In a world of constant interruptions, people need reminders.  That’s why in the business world, we live by our email based calendars and the meetings that overpopulate them.  I’m sure you’ve been working at warp speed at your desk only to be interrupted by the pop-up 15 minute meeting reminder on your monitor or cell phone and thought “Aaahhh, I would have forgotten about that meeting if it weren’t for that darn pop-up”.

In a busy world with short attention spans, it’s nice to have reminders.

Google’s remarketing works in the same way (as you can see in the image above), but it allows your brand to continue to interact with your target audience after they’ve left your site. It allows your brand to be a reminder to the people that have already been to your website and looking into your products and services.  By having your ads visible to your target audience across the web, you are getting more exposure, more recognition and gaining more psychological equity.

I’ve helped a few clients get up and running with remarketing. Believe me, it works. Also, it’s not stalking, you can put a cap on the amount of times your ad can be served to people before it gets annoying.  Clients first reactions to the idea are always “Oh, its like stalking.” But its not really, because this stalking makes you money and grows your brand.

Before you get to the conversions, here are a few steps you can take to get prepared for remarketing success:

1. Know your target audience. I can’t stress this enough.  Knowing what the pains, problems, barriers (and conversely, the aspirations) of your target audience can help in every facet of your marketing efforts.  Also, by knowing your target audience, you’ll have a better understanding of what the buying cycle is like for them.
2. Look into your Website Analytics to see where the majority of your traffic spends their time Google Analytics offers a nice window into seeing what pages get the most traffic. This insight will also influence which offers you will target those folks with once they leave your website.
3. Figure out what offers will be valuable to those visitors You want to target the people who visit your site and look at Product X with valuable offers that are related to Product X. Seems simple.  But this is predicated upon knowing your target audience.  You want this offer to provide alleviation to some of the pain they are facing in relation to the problem that Product X solves.
4. Figure out how you’ll continue to nurture that lead once they convert (more on this in a future post) Getting someone to download an offer is only the beginning, not the end.  I mean, you can pat yourself on the back for seeing that your previous research has worked, but now you roll up your sleeves.  How are you going to continue to shepherd this lead down the sales funnel. It takes a handful of touches in order to convert a lead. A lead scoring automated marketing workflow is the preferred method.

Once you have those 4 steps roughly figured out you will be well on your way to having the elements required to extend your reach beyond just when people are on your site. Happy remarkerting.