Secrets Of Successful B2B Remarketing Campaigns

Remarketing has been around for a few years on the display side of marketing, but has only recently picked up momentum and adoption on the paid search side. From what I’ve seen, remarketing is something that companies sometimes do really right… and other times do completely wrong. Here, I’ll share the main things we’ve learned from our search B2B remarketing campaigns, from both an e-commerce and lead-gen perspective.

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First, to give a bit of background, remarketing is simply the act of “cookie-ing” a user who has been to your site before so you can later serve ads to them to draw them back to your site. The beauty of remarketing from a search perspective is that you know the searcher is interested in your brand, as they’ve already visited your website.

Additionally, remarketing gives marketers the ability to help encourage the customer to move further down the conversion funnel, as the marketer knows the content they’ve engaged with and can message them based on those actions.

So, how do you capitalize on that interest (assuming you already have the basic remarketing audiences set up on your site, such as visiting content on your site, completed lead/sale, etc.)?

Tight Audiences, Granular Remarketing Lists & Targeted Messaging

Remarketing in paid search follows the same methodology as traditional paid search and product listing ads. The more granular you are, the better your campaign will perform. Best practice dictates to ensure keywords are tightly themed within your ad group, and remarketing follows the same concept, except, instead of keywords, lists and audiences are used.

Create custom combinations of your audiences and lists by adding or excluding lists together to create niche customer pools. You will then know exactly what actions the customer has taken and what pages they’ve visited on your site.

The biggest complaint I’ve heard about e-commerce remarketing is when a customer visits the page, converts, and then is remarketed to later to purchase the same product they’ve purchased minutes or hours ago. With a simple exclusion of customers who are on the list of “completed sale,” they are excluded from the remarketing list to potentially remarket them that product again.

Instead, utilize the information about the products they purchased and the fact they’ve completed the sale to remarket them with complementary products and services. That customer has already established a relationship with your company, so stay top of mind with them.

Another strategy can be if you know that the customer has visited a checkout but didn’t complete the sale, you can remarket in your copy a coupon code or other incentives, and land them on a page further down in the funnel to help promote that sale completion.

For lead-gen remarketing, the same strategy applies. Tag as much of your site as possible, including all content on your site, parent sites and even microsites if possible. As customers are added to these lists, custom combinations can be created to keep track of where customers are in the conversion funnel, and their interest in your brand.

If a paid search click lands customers on a content page, but they leave before completing the conversion, remarket to them and land them on the conversion page, rather than back on the content page that they’ve already consumed. If the customer completed the form and is now a lead, remarket to them by messaging breaking research and landing them on the press releases of the research to help keep your brand top of mind. If a customer has landed on a parent site, remarketing can be done to promote a microsite or child site of a niche solution or product that they could be interested in.

As remarketing runs on the Google Display Network, don’t be afraid to exclude content that is not converting at the CPO goal required. Because remarketing runs across the entire GDN, if a customer is included in one of your lists, your messaging may serve next to content that’s not relevant to your brand.

As I mentioned in my previous article about the B2B advertising funnel shift, success is primarily seen when ads serve next to content that is in the same industry and relevant to your brand. Just like negatives would be added to broad match keywords when the match is irrelevant, exclusions of sites should be performed on a regular basis for your B2B remarketing campaigns.

Other Food For Thought & Remarketing Opportunities

As search marketers start utilizing remarketing more and more as an effective and affordable way to drive more sales and leads, more remarketing opportunities will pop up. YouTube is one way to continue to scale and grow remarketing lists for your brand. As customers engage and watch video on YouTube, the B2B advertiser can potentially remarket and message them back to the parent site for a conversion opportunity, or even back to YouTube to consume additional content.

Another opportunity exists with remarketing lists for search ads (RSLA), which came out of beta just a few months ago, and is meant to be implemented along with enhanced campaigns. This feature allows the advertiser to change messaging and bid higher on specific keywords during a Google search if that customer is already within a built remarketing list.

My last article on SEL spoke about how we tested using geo-bid multipliers (as a function of enhanced campaigns) to scale search volume where opportunity existed. While paying a premium to target a highly profitable audience is not a new concept in the advertising world, as search engine marketers we have many opportunities to grow our accounts and reach potential customers. RSLA seems like another option to scale, but should be done so within reason and marketers should invoke careful analytics so as not to inflate CPC or CPL beyond the realm of profitability.

In conclusion, granularity is key when setting up B2B remarketing campaigns from paid search. Doing so will allow for tightly grouped remarketing lists which will allow the B2B advertiser to remarket effectively through messaging and landing page. Other opportunities exist for scaling B2B remarketing outside of site engagement (YouTube, RSLA), but should be carefully considered and vetted with robust analytics to ensure profitability for the brand.