Quality Leads at Scale: What Lead-Gen Marketers Need to Get Right with Retargeting
Criteo’s Managing Director of Mid-Market Americas, Jessica Breslav, examines, how marketers can best leverage retargeting to convert traffic into leads, and the four essential components to turn those leads into customersÂ
While programmatic retargeting has been a lucrative marketing solution in e-commerce for years, smart B2B and lead generation marketers are also leveraging retargeting to generate leads at scale. Longer buying cycles require retargeting to stay top of mind and drive users down the funnel to conversion.
The longer a business’ conversion/sales cycle, the more crucial retargeting becomes. If you aren’t using programmatic retargeting to keep your product top of mind during the exploratory phase, you’re missing a key component of the marketing mix that can convert traffic into leads.
Retargeting doesn’t end when the lead is submitted. Once a lead is qualified, retargeting can help nurture the lead on the path to conversion. This additional touch point can complement internal sales efforts and be a differentiator to acquiring new customers. User evaluation and understanding of where a user is in the funnel allows for retargeting and cutting through the clutter of unqualified users, while pushing those with high intent down the funnel.
In order to drive traffic into leads, and leads into customers, there are four things that marketers need to be mindful of:
Drive Lead Volume at Scale, While Maintaining Quality
The first step to ensure lead quality is removing poor leads during the initial lead flow. Whether it’s valuing business email addresses over personal email addresses, eliminating all leads with the word “test†in the form, or measuring the time spent on the website, removing leads from this type of initial lead scoring can filter out unqualified users from the beginning.
The benefits of initial lead scoring are two-fold. First, you’re not wasting time or money attempting to convert the wrong prospects. Second, you give valuable data to your programmatic machine learning algorithms so they look for more users who display similar behavior and intent signals for higher quality leads.
Once you’ve converted the lead into a customer, it’s critical to have a feedback loop in place to further inform your retargeting campaigns. Using online and offline conversion data helps provide additional information to your machine learning models to seek out users who exhibit similar traits to your best customers. By only counting leads that meet minimum standards as actual conversions, you can optimize the campaign toward quality leads.
Be Where Your Prospects Are
Users don’t think about their browsing activities as separate experiences, so your retargeting campaigns should flow from one channel to the next to create a cohesive experience for the user.. Whether a prospect or lead is checking the weather or catching up with friends on Facebook, segmenting one user into two campaigns – one for web display, one for Facebook – is inefficient and can lead to overserving and a poor user experience.
Mixing your retargeting display efforts across the web, adding Facebook and Native inventory in one campaign brings a holistic approach and allows you to serve banners wherever your potential customers spend their time.
One User, Multiple Devices
The same logic applies to the device as well. Today’s users expect a streamlined experience from desktop to mobile to tablet, so the ability to recognize a user across multiple devices is crucial. Traditionally, click-through rates for lead generation have been higher on mobile, but the quality of leads is better on the desktop. Campaigns should be set up to optimize toward devices where high-quality leads are coming from without ignoring the part other devices (typically mobile and tablet) play in the path to conversion.
Targeting Your Best Prospects
Utilizing your targeted accounts and CRM data can help prioritize retargeting campaigns so you focus your time and budgets on your best prospects. Executing this while meeting today’s privacy laws can be tricky, but removing all PII (personally identifiable information) should always be a part of your strategy.
While B2B and lead generation isn’t always the first thought that comes to mind when you hear “retargeting,†it’s an effective method of serving ads to a highly qualified audience. It can help keep a brand top of mind and create additional opportunities for conversions. By ensuring lead quality, mixing retargeting display efforts, streamlining across devices, and targeting best prospects, B2B and lead generation companies can use retargeting to generate quality leads, increase ROI, and recapture lost leads.
This article was originally posted on –
Author
