(Source: Chango)

The typical cost of marketing is 100% for first-time customers and 33% for reselling new products to existing customers. Thus the statement “your best prospects are your current customers.” Retargeting is a strategic way for a company to continue the marketing process among current customers that have been in use by savvy marketers for years. What’s newer is applying the strategy to your customers, your website marketing, and related social media efforts.

Of course, the primary place to begin your retargeting program is your primary website. That’s where the majority of your current customers and prospects are spending time learning about your company and its ongoing product and services. One way to put this strategy in play is to retarget users based on the products they browsed on your website.

Site retargeting (sometimes referred to as remarking by marketing planners) is a strategic approach that serves up a relevant display ads after a user has visited a specific portion of your website. Adding to this approach is to add another level of specificity based on where the user arrived onto your website. Was it through organic SEO unpaid search engine traffic or SEM paid traffic using Google AdWords for instance? This data is then mixed with the specific products the user reviewed and new content marketing is prepared somewhere else on the website as they continue to browse.

Companies specializing in retargeting have taken this approach even further. As Wikipedia notes on their Behavioral retargeting page, “Some companies specialize in retargeting. Other companies have added retargeting to their list of methods of purchasing advertising. Retargeting helps companies advertise to website visitors who leave without a conversion — about 98% of all web traffic. This is done by displaying ads to the prospect as they surf the Internet via various ad networks that the agency buys media from on behalf of their Business Customers.”

Some might call this big brother, but I digress. Retargeting is only serving banner ads to people who have shown at least some amount of engagement in your brand. This makes retargeting a smarter spend than most other display ad campaigns as it focuses on your brand’s engaged user-base. Most likely a company has spent marketing dollars to get a customer to their site in the first place, so the term Retargeting is derived from the concept of marketing to them again, however in a different manner. Search retargeting is a form of behavioral retargeting, can also be leveraged to drive new customers that have not been to the site before because they are being retargeted based on actions taken on a third-party website.