Making the Most of Mobile With Retargeting

by Mary C Long 

If you don’t have a distinct marketing strategy for mobile, or if you’re still focusing on blogging to attract your target audience, you’re missing the boat.

​Mobile isn’t just a slice of the pie for you to focus on, it’s overtaken Apple (pie) as the hometown favorite – and you need to get creative around how you’re cooking it. Retargeting might be the spice you’re looking for. ​

Regardless of any other metric, mobile is THE way your target audience is connecting with your brand and with each other. You can slice it up by location, demographics, previous purchase behaviors, but all roads lead back to accessing that segment (whomever it may be) via mobile. The good news is, we know this already. The bad news? According to a recent survey by refer-a-friend software provider, Extole, if you’re B2C, you’re competing against the likes of Amazon. And losing: 

Worse news, mobile users are increasingly showrooming before buying: 

• More than 75% of consumers compare prices on mobile while browsing in-store.
• Slightly more people browse in-store and later buy a product online from the same retailer than from a different retailer. But, if they browse in-store and then buy later on a smartphone, more consumers buy from a different retailer than where they browsed.
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And even if you’re not B2C, you likely have some stiff competition as this point. So you not only need to get in on the mobile game with a quickness, you need to step up those efforts and get in front of your audience to tag them with those ten or so touchpoints. And that’s where retargeting comes in. 

What is retargeting? Buzzstarter sums it up nicely, “turning browsers into buyers by tracking your visitors and then advertising to them across the web.”  

And retargeting can help you “maximize your investment by advertising to the segment most likely to convert,” assuming the site you’re using offers a content and distribution framework beyond retargeting, that is. Try sorting THAT out on your own! 

However you accomplish it, assuming you do, you’ll be top of mind instead of Amazon or whatever “other” you’re competing against. Hands down. 

But wait, you mentioned blogging? 

Blogging is still important for SEO, and you do want to provide thought leadership to attract your audience to your site initially and kick off the ability to retarget them once they leave – so you’ll want to keep that up. But you’ll also want to write your posts in shorter bits – as short as possible to get your point across, really. Yes, longer posts are important as well, and offer more SEO juice, but even those need to be broken into digestible bits. 

Here’s why: Attention spans continue to decrease and mobile users are impatient. They skim your words, so you need to make it easy for them to do so. Posts that are long and aren’t easily skimmed are left. And your reader won’t likely return to read more, regardless of how fantastic your content is.
What does blogging have to do with retargeting? 

Everything. After you’ve become the go-to in the mind of your retargeted audience and they revisit your site, beyond making it wonderfully accessible for mobile (which will soon be table stakes as well), you’ll want to stand out with fantastic products and words of wisdom that sing.  

You’ll want your visitor to know they’ll not only have a fantastically mobile-optimized experience on your site, but that they’ll also find all the relevant info they could ask for about your industry while there, so they’ll be back for more, even when you’re NOT following them around the web. And they’ll tell their friends about it too.  

So level up with retargeting and bring blogging along for the ride, and you’ll be both remembered and rewarded for it.  

This post originally appeared on Business2Community 

IMAGE CREDIT: KRYSTAL GRAY