Remarketing shouldn’t be a new concept to the seasoned digital marketer. Brands know that it takes consumers over 9 visits to a site before they decide to buy, and remarketing is a critical part of the conversion equation. Getting the first site visit is tough (any brand marketer can attest to that), but it’s the 7th, 8th, and 9th visit that leads to the magic.
This is where remarketing comes into play. In fact, web site visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert. The better the audience being remarketed to, the higher those conversion percentages. By leveraging your most engaged audiences and your Superfans and brand advocates, you can better ensure the highest ROI for your remarketing dollars.
For brands that have organized their Superfans into an advocacy marketing program, there are a multitude of ways to utilize their program membership database to build those profitable remarketing audiences.
Audience 1: Remarketing to New Site Visitors
The beauty of an advocacy marketing program is that it empowers your Superfans to share your best content with their friends and family. Their social network sees your content pop up on their social feeds (endorsed by their friend – your Superfan). They then head on over to your website to check out the video, blog post, offer, or white paper being shared.
In Google Analytics, it’s easy to segment remarketing audiences based on which specific site pages they visit. Brands should have supporting remarketing campaigns geared towards where a user is in the sales process. Have your advocacy marketing program members share a mix of content including:
- Discovery content
- Informational content
- Offers
- Selling content
Then, as their friends and family self-select which content they want to check out, you can place them in a correlating remarketing campaign. If a consumer is self-selecting to engage in more sales oriented content, they’re likely further down the sales funnel, requiring less of a remarketing investment and helping to drive a higher ROI. Likewise, if they’re lightly dipping their toe into your content, they might not be ready for that hard sale quite yet.
Audience 2: Custom Audiences Built on Superfans
Many advertising platforms (including Facebook and Google) allow brands to directly advertise to users that have opted into that brand’s other marketing campaigns. Essentially, if you’ve got a list you’re regularly emailing, you can import that list into Facebook. Facebook will then match that list with Facebook users and allow you to show your ads and promoted posts to directly to those users to ensure that they’re seeing your messaging across multiple marketing venues.
SocialToaster makes it easy for you to export your advocacy program membership as a .CSV file, the platform-preferred document type to create custom audiences with. You simply upload that list into Facebook or Google and create campaigns to show your messaging directly to your Superfans, giving your brand an additional touch point to market to your most passionate consumers. It also allows you to reinforce a key marketing message or offer to further drive conversions.
Audience 3: Look-a-like Audiences Created from Segmented Advocacy Program Members
We know not all audiences are created equal. There will always be some Superfans that outperform in terms of share rates, engagement rates, conversion counts, or the key performance indicator of your choice. It’s just the way people are.
For brands that want to take their audience creation and retargeting to the next level, they can take their advocacy marketing program members and sort by the top 15% or 20% of users. Once segmented, brands can then upload these smaller audiences as a custom audiences (see above).
But wait, there’s more! Once uploaded, brands can use these key Superfans to create what’s known as a look-a-like (LAL) audience. A LAL audience is an audience made from people that share common characteristics with their parent audience (your custom audience members). Essentially, the brand is telling Facebook, “Hey, we like these people! Can you find us like a million more who have similar interests?”
At SocialToaster, we recommend building these LAL audiences based on the high-performing segment of your Superfans versus a brand’s entire advocacy program membership. This helps to ensure a higher level of quality in the makeup of the LAL audience.
As this LAL audience – made up of people who more-than-likely have not engaged with your brand – starts to engage with your ads and visit your website, they then become part of your remarketing campaigns! Can we get a KA-CHING?!
While getting that first website visit is crucial to a brand’s success, multiple site visits are what it takes to get those sweet, sweet conversions. Maximize your ROI by using your advocacy marketing program as more than a content distribution platform.
Ready to start putting an advocacy marketing program to work for you? Reach out today, we’re here to help!