B2B Retargeting Best Practices: An Easy Guide to Win Back Lost Leads

“As soon as you open your mind to doing things differently, the doors of opportunity practically fly off their hinges.” -Jay Abraham

In our last blog post in this B2B retargeting series, we explained why it can be one of the most useful tools in the digital marketer’s toolbox.

If you’re still wondering, “Does retargeting work for B2B?” The answer is a resounding YES!

Retargeting can win back lost leads by nurturing and persuading the 99% of visitors who didn’t buy immediately to return and purchase later. It’s one of the most affordable ways to increase conversions without having to convince cold traffic (visitors who have never heard of you).

Also, you can turn it from something that is annoying into something that delivers tremendous value if done right.

Though it is cheap and effective when implemented properly, remarketing is a nuanced beast that needs thoughtful planning if you want to maximize its ROI.

Consider retargeting its own channel

A typical marketing funnel contains stages that a prospect takes to initiate and deepen the connection with your brand.

The beauty of retargeting is that it is smarter than other tactics.

You are able to “listen” for behaviors taken along the way through the prospect journey and effectively make the prospect an offer they can’t refuse.

Plus, you can serve this type of ad to nearly anyone who has interacted with your brand digitally.

Retargeting can perform exponentially better than traditional PPC ads.

This, coupled with the fact that the two types of ads behave very differently, means that retargeting exists in its own land and should be treated as a wholly separate channel.

So now you might be wondering… what ARE the best practices for a B2B retargeting campaign? Let’s dive deeper into that…

There are a few great remarketing techniques to stand out from the other B2B remarketing ads and get more people to click your ad.

Here’s what we recommend:

1. Know your goal

Different companies retarget for different reasons.

For instance, some companies want more likes on Facebook.

Some companies want a non-converting visitor to simply fill out a form, any form.

And some companies want a very specific, high-value or high-intent conversion and use retargeting to cherry pick leads.

Defining business goals early on goes a long way toward ensuring success later.

Pro Tip: Retargeting can be used at any point in the buying cycle.

You can also leverage it to upsell or cross-sell existing customers.

Let’s say you are a multi-product B2B software company who just closed a single product deal.  After a few weeks, you could retarget new customers to position other products they might find useful.

CRM powerhouse Salesforce uses this approach extensively to cross-sell products like Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud to existing Sales Cloud users.

They do this so much that there’s a good chance you’re saying to yourself ‘Yeah … they do!’

2. Make unique creative

Arguably, creativity is the most important ingredient in a successful campaign.

Write copy that is clever but immediately understandable and does not require thought.

Choose imagery that clearly connects to the headline and is relevant to your ideal buyer.  If you are selling educational services to brick-and-mortar college students, your ads probably shouldn’t have an image of a busy mom, which isn’t relevant enough to the students seeing the ad.

As Chris Mechanic, our CEO, puts it, “marketing should never be boring.”

You can elicit nearly any emotional reaction known to humankind but the minute you cause boredom, you end up in the marketing graveyard.

If you want some inspiration for your ads, here are 3 great examples for you to see what’s working for other clients that were in the same place you might be now.

• Zephyr SmartBear pulled in over 1400 new leads within just a few months after implementing new ad creatives. 
• Surefire Local completely leveled up their follower base with a well-targeted campaign that paired video and static assets.
• Passport used social ads to show their target clients (cities, universities, and large hospitals) how their easy-to-use app-based system could drive more revenue. This was a perfect counter to the loss of major traffic and shortages of enforcement officers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

3. Explore different types of messaging

At WebMechanix, we divide marketing messaging broadly into four categories: love, fear, duty, and greed. Here are some B2B marketing strategy examples of the four in practice:

• Love-based: spreads some cheer and reminds people the benefit they will get out of what you’re offering. Ex: “Your speed of automation will be twice as fast.”
• Fear-based: points out what happens if a prospect doesn’t take an action.
  Ex: “Don’t Get Left in the Dust by Your Competitors. Offer Ends Tonight.”
• Duty-based: obligates a prospect to something time-oriented or value-oriented.
  Ex: “Find Out What All the Buzz is About Around This New AI Feature”
• Greed-based: conveys something new and enticing to elevating their status or well-being.
  Ex: “Say Hello to 516% ROI.”

Pro Tip:  Don’t be stingy with messaging 🙂

Load one campaign up with 3-5 offers to the same list.  You will get a sense of what actually converts within the segment pretty quickly.

4. Use relevant landing pages

Don’t send prospects to your homepage.

And definitely don’t send them back to the same page they didn’t convert on, either.

We call these “bus driver” ads because you’re dropping potential customers off at a bus stop that is probably nowhere near their destination.

The homepage has too many links and options that will distract users and reduce the chance they will take the action you want.

The page they didn’t convert on is likely not going to win them over since they’ve already seen it. It’s better to use a different appeal.

On the other hand, if your ad is promoting an amazing ebook about retargeting (heh… wink, wink) but your landing page is actually a newsletter signup, you’ve just eroded trust.

Instead, invest the time to make landing pages that connect to your ad creative.

A major key is to create ads and landing pages that connect holistically to the action that triggers the ad in the first place.

If someone browses content on WebMechanix.com about PPC management, then they are probably interested in learning more about retargeting.

And rightly so; it’s a pretty hot topic right now that we have been knocking it out of the park for nearly a decade.

So you can see where we are going with this.  Serve up an ad that delivers topically-relevant content and positions your brand as a subject matter expert.

Instead of being a bus driver, chauffeur users to a landing page that briefly goes into more detail.

Then watch those conversions roll right in, baby!

5. Constantly test and improve

That which gets measured gets improved. Pull levers. Tweak messaging. Test colors. Try different images.  Evenly rotate ads.  Examine landing page behavior.

Just test, measure, and iterate.

Marketing is a blend of art and science.  Reach beyond the story your data tells today to deepen insight and drive strategy tomorrow.

6. Personalize

Retargeting requires work to set up.

Segmenting your audience for specific campaigns most likely means you’ll need additional content for those campaigns.

That awesome retargeting ebook probably won’t entice someone who browsed content about usability.

Relevancy, relevancy, relevancy.

That’s what retargeting is really all about anyway.

Conclusion

There are a few key ways you can boost your retargeting conversion rate to a level higher than the industry standard. We’ve learned these from cold, hard experience in our own PPC marketing for B2B clients.

Start with a goal, make your creative unique, explore different messaging, create relevant landing pages, test and iterate, and personalize.

Stay tuned for two more blog posts on this Remarketing series. In the next blog post, we will dive into more advanced, lesser-known remarketing strategies that we’ve seen work well for our mid to large B2B SaaS clients.

Now, I have a question for you:

What is your biggest struggle with retargeting in B2B industries? Let me know in the comments below.