Tips for Effectively Retargeting Customers Using Instagram

You might know how to retarget your customer on Facebook, but do you understand the best practices for Instagram retargeting?

Among the top frustrations for online marketers is losing potential customers amidst the purchase funnel. The internet is undoubtedly a distracting place, and potential customers visiting your site may leave items in their carts. This leads to inevitably forgetting to complete the purchase process. The only way to track such customer engagement milestones and nudge them towards completing their purchase actions is through retargeting.

Instagram, being a powerfully visual, youthful, and inspirational platform, is a great place to try retargeting if your audience is there. But what is retargeting? What does it entail? Read on to find out.

What is Retargeting?

The current social media marketing landscape involves putting out good content, be it engaging photos with witty captions, blog posts, or videos. While you might predict the best times and days to upload your Instagram posts, you can’t be sure if you are reaching an interested audience or shouting into the void. With the current nature of saturated social media marketing, retargeting ads enable digital marketers to maximize the power of Instagram and other social media platforms.

Also known as remarketing, retargeting is an effective method of digital advertising where potential customers are targeted with specific ads crafted from their online behaviors. Simply put, retargeting turns online “window shoppers” into real customers for your business. Retargeting ads enable marketers to engage and potentially convert Instagram audiences who already know their products.

You can retarget followers who have already clicked on previous ads, visited your website, or taken part in your email marketing database. This gives you the leverage to tailor your marketing message and images better. Enabling you to attract your audience and improve your return on ad spending. Retargeting ads are reminder ads to elicit more sales from the dozens of already implemented leads and audiences. That said, below are some steps and useful tips to retarget your Instagram followers effectively.

Steps to Retargeting using Instagram

Step One: Describe the Success of Your Retargeting Ads

A successful marketing strategy should begin with well-outlined goals. As such, your retargeting goals, if done correctly, should boost your visibility and provide convincing repetition so customers who fell off in the purchase funnel convert. Some of the goals of retargeting include;

• Promote your blog content and optimize for more traffic or cost per click
• Grow your email list and optimize for more leads or cost per lead
• Promote your products and services
• Optimize for more click-through-rates
• Promote previous customer testimonials, reviews, and social proof

While Instagram retargeting is beneficial at any stage in the sales funnel, you should prioritize your retargeting efforts to those at the top. The majority of online shoppers won’t make purchases off an ad. Therefore, consider going deeper by retargeting starting at your blog content to engage potential customers with no intention of making purchases yet. Promoting ads at the top of the funnel is best for reaching potential customers who need little additional information before making a purchase.

Providing entertaining and educational content in your retargeting marketing campaign eliminates the risks of being too salesy. You provide a positive brand touchpoint that increases customer awareness and trust without the “Buy!” language. It is a perfect opportunity to convert mere website visitors into subscribers, either by clicking on the blog or ads optimized for lead generation. They will have already fallen into the funnel, and you can continue marketing to them in the future.

Step Two: Track Visitors with Facebook Pixel

To launch your retargeting campaign effectively, you should target a specific audience. To achieve this, you should define what this audience entails, which is where Facebook Pixel visitor tracker comes into play. You can check out these simple steps to add a Facebook Pixel to your website.

If you run multiple Instagram accounts, ensure that you are logged in to the correct account that corresponds with the website that you want to implement Instagram retargeting ads.

Step Three: Create a Custom Audience

Custom audience entails the group of audience you intend to retarget your ads to. With the help of Facebook Pixels, you can form your custom audience based on the website activity, custom list from your email, CRM, user IDs, or a spreadsheet of phone numbers. Create these audiences based on the specific actions that you want them to take from your ad.

Some potential audience includes prior customers, people who have searched for your website, those who haven’t completed transactions on your website or repeat visitors. After segmenting the audience, proceed and create retargeting ads that align with the expectations of each audience.

For instance, if you are creating an Instagram ad to market a specific product, target users who have checked out the product’s page within the last month or so. Similarly, if you are creating a retargeting ad to promote a new software or application, target users who have already downloaded your previous release.

