A Powerful Cocktail: Mixing Retargeting With Content Marketing

The marriage of content marketing and retargeting efforts can be effective in driving lead generation. How can you implement this strategy in your marketing?

Retargeting has proven to be an incredible advance in effective marketing. However, many marketers see retargeting as a new channel for acquisition when, in fact, it’s simply a layer to supplement your existing marketing channels.

One channel that isn’t typically associated with retargeting (but should be) is content marketing. Having a smart strategy for mixing retargeting with content marketing creates a powerful “cocktail” to drive lead generation. Let’s take a look at one successful set of tactics you can use to drive leads using retargeting and content marketing.

Retargeting for Lead Generation

Disclaimer: This set of tactics typically works best for B2B or businesses with higher cost of acquisition due to the cost of the retargeting. If you do some simple math using the costs of retargeting, you can decide if this will work for your business.

  1. Develop a hyper-targeted blog post focused on answering the most common questions your personas typically have in the top or middle funnel.You can develop topics based on keyword research to see what people are looking for or by the reviewing your current analytics to see popular questions. Then test the topic by posting in a popular LinkedIn group or Quara and see what kind of response and engagement that topic gets.Once your topic has been picked, write an extremely high-quality and in-depth blog post that helps answer that question. Because this will likely be the first page new visitors see and because we will be putting money behind promoting it, take extra steps to develop an impressive and informative post.
  2. Next create two mini-content offers that match the topic of the blog post but offer additional value. One offer will be paired with our blog by placing call to actions on the post. The other offer will be used in our retargeting campaign.Some examples of a “mini-content offer” are a checklist, template, mini-e-book, tools list, etc. For sake of time and focus, I’d suggest keeping these as mini-offers and if you find success, then expanding into a bigger, premium conversion offer.
  3. “Soft-launch” and promote the blog to your existing network. I think of this as a soft-launch in order to measure the effectiveness of the blog in driving lead conversion to the mini-content offer.Once you have collected enough data, develop and implement improvements to the blog, calls to action, landing page, conversion offer, etc. to ensure when you start your paid promotion it will perform well.
  4. Develop a targeted paid promotion mix of display and social ads to help drive traffic to the blog. As they land on the blog, this will not only open the possibility of a conversion on the mini-content offer, but also add a retargeting tracking pixel to those who visit.Keep in mind to make your paid promotion as hyper-targeted as possible in order to match the website traffic you’re driving with paid ads to the personas the blog topic is written for. Think quality over quantity. This will help ensure higher conversion rates and more targeted people being retargeted.
  5. This is the step where the retargeting comes in. Build a retargeting list for anyone who reads the blog post but does not convert on your first mini-content offer.Create two different sets of ads for your retargeting campaign. The first set will feature the first mini-content offer a second time for those who may have overlooked it on their first visit.The second set of ads will feature your second mini-content offer. If the individual was not interested in the exact topic of the first mini-content offer, this second offer will give us a second chance to hook them back to convert.

You can also do this with existing blogs that are already performing well. You can take a look at your conversion assist report and filter by your blog to understand which posts are driving lead conversion, then double-down on those posts using the above process.

This is just one of the many methods to successfully implement retargeting into your content marketing campaign. It’s important to note that you should still keep all your retargeting as a supplement and put your focus on creating amazing content. After all, you can drive people to your content, but if the content isn’t good, they will quickly leave and you’ll be wasting ad spend.

If you have any other created uses for retargeting in your content marketing program or have any questions, please comment below and I’d love to chat!

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