Facebook Retargeting Strategy

Are you using the right messaging in your ads for your target audiences? If you’re showing consumers the same content whether or not they’ve heard of you before, you may be missing out on sales.

We recommend using a Facebook retargeting campaign to build more traffic and generate more sales.

First-Touch, Traffic Building Campaign

A traffic-building campaign is taking a marketing campaign and pushing it out to an audience that doesn’t know you, your brand, or your business.

We call this a “first touch ad.” This is your introduction to the consumer and first step in your Facebook retargeting strategy. Ideally, your customer will click the ad, visit your landing page or website, and be pixeled by Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or another marketing platform.

The idea of a Facebook traffic-building campaign is to drive a ton of traffic to your website that you don’t necessarily expect to actually convert. Sometimes they do, and that’s nice, but the focus at this stage is really building an audience.

Once they visit your website, they’re now in your Facebook remarketing network. Depending on the ad platform you’re using, a new customer could be in that network for up to 580 days.

The first touch should be softer, talk about the benefits of your business, and try and get them interested. If they don’t know who you are and they don’t trust you, they probably aren’t going to buy from you yet.

First-touch calls to action are good, such as “check out this product,” or “learn about us,” but you’re not really trying to give them the hard sell at this point.

Second-Touch, Retargeting Campaign

So where do you go after that first touch? You guessed it, a second touch retargeting campaign.

It’s important that the content of the second touch ad be different from that of the first touch. Otherwise, the consumer just ends up seeing more and more of the same without improved messaging.

In the second touch, they’ve already been introduced to your brand, which means you can be a little more direct.

If you think of a traditional car salesman’s process, they start with establishing rapport, building trust, and getting to know the customer. Eventually they’ll move over to showing off the cars. Then, they transition to trying to sell.

Lastly, they try to get the customer into the room to talk about pricing, so they can transition from selling to closing. That’s the idea behind the second touch ad. You don’t necessarily want to go for a hard sell, but you move them towards closing.

If you’re not sure how to set up your Facebook retargeting campaign, check out our Introduction to Facebook course at the ParaCore Academy or watch this video for a brief overview.

Vary Content in Your Facebook Retargeting Strategy

If you use the same ads for every touch, you’re missing the opportunity to use stronger language with more familiar customers, and the customer is seeing only one ad and one message for your company.

One idea is to exclude your second touch customers from your first touch ads. This way the customer sees the first touch, gets in your Facebook retargeting campaign, then moves on to a more focused level of advertising. You can keep this going through third touch, fourth touch, and so on. This allows you to take the customer through a story. They’ll connect with your brand more and more until they finally buy.

Be careful to not set a budget that’s too big for a small retargeting audience. If the budget is too big, your ad frequency will be far too high and annoy your audience.

The more you tailor your ad campaign to each consumer, the more successful the marketing will be. Facebook retargeting campaigns are one of the best ways to turn curious clickers into dedicated customers.