cookies can watch for specific products or services they may look at or add to a shopping cart without checking out. You can then remarket those exact products to them through Facebook and Instagram.
The customer didn’t complete the purchase for some reason, but you know they are interested. Your remarketing may also offer them a special promotion, discount or offer to entice them to return to your website.
Remarketing doesn’t have to be purely sales focussed. Connecting through a free offer or subscription will build your database and prove invaluable for future marketing. Often this approach works better than a blatant ‘buy now’ pitch as it builds trust in your brand.
Remarketing can also be done to your Facebook and Instagram audience - more on that later.
The Facebook pixel
Facebook has made it super easy for you to reach your potential customers through the Facebook Pixel. The Facebook pixel is code you put on your website. When someone visits your site who is a Facebook user, the pixel identifies them and gathers data on which pages and products they looked at, clicked on or even put into their shopping cart.
The information is invaluable in qualifying your target audience and honing in on how best to remarket to them. Now you can turn to your Facebook Ad Manager and use that information to create a custom audience. You can also market differently to these people than you would to a cold market as they are already aware of your brand and have taken a step in your direction.
Facebook and Instagram advertising
Facebook and Instagram offer a variety of ad formats and it’s a fairly simple process to get your remarketing ad campaigns up and running.
As well as remarketing to your website visitors, you can use your Facebook Custom Audiences to remarket to both your Instagram and Facebook communities.
Facebook Custom Audiences are groups of people who:
- you already know through social media
- have engaged with your Instagram or Facebook pages, posts or ads
- have visited or interacted with your website or app
- have engaged with your business offline
You can set up your Ad Manager campaign to create lists of these people so you can really niche your marketing message. You can also remarket to people who have viewed your business page or profile, interacted with your posts, clicked on your social media advertising, sent you a message, opened your lead generation form, watched videos you have posted and a whole lot more!
To create your Custom Audience, log in to your Facebook Ad Manager or Business Manager account. Find the audiences tab and click on ‘Create New Custom Audience.’ If you click on the ‘Engagement’ option at the bottom, you will see a whole range of interesting options to choose from.
Once created, you can access your retargeting audiences in your Assets library under the ‘Audiences’ tab.
Valuable insights
Once you've created your Custom Audience, you can use it to gather valuable information. You’ll discover exactly who the people are who engage with your business. You’ll find out where they live, what they earn, their relationships status their online habits and a lot more. You may even be surprised what some of the stats reveal about your audience.
Remember also to regularly visit your Facebook Insights tab on your business page. You’ll find loads of interesting and useful data that will help when creating your remarketing campaign.
In this era of engagement and connection social media remarketing offers the perfect way to authentically connect, encourage and engage with people who are already leaning towards you, but may just need a little nudge.
