Lead Nurture: Use Remarketing to Nurture the Buyer Journey

Perhaps you’re already using remarketing campaigns for your offers, but are you getting the best out of them?

When you’re remarketing an audience, you’re creating content and ads that persuade leads who didn’t convert the last time to come back and give you a second chance. Remarketing and retargeting are basically the same things, albeit using different terms for the same process.

Effectively, remarketing is putting ads in front of people who have already seen or visited a certain page or viewed a piece of content. The goal is to get somebody back onto their path and accelerate their buyer journey.

To get the most out of your remarketing campaigns, you need to consider your offers in the context of the buyer’s journey. This way, you can assess if the content you use for retargeting leads is relevant – is this what they need to move further down the path to conversion.

Map Out The Buyer Journey

The buyer journey is not linear in nature. Prospective customers are not moving from awareness to consideration to action in a straight line. Instead, they discover your content while trying to solve a problem they have, and then enter a loop of exploration and evaluation of the various options.

You can think of it in terms of the “SEE-THINK-DO-CARE” framework. This framework is not a funnel, but different stages than people can enter at various points, move back and forth between, and exit at will.

To truly map the buyer journey, we need to take into account the fact that the “Think” stage itself is a “Messy Middle” – a complex space between triggers and purchase, where customers are won and lost. It involves two processes – exploration, during which people search for and discover more options (competitors), and evaluation, a reductive activity during which they narrow down their list based on their own cognitive biases, needs, and product features.

These decision-making processes are repeated multiple times and in different sessions before people exit the loop and enter the DO stage.

As marketers, we have different opportunities to reach people with our offers at the SEE, THINK, and DO stages. Remarketing can be a very powerful driver to get people from SEE to THINK and influence their decision-making in the “Messy Middle” loop of exploration and evaluation. Let’s see it in action.

How to Use Remarketing at SEE and THINK Stages

Let’s say you have a great top-of-the-funnel piece of content, a video. You’ve created it to attract new users, so you target audiences at the SEE stage.

If you get, say, 10,000 views on that video, you can put all those viewers into a remarketing audience and start showing them another piece of content. This could be another video with more information, or a free ebook, or a lead-magnet. Eventually, you’d want to offer them something relevant and valuable – premium content they can access once they give you their email addresses.

Once you have these names and emails, you open a new door to continue remarketing efforts into their email boxes. Not only that – you need to create another remarketing audience from the people that signed up for your lead magnet and start retargeting them with the next steps.

You have to get your prospects to care, and that comes in the content you design for them. Engage them with content that helps them evaluate your offer – showcasing your use cases, features, and benefits. You can also support them when they are measuring you against your competitors. Perhaps a head-to-head comparison landing page would help them make up their mind.

At this point, the campaign should have an offer that gets them to convert into a sales qualified lead and get in touch with you.

This is how you can use remarketing to accelerate the buyer’s journey and help them move through these different stages. We’ve had some great results with this and highly recommend that you test it out with your own content assets and audiences.

Continue reading us at Hop Online to learn how to make landing pages that convert.