- Remarketing to customers who have previously engaged with your brand can lead to new purchases.
- To remarket successfully, share content that gives customers more information about your business.
- Don't be afraid to customize ads for specific audiences and adjust based on performance.
- This article is part of "Marketing for Small Business," a series exploring the basics of marketing strategy for SBOs to earn new customers and grow their business.
When sisters Lindsey and Courtney Glasser started their clothing brand, Grey Bandit, in 2017, they relied heavily on influencer marketing to get in front of new customers. But as influencer marketing grew more popular, the rising costs became harder to justify — especially since they didn't always see it translate to sales.
The Glassers started to experiment with remarketing as a way to maximize the impact of the followers they already had, serving ads on Instagram to people who had previously engaged with their posts or visited their website.
"Remarketing is so valuable because you already know this person is interested in some capacity," Lindsay Glasser told Insider. "You don't have to spend $10,000 to see a return."
Joe Karasin, the owner and chief marketing officer of the consultancy Karasin PPC, agreed that remarketing can be a gold mine — one that too many businesses overlook.
"The vast majority of consumers these days are not 'one-click ponies,'" he told Insider, explaining how customers typically require multiple touch points with a brand before deciding to make a purchase.
"For businesses, it means that you need to be more present and take a kind of tiered approach to how you introduce yourself," Karasin said. By using cheaper channels for initial acquisition and investing more in remarketing, he said, you can see higher conversion rates.
Insider talked with the Glassers and Karasin to learn about remarketing strategies for small businesses on a budget.
Think creatively about audiences and platforms
The Glassers have found that the most successful remarketing happens when they target customers who had the highest intent, such as shoppers who abandoned their carts. But for brands just starting out, that audience may be too small to have much of an impact.
Courtney Glasser said it's better to start by targeting based on audience and engagement. "When we first started using ads, I was just retargeting people that were on our site, and then I started to narrow it down as we had a bigger audience," she said.
"If your Instagram posts are getting a lot of visibility and people are engaging, you might want to retarget your ads to people who have DMed you or liked your posts," she added.
To cut costs, it can also be worth looking into less popular platforms, such as Pinterest, that attract your target audience. "Pinterest is where we see the strongest ROI for the lowest cost," she said.
Look for ways to share more about your brand
Not all customer touch points are created equal, according to Karasin. Blasting the same messaging about your brand to every corner of the internet is the wrong approach, he said, because it does nothing to deepen the relationship with the customer.
"Now that consumers are more savvy about internet marketing, they think, 'It doesn't matter if I see this brand in 20 different places, that just means they're blowing a bunch of money,'" he said.
Instead, he recommends finding ways to educate customers or build more trust through remarketing.
For example, when working with a real-estate client, Karasin launched a remarketing campaign using YouTube and TikTok videos to showcase how the agent marketed properties in the area and the amount they sold for. The agent was able to recapture 19 clients over a six-month period, resulting in an additional $400,000 in commissions, Karasin said. The campaign cost $1,500.
The Glassers agreed that showing new aspects of their brand to customers is an effective strategy when remarketing. For instance, when a shopper abandons their cart, they don't serve them ads featuring the same product they were considering but instead show them ads for new seasonal products.
Watch the performance data and adjust
Lindsay Glasser said successful remarketing is a trial-and-error process.
"If you're wanting to start running remarketing ads, have a few different types of content and a few different kinds of audiences and see what's working and what's not," she said. These ads can cost as little as $5 a day, Courtney Glasser said.
"If you see that something's doing well, it's OK to take a little bit of a risk and add a little bit more money," Lindsay Glasser said.
To monitor ad performance effectively, Karasin suggested that nontechnical business owners get support in setting up their pixels and attribution tracking.
"Don't screw up the attribution setup — otherwise, you're just going to get bad data and then you're going to either not see the value of what you're doing or overvalue what it is you're doing," he said.