Marketing activities are an important part of our company’s strategy – not only in the real world, but also (and perhaps especially) in the virtual world!
The online user in the present time is one of the most important targets of our advertising, sometimes before they even know they need our product or service specifically. In this article you will learn about one of the segments of effective online marketing and that is retargeting. You will learn the differences between this concept and remarketing and what role both play in the customer journey in the marketing cycle.
What retargeting is all about and why it should not be called remarketing?
Retargeting involves reaching potential customers based on their past behavior in the online space. Some people use the term interchangeably with the word “remarketing”, but there are minor differences that are worth mentioning. Using retargeting, our goal will be to reach out again to people who visited our site, but did not perform the action we expected and, for example, abandoned the shopping cart. Thus, they have not yet become our customers.
Remarketing targets people who are already our customers and we need to remind them of ourselves.
This is especially important because there is a high chance that they will use our services again and help to make money relevant to our business. Therefore, it is worth making them become regular customers.
The biggest difference, therefore, is in the very definition of the user we are targeting with our advertising in social media platforms. In one of them he is only a potential performer of the action we want, in the other case he is already a full-fledged customer of our service.
Marketing funnel and online ads in customer journey
To vividly convey the marketing process through the customer’s eye, the so-called marketing funnel is used, which consists of roughly five stages – awareness, interest, desire, action and loyalty.
The first and second are aimed at getting the user to notice our product, the next is to create a sense of need for it, action means performing the action we care about on our site (e.g. purchase) and loyalty is understood as giving the customer back to our brand and, as it were, turning a circle in the presented funnel. Retargeting plays a very important role in this process from the early stages.
After noticing a product or service, the user begins to receive personalized ads from our company – this allows the user to become familiar with the brand, the product. Retargeted ads accompany the user through the rest of the levels of the funnel, and it is thanks to the early effect on the subconscious of the user that there is a high chance that he will complete the desired purchase process.
Referring to the nomenclature issue from the previous thread, we would deal with retargeting in the first pass of the user through the funnel, while once the user has made a purchase and the loyalty stage occurs, we are dealing with remarketing. However, both of these processes are very important in increasing profits and gaining loyal customers.