Retargeting is one of the best ways to encourage prospective customers to visit, and revisit, your website. It’s also called “remarketing,” but whichever term is used, the benefit is the same: it helps spread awareness of your brand. How does it work? The first step, is to have someone visit your website, where they would then receive a Retargeting cookie. Then, the retargeting cookies will place ads strategically on the websites they visit, be it search engines, or social media. Lastly, when they click on the ad, it will bring them back to your website to complete the sale. With B2B, the biggest challenge is visitors, because you need visitors to score sales. In fact, according to AdRoll, 98 percent of visitors leave your site without converting. “Retargeting lets you re-engage those visitors with your ads as they browse across the web,” they note. The outcome: an 85 percent increase in return conversions! Throughout this post, we will explore the benefits of retargeting for B2B companies, how it helps generate leads and how it helps you target your audience for optimal return conversion. Let’s dive in! Why Is Retargeting Effective? Yes, retargeting is effective—but why? Well, first off, it’s a cost-effective way to engage potential customers, or even bring them back to your site. Also, retargeting for B2B helps to sustain brand awareness, which is essential for B2B buyer’s longer buying cycles. “Remarketing (or retargeting!) is the process of bringing previous visitors back to your website to finish the conversion process – otherwise known in B2B as filling out a form,” explains Bob Brown of SEMRush. “Research shows remarketing converts up to 50 percent traffic, while search campaigns convert roughly 2 percent.” One way B2B marketers can capitalize on this knowledge is to maximize the business model they’re working with. To explain, retargeting is especially beneficial if you offer free trials, which eliminate risk and generate sign-ups for your brand right away. Retargeting those that have signed up for your free trial will remind them to take the steps necessary to enroll into the paid service that you offer. One thing to keep in mind—customers do not like seeing ads for services or products they have already purchased. It’s essential to ensure you are not using retargeting ads to draw customers back to sign up for a free trial which they have already signed up for, or to purchase something they have already purchased. You can still advertise to existing customers, but you must do so in a way that adds value to your ad. One way, would be suggesting a paid product to those with the free trial, such as an upsell through a freemium product. How Does Retargeting Benefit B2B Companies? Using retargeting allows you to reconnect with past visitors, providing value in multiple ways. It helps to bring awareness to your brand. We have all heard that you need to repeat something three times before you are most likely to remember it. The same goes for your prospects. By reminding them of your brand, and services, or products, and why its relevant to their needs, they’re more likely to buy from you, as a study by Nielsen confirmed, consumers tend to buy from familiar brands that they’ve had positive associations with. Reconnecting with your target audience increases engagement, no matter where the prospect is within the buying cycle. “Take care to ensure the right message to your audience, based on what they have viewed, or perhaps missed, or did not finalize,” explains Gary Johnson, a digital marketer at Writemyx and Origin Writings. “The trick to winning over customers is using branding and engagement to your advantage, by using retargeting to create a message to previous visitors, which have the highest intent to buy, such as those that have placed an item into their cart but left before finalizing the transaction.” How Does Retargeting Generate B2B Leads? With B2B, the cycle for sales is usually longer than those of consumer goods. Customers are more likely to thoroughly research all options diligently—we call these “tire-kickers” as they’re testing the waters to see which product suits their needs best. Amanda Hammer, a marketing strategist at 1Day2Write, notes, “Retargeting keeps your customers reminded of your brand while they are looking at your competition, which helps keep awareness, and thus generate leads. It also helps you nurture those leads by keeping them engaged. One way to do this is through email retargeting campaigns. Add a retargeting code into the HTML or into your email signature. In turn, anyone who opens your email will start seeing your ads while they are browsing the web”. How Can Retargeting Help You Reach Your Target Audience? Every visitor to your site is a candidate for retargeting, although financially, it may not make sense to target every visitor. Companies often focus their resources on those that best align with business goals, the goal often being intent to purchase. An easy way to do this, is targeting those customers who start the sign-up process for a free trial or even the paid version of your solution—but leave before finalizing their transaction. Retargeting would remind them of that abandonment, and prompt them to return to your site, to complete the desired action. Another important aspect for remarketing campaigns, is to uncover where your targets spend their time when they’re online. Are they spending time at competitors’ websites? Are they on social media? Using social media to your advantage is highly effective because of how likely people are to openly share information or discuss brands. Many people assume retargeting is only for ecommerce, however, there are a multitude of ways it can be used to help B2B companies with their goals, increasing brand awareness, and become familiar to customers, increasing traffic to their sites, which would increase leads, conversions and then, of course, revenue! It may take some time for them to come back to finalize their purchase, so that is why retargeting is an effective way of reminding customers of the services and products that you offer. Author’s Bio: Adelina Benson works as an email marketer and a writer at Academic Brits. She enjoys developing marketing strategies, teaching people on proper business email etiquette and helping businesses develop cheap marketing strategies for their social media.