Retargeting: The B2B secret weapon for your content marketing

Behind these actions are a wide variety of people – including highly interested prospects who have not yet identified themselves, people who are already in the sales process, and existing customers. Retargeting is the most valuable digital target group for your content marketing – no other will deliver better performance. And not just in marketing, but also in employer branding and partner marketing, for example.

More than 90 percent of all traditional B2B companies have not yet implemented retargeting. These companies are losing valuable prospects every day. Only once retargeting has been implemented can they tag visitors and target them again with campaigns. Would you like to review your current setup? Feel free to schedule a free consultation with one of our experts here.

To answer this question, we need to take a closer look—because not all retargeting is the same. There are three different approaches:

• Website retargeting means reaching website visitors again and must be implemented separately for each advertising platform (LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, etc.). A script provided by the advertising platform is embedded in the website, which sets a cookie when the page is accessed after the user has given their consent via a consent banner or (in the case of Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn) alternatively determines the user’s ID with the respective provider. If the user is recognized at a later point in time based on this cookie or ID, you can deliver relevant advertising campaigns to them. As a result, B2B companies can then reach visitors to their website via many advertising platforms in a wide variety of formats.
• On-platform retargeting means reaching social media users who have had certain touchpoints with you, such as watching a video, following your page, or opening a form. No confirmation of a cookie notice is required for this, as the responsibility initially lies with the respective network. This means that the recognition rate is 100 percent and target groups can be built up much more quickly. In return, reach is only possible on the same platform – i.e., after someone has viewed a video on LinkedIn, they cannot be reached on Google.
• Account-based retargeting: Here, company lists, e.g., from your CRM or generated by IP analyzers such as Salesviewer or Leadinfo, are uploaded to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Based on this data, you can then reach all users registered on LinkedIn who are relevant to you and who work at these companies.

Depending on the platform, retargeting campaigns require a minimum target group size of several hundred to 1,000 people. B2B companies first have to build up these visitor numbers, which is why retargeting can often only be used in a scalable and meaningful way in combination with campaigns to acquire new customers.

B2B companies that have not yet set up retargeting are losing valuable prospects every day. This is because they can only tag visitors and target them again with campaigns once retargeting has been implemented. Would you like to review your current setup? Feel free to contact us for a free expert evaluation.

Many B2B companies lack a workable concept for reaching prospects in a scalable way beyond email and phone calls during the customer journey. Even if they have a well-maintained CRM (which is usually not the case), companies often only know a fraction of the people involved with the customer personally and have their contact details. The other people, who are equally important but unknown to the company, cannot be communicated with at all via traditional channels such as email and telephone.

Retargeting offers the perfect target group for “always on” communication:

• 50-100x higher reach than any newsletter, without the need for double opt-in
• Much higher visibility, as the content does not have to be opened first, as is the case with email
• 100% automated delivery
• Exciting, multimedia content formats
• High ad contact frequency of, for example, once a week is no problem – try that with email or, even better, by phone

With retargeting, you can reach the relevant decision-makers at active companies in your CRM (the so-called “buying center”), as they have usually either visited your website or interacted with your social media content. Alternatively, you can even proactively target all relevant job positions/functions at your existing CRM companies via LinkedIn Matched Audiences (account-based targeting), even if they have not visited your website.

Retargeting is therefore the perfect channel for cross-selling and upselling and can generate attractive additional revenue in the service sector. This is particularly true in periods of low investment, when fewer new machines are being purchased. We would be happy to send you a case study in which we used a retargeting approach for a leading mechanical engineering company to generate over €4 million in potential service revenue with a LinkedIn campaign.

With a small media budget of just a few hundred dollars a month, you can use retargeting campaigns to proactively reach a highly attractive target group that is usually many times larger than your newsletter audience. The unique quality of the target group will significantly increase the relevant reach of your expensively produced content and lead to a noticeable increase in the number of leads.

Depending on the occasion and your goal, you can choose from a wide variety of digital advertising platforms with many attractive content formats, such as:

• LinkedIn (sponsored posts, newsfeed ads)
• Facebook / Instagram (sponsored posts, newsfeed ads, chat)
• Google Display (ads on websites)
• YouTube (content videos and trailers)
• etc.

A wide variety of content formats can be selected to achieve different effects, from trust & brand (testimonials, case studies) to education (webinars, expert articles) to lead generation (lead ads).

A common question is, “Is this allowed under data protection laws?” The answer is “yes” – provided you formulate your privacy policy clearly and implement the cookie notice (the information window that initially informs users about the use of cookies on websites) in such a way that retargeting scripts are only played after the user has confirmed their acceptance. “On-platform retargeting” and “account-based retargeting” are not an issue anyway, because either the data remains on the respective platform (“on-platform retargeting”) or no personal data is transferred at all, only company names (“account-based retargeting”).
In B2C companies, retargeting has been common practice for several years and is used without further discussion – even though case law is significantly stricter in the B2C sector than in the B2B sector. Paradoxically, concerns about its use are generally much higher in the B2B sector.

We work with you to evaluate individual retargeting target group potential and possible complementary content approaches for lead generation for your company.