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Start With Retargeting: How to Weave Programmatic Into Your Search and Social Strategies

We've talked about the advertising lifecycle for Direct-to-Consumer brands and how they begin with search and social and what comes after that - you can read our article on it here - but today we're taking a deeper look at the specifics. Specifically, where do you start if you're doing search and social and need to move into other formats, but don't have the budgets to move the needle with a large programmatic buy, or if you're at the stage of growth where you still have to focus on direct response marketing?


The High Cost of Moving the Needle

Branding is great, but for many brands early in their marketing journey, it's a luxury they can't afford - video ads are expensive and time-consuming to create, and it's difficult to justify spending a hundred thousand dollars on media to fill the top of the funnel when there's still low-hanging fruit and a largely untapped audience who can be directly influenced into a sale at the consideration step. This is part of what makes search and social such a great fit for D2C brands starting their marketing journeys - it's easy to understand how and why they work, and easy to measure their immediate impact. But at some point, you have to branch out beyond those platforms - so where do you start?


This is a tough challenge, and it can be really expensive if you aren't prepared for it. Programmatic is a powerful tool, and the best next step, but actually making a dent with programmatic requires large budgets - you need time for the media to run, you need time and impressions, clicks, and purchases to optimize delivery, you need time to collect consumer insight. And in this case all that "time" really means "impressions and money," and while programmatic also gives you a powerful tool for building awareness, the value of that awareness can be difficult to measure. If you don't have the luxury of wondering whether your buy is providing value, or if you just have a small budget generally, how do you make good use of programmatic?


Effective Remarketing

One great place to start is retargeting: While prospecting tends to be very expensive, providing awareness benefits that are difficult to measure, retargeting has a clear and immediate value - existing customers and consumers who have already visited your site are the most likely to come back, and you can close sales by chasing down shoppers who left abandoned carts on your site. Buying media for retargeting is straightforward and doesn't require buying expensive third-party data, and allows you to immediately put your site and first-party data to use.


The best part is that this is incredibly easy to implement - all you need is a tracking pixel on your site - and from there you're good to go. You'll need creative assets for it, and you'll need a landing page for your ads, but your strategy doesn't have to go much deeper than that. A savvy programmatic partner can help you build or optimize those and help ensure you have higher click-to-conversion rates as well as help build out a measurement strategy for view-through attribution.


Then What?

Of course, if you want to go deeper, there are tons of options - dynamic creative with viewed products is a great next step, and once you've started tracking site visitors for retargeting you can start using that data for more than just retargeting. Specifically, you can start looking at who's visiting your site, and using that data to both build lookalike models for prospecting and using the insight gleaned to build marketing and customer strategies. Building new creative and messaging strategies around top-selling products and the demographics and interests of your site visitors can lead to the kind of varied and nuanced messaging which can increase performance down the line while helping you build a stronger brand identity.


Interested in taking the first step on your path into programmatic and looking for a partner who can help build a strong retargeting strategy? Drop us a note in our Contact form and let us know!

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