Step Four: Design Your Retargeting Campaign

With your goals and audience in place, proceed to create your retargeting ad campaign. Depending on your goals, you can create campaigns for increased website clicks, conversions, more video views, or more app installations. You should also set your budget, advertising schedule, and fill in the custom audience created in the previous step.

With all these sets, add the creative assets of the ad. This is similar to creating an Instagram ad, as you will have to upload an image/video, specify target URL, caption, and preferred call to action. Once everything is set, you can launch the retargeting ad.

Tips to Improve Retargeting Ad Campaign

As mentioned, retargeting is an effective strategy that digital marketers should leverage to reduce the percentage of shoppers visiting their stores and leaving without completing purchases. Retargeting fits the old marketing “Rule of Seven.” These rules state that prospective buyers should hear or see a marketing message seven times before making a buying decision. That said, below are the tips you can use to improve the effectiveness of your retargeting ad campaign.

1. Understand the buyer journey

Getting to know the buyer journey or cycle is crucial when applying your retargeting campaign. The buyer journey is just like the sales funnel, as it begins with more customers in the awareness stage at the top and ends with few people in the conversion stage at the bottom.

Retargeting is aimed at capturing more customers along the funnel. However, if you aren’t cautious, you will reduce the conversion rates from the cycle. Don’t allow your retargeting campaigns to run along on their own. Remember that this is about showing ads to the right audience at the right time.

2. Curate your target audience

Most brands make the mistake of targeting every website visitor with their retargeting campaigns. While you might be thinking that you are broadening your audience, this approach is not that effective. Note that different customers visit your website for different reasons. Besides, they visit different pages and represent varying buyer intents.

That said, the key to succeeding in retargeting your Instagram followers is matching your ads to individual shopper intents. For instance, if you are an ecommerce website and someone visits your website looking for baseball caps, ensure that you segment such visitors into a category labeled “Baseball caps.” This will enable you to create hyper-focused ads to potential customers.

3. Watch your advertising frequency

If you are well-versed with online marketing, you understand the importance of timing your Instagram posting strategy. When running your retargeting ads campaign, keep in mind that the ad frequency can have a negative impact on buyer emotions.

Running a heavy ad frequency can change a potential client’s outlook. Depending on many factors, your ad can be intrusive, cause annoyance, or make some customers agitated with your brand. This will affect both current and future sales. That said, implement an ad frequency limit on your retargeting campaign for effectiveness.

4. Leverage the use of dynamic creative ads

You might have previously experimented with the use of dynamic product ads on various marketing platforms. However, you should try dynamic creative ads for your retargeting campaign. Dynamic creative ads are incredible advertising tools as they eliminate the guesswork from your advertising copy.

With this tool, you can load several images, videos, headlines, description variations, calls to action, and more. The tool will then test and automatically optimize the best combination for use. Note that dynamic creative ads work best with traffic, app installation, and conversions campaigns. As such, consider using them to target customers at the middle or bottom of the sales funnel.

5. Embrace the emotional element of advertising

It is a fact that most intelligent buyers act rationally. While this is not true for all buyers, the emotional side affects how a majority of buyers make purchases. Outlining a list of unique product features may act on the rationale of some users but will not affect the emotional buyers. The emotional element of buyers does not care about product features but gains satisfaction from imagining or seeing the benefits of the product. The Coca-Cola Super Bowl advert is a great example of how brands can embrace a potential buyer’s emotions to their advantage.

Bottom Line

Social media platforms, including Instagram, provide a direct channel that brands can use to reach extremely engaged consumers. Instagrams retargeting campaigns allow you to access one of the largest online audiences. Take advantage of the native Instagram tools, including shares, likes, and comments, to expand your reach.

Instagram users are already engaged while browsing or visiting your website. As such, you should prepare adequately to interact with such prospects through carefully crafted retargeting ads. The ads provide an excellent opportunity to connect more with users and creating awareness of new products and services. The tips outlined above can come in handy when running your retargeting ad campaign.

Leads are the lifeblood of business and social media is a powerhouse opportunity that’s here to stay and one that businesses must learn. In my book, Game Plan for Social Media Lead Generation I’ll help you develop a plan for your business!