6 Ways to Make Your Brand Stand Out with Facebook Remarketing
As digital marketers, we are constantly looking for the newest trend or the next best way to target our audiences. Facebook gives us many ways to do that through custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and remarketing.If you work in digital marketing, you know what I’m talking about when I say remarketing. And this blog and the advanced Facebook remarketing tactics I’m about to explain are especially geared toward you!General Facebook remarketing is described as placing a pixel on your website, building the audience after the site has had enough visitors, and serving an ad to anyone who has visited the website. But let’s get more specific to ensure the right message is reaching the right person at the right time. When this “magic formula” happens, the person who sees the ad is more likely to take the specific action you desire. Many of the items I’ll discuss below relate to both Facebook and Instagram, as they are both owned by the same company, and managed through Facebook Business Manager.
1. From ‘Meh to Marvelous’
In August, the Meld team attended the Digital Summit in Chicago. My favorite session was “Meh” to “Marvelous” – Marketing with Facebook Ads in the Era of Killer Competition presented by Susan Wenograd. The session focused on how the old ways of telling someone about your brand, and then serving them a remarketing ad to convert, just doesn’t work anymore.Almost every brand caught onto this strategy, which makes it harder to stand out, and consumers are already overwhelmed. So how do you stand out via remarketing in the advanced digital age? This can be done in a variety of ways.
2. Move Them Through the Marketing Funnel
First, don’t assume that everyone who has seen a social media post or a digital ad from your brand is ready to convert (buy a product, submit their information, etc). Some people might be ready, but as I mentioned above, this isn’t typically the case.A more advanced way to utilize remarketing is to think about the marketing funnel and how someone can be moved from the awareness phase (seeing that first post) all the way down through the conversion phase (typically after having multiple touchpoints with your brand). One way to do this is to remarket to those who have engaged with your Facebook posts. If they are engaging with your brand on social media, they’re likely to want to learn more and visit your website.To lead them through the marketing funnel, serve an ad that directs people who have engaged with your Facebook posts to your website. Once they have spent time on your site, it’s easier to show them even more specific remarketing ads based on the pages they’ve visited.
3. Grab Their Attention with Video
Video is one of the most important and engaging ways marketers can get their message to potential customers. Last year CISCO predicted that more than 85 percent of content consumed online (in the US) in 2019 would be presented via video. One way to retarget is based upon who has watched different amounts of a video. For testing purposes, I recommend including multiple audiences based on the length of the video they have watched. For example, one audience made up of people who have watched at least 50 percent of the video, another audience made up of those who have watched at least 75 percent of the video, and another of people who have watched at least 95 percent of the video.
Let’s assume that an audience that watches more of your video is likely to be more interested in your product or service. Using this logic, you can retarget those groups with different messages. This will help you learn which audience is going to generate the best results and allows you to better optimize future campaigns (e.g. if someone has watched 95 percent of your video, they’d likely be more ready to buy than someone who has only watched 50 percent). For those who have watched 95% of the video, the next ad they’re served might encourage them to actually make a purchase.
4. Get Specific with Your URLs
Any good marketing strategy has a mix of digital platforms: Facebook, Google, etc. It’s not usually a good idea to put all of your marketing efforts into just one digital platform.Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to serve ads on Facebook to people who have clicked on your Google Ad? The answer is yes, if you have auto-tagging enabled in your Google Ads campaigns! Google incorporates a Google Click ID into the URL when someone clicks on it, denoted like this: ‘&gclid.’
What if you utilize UTM parameters in your
Google Ads URLs instead? No problem! As an alternative option, Facebook is also able to serve ads to people who have visited certain pages from Google Ads or other digital campaigns as long as they are tagged with UTM parameters. Pages that contain either of these can be entered into Facebook as a specific URL as shown below.
5. Use Your Instagram Business Profile
Your Instagram Business profile is likely low hanging fruit in terms of remarketing. Since Facebook owns Instagram, it’s possible for marketers to serve remarketing ads to people who are interacting with your Instagram Business profile.
There are currently four options within Facebook Business Manager audiences to utilize for Instagram. These include:
- Anyone who visited your business profile
- People who engaged with any post or ad
- People who sent a message to your business profile
- People who saved any post or ad
6. Test, Test, Test!
As with anything in marketing, it’s important to test your remarketing. If the audience is too small, it’s not always ideal for the campaign objective to be conversions. It’s difficult for Facebook to show ads appropriately using its algorithm if the audience is too small. Test this using other campaign objectives such as reach, traffic, or engagement. Brands with smaller numbers of followers don’t have as much brand recognition as those with larger amounts of followers, so it’s important to still focus on brand awareness, a top-of-the-marketing funnel approach.Remarketing on digital platforms, especially Facebook, is becoming more advanced. Hopefully you learned some new tactics to try in your current or upcoming remarketing campaigns. Whether it’s thinking more about the marketing funnel when it comes to remarketing, creating remarketing audiences from video views, utilizing Instagram in a way you haven’t before, continuing to test, or incorporating URLs from other campaigns, there is something that makes sense for almost all digital marketers depending on your goals.
Final Recommendations
Don’t know where to start? Think about what you already do a lot of and start with the advanced remarketing strategy that best correlates. Then move on to something on this list you haven’t tried. You never know what type of results it will generate for you or your clients!Interested in learning about other digital platforms? Check out our recent video blog about Google Ads! Looking for a little more guidance on Facebook remarketing? Reach out and we can help you explore new strategies for remarketing your brand.
