Remarketing – Creating a Digital Deacute;jagrave; Vu

It will now be close to 20 minutes since I drove into a traffic bottleneck. The heat outside is sweltering. Patches of white cloud dot the clear blue skies. Hello Indian summer.

Amidst the trees and buildings that make up the urban landscape, I see close to 10 massive billboards crowding over, screaming for our attention. Considering I get to spend 10 more precious minutes to count every speck of dirt on the truck in front, that would mean a total of 30 minutes for these billboards to try and convince me to upgrade my car or my mobile phone. I see, I smile, I ponder, and I get on with the day. That’s an awful lot of money spent on a smile. Albeit being much cheaper, similar concerns plague digital banner ads. People are witness to hundreds of banner ads entailing in similar or worse consequences.

Here, today, now, people are busy and thus have receding attention spans. This means more challenges for us marketing folks. We need something more innovative and viable that helps the cause of catching more eyeballs over and over again, pushing brand recall, and aiding purchase. How?

Statistics show that people among all age groups in China, India, Singapore, Japan, Korea, and Australia spend close to 18.5 hours a week online. This time is divided over activities that range from social networking to purchase research.

During research, the shopper may or may not complete the purchase.

Enter remarketing.

Remarketing is a concept that allows you to reach out to people who previously visited your website, match their purchase interest with bespoke banners, and display these across a display network. Remarketing can be done by simply tagging your website’s pages with a code provided by the display network.

Here’s a crude scenario where remarketing can prove effective – you check out shoes on Website A, but since you don’t have your plastic on you, you can’t buy them. On your consecutive browsing affair, you will be shown banner ads of shoes on Website A when you browse sites across the display network. Thanks to a remarketing code placed on the pages cataloguing shoes on Website A, you remember, you like, and you buy.

Remarketing can also play a significant role in an integrated search campaign strategy. When consumers research a purchase over the Internet, they instinctively punch in relevant keywords into search engines and reach the product website or the website that offers the best deals.

Since the user trailed onto your website via your keywords, you can now remarket to these prospects across the display network.

Apart from selling, remarketing can also be used to cross-sell and up-sell. Relative to the aforementioned scenario, this means you can advertise for therapeutic insoles, running shoes, shoe accessories, etc.

The question is not whether billboards, digital or otherwise, are to be or not to be. We know that either as messengers of brand awareness or helping the brand’s employees to some ego massage, billboards work. What I’m trying to get at is how to effectively use these to push your brand and complete the purchase process.

Through digital and remarketing you can get that much closer to completing the purchase cycle than any other medium.