Interest-based remarketing has been available to the industry for years. Today, most marketers who’ve been using remarketing execute it wisely — and with skill. As a single method, remarketing has practically become an industry standard.
But, if you look closely, this approach appears to be a preferred performance marketing measure. At first, most marketers don’t naturally consider remarketing a branding option. So, as an industry, we are not seeing cohesive use of remarketing when a company has both branding and performance objectives. DR seems to be the default application here.
For the industry to leverage and realize the full potential of this approach, we need to be more aggressive and thoughtful when remarketing across our media plans – branding and DR alike. So, what does full-fledged leverage and deployment look like? Well, it means that we are continually using what we know and what we learn about successful, productive audience profiles – both current and discovered, endemic and non-endemic – to do more of what’s working for us.
To illustrate the issue, there are several specific ways we hurt ourselves with this short-sightedness and what is essentially a DR bias, when it comes to the remarketing method.
Blind Budgeting
The best ad marketing budget allocations are informed by a full appreciation for and visibility on the mix, with nothing operating in isolation. This open-mindedness is needed when determining channels, media types and platforms, visual creative and messaging – as well as targeting methodology.
Even though different teams or plans may be accountable measure by measure for what’s being executed, it’s important to know what’s being deployed and to what degree we are investing in tools and solutions – so that we may always learn from the outcome and apply our findings on every relevant front, and not inefficiently split and silo our targeting dollars. Fixing the discord is easy. Make sure all the right people see and review the strategy. Circulate a solid media brief up front and take a collaborative approach to performance reporting.
Help Your Provider Help You
An audience solutions provider worth its salt will know remarketing as a method inside and out. If you expose your providers to both your branding and performance objectives, this will empower them to deliver for you. Just as you should not silo or isolate the method within your own efforts, nor should you hinder those you are entrusting with this bias.
In addition to examining all of your own audience-related data, learning and intelligence to date, your provider will be leveraging their own base of data and experience. It is only with full visibility and inclusion that they can truly scale for you, using whichever solutions you have engaged.
Don’t Get Stuck on ‘Your’ Audience
By executing audience targeting and remarketing based only on what you believe and know today about your audience immediately hinders your opportunity. Sure you may know your demographics, lifestyle attributes and even have some successful behavioral models on hand, but there is no need to stop there.
If you go in stuck on a set perception of your audience, only willing to mine the same audience profiles, you are not exploiting the power of the method or enjoying the benefits of the state of the science.
Consider this real example of what happened when one of our car rental clients opened up his point of view and looked beyond his endemic audience. The marketer found new audiences who were more likely to take advantage of the marketer’s offers in the following segments:
- Discounted fashion forward professionals turned out to be 3.4X more likely
- Observed travelers who showed multiple country impression requests in the last 30 days were 2.8X more likely
- Mainstream video delivery site visitors were 2X more likely
- Dating sites users (i.e. singles) were 1.6X more likely
- Professional service consumers turned out to be 1.5X more likely
- Automobile researchers were .2X more likely
These exponential boosts show how a marketer can find new highly qualified audience segments previously unimagined – and benefit by targeting them. This more open approach allows a marketer to scale up conversion-driving activities and also increase exposure, visibility and branding to wider radiant audience circles. As a result, there is less discord, fewer constraints and your plan is in its best possible position to deliver.
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