Digital Marketing is a very broad term. Lots of things fall under the umbrella of digital marketing- from analytics to social media. The one thing that all these techniques have in common is that they are aimed help companies sell more.
One of the core pillars of digital marketing is Paid Media Advertising (often called PPC or Media Buying). These are the ads that you see in Search Engines, when you’re browsing on your favorite blog, or scrolling through your social media feed. They're kind of like the digital equivalent of a billboard, except instead of displaying your ad to anyone who happens to drive by, you can define who sees your ad based on the user’s demographics, interest profile, or online behaviors.
You can even segment these audiences based on their previous engagement with your brand. This is called remarketing.
This strategy allows us to impact the same consumer multiple times during their customer journey by showing content and/or ads to users who have previously had contact with the brand. Remarketing is hugely important when it comes to facilitating the customer journey and maintaining top of mind for your brand.
Remarketing is made possible by combining analytics and advertising.
When a user visits your website, data about their session is stored in the browser’s cookies. Through tools like Google Tag Manager, we can collect, aggregate, and analyze all the website data.
With these analytics, we can segment your audience based on their historical interactions with the website and deliver ads to them accordingly. This means that instead of everyone seeing the same ad, like the billboard, we can serve end users ads that are specific to where they are in their customer journey. For example, users who visited the website in the past 30 days can receive a branded ad, while users who abandoned their shopping cart before completing the purchase can receive a more product-focused ad.
Most digital advertising platforms, like Google and Facebook Ads, have remarketing capabilities. This means that we can create remarketing campaigns that are user-specific, and platform-agnostic. Since users tend to bounce around between different social networks, ecosystems, and even devices, we can impact them in that reflects their typical online behavior and serve them ads wherever browse.
It typically takes several visits to a website for a user to finally purchase a product or service. Remarketing allows your brand to create multiple touch points along the customer journey. This way, the potential customer will have your brand or product in mind as they travel through the consideration and conversion stages of the online customer journey. This increases the user’s likeliness to shop with your brand, which, after all, is what digital marketing is all about.