The Digital Age has granted us with some amazing tools that allow us to do some amazing things. If you are anything like me, you are constantly looking at how you can learn new skills that will allow your business to hit your intended target audience. Retargeting has to be one of the best tools in any digital marketers arsenal, yet most entrepreneurs and business owners in the Caribbean have never heard of it or if they did, don’t know what it is.

So let us address the elephant in the room right away. What the heck is Retargeting?

You may have heard of the terms Retargeting & Remarketing and wondered or assumed they were the same thing. For the best breakdown I have seen on the 2 terms, check this article from Rejoiner out (Retargeting vs Remarketing).

The two terms refer to different marketing actions. While both refer to marketing to the same people more than once. Retargeting is a division of Remarketing and deals with the targeting of web traffic. Remarketing is the act of marketing to the same people more than once. You could do that through offline methods, phone calls, emails and social media.

Neil Patel made a nice chart that gives you a bit of a visual that will help you understand the difference.

Today though, I just want to highlight Retargeting and stress that more businesses in the Caribbean, start using this as apart of their marketing.

Why is Retargeting so important? Well, the experts say about 98% of web traffic does not convert. People leave your website without having purchased any of your products or done so much as left an email address.

How are we supposed to find success or stay top of mind, in order to get in front of those visitors who expressed interest in our brands by taking the time to visit our website?

Have you ever visit those websites that give you a disclaimer about the cookies? These websites use a piece of technology called Pixels. This leaves a tracking Cookie in all of your website’s visitors browsers, that way you can now market to them at a later date.

The 4 main pixels used that essentially stretch across the internet are Facebook Pixels, Google Pixels, Twitter Pixels and Taboola.

You can use a tool called Google Tag Manager to manage all of your pixels and ad spend to distribute to each of these platforms.

Retargeting allows you to market to those site visitors who have taken specific actions on your website. This will allow your ads to be shown to warm traffic that allows for a much higher conversion rate than simply doing what ALL Caribbean businesses do, make a flyer, post it to Facebook and hit “Boost Post”.

Trust me, folks, if you have never used Facebook Ad Manager and created audiences using Pixel data, you are definitely wasting your ad dollars.

One of the key scenarios to retarget people is the “Abandon Cart” situation. Those people who add your products to their cart and leave before checking out. Life happens and sometimes we get distracted. This is a perfect time to retarget those people who have taken the action to “add to cart” and not checked out and giving them an ad that reminds them to check out. You can even throw in a discount code to create some immediacy.

Another situation that is popular for retargeting that I use a lot is for my blogs. I have set up a pixel on my blog pages so that when I create a new post, I can send out an ad that targets people who have visited my blog in the past and have that show up for them so they can view it.

When you place your wonderfully crafted flyers and posts on Facebook and hit boost. If you have not configured a Facebook Pixel on your website and created an audience with that data, you are boosting a post to people who are cold traffic and probably are seeing your brand for the very first time.

You can take the situation a step further and retarget those who have expressed interest in your competitors. That’s where things get serious lol.

You can even go up another level by using something called “Lookalike Audiences”, that take the data from your pixels and look for other users on the specified platform that have similar characteristics to those already in your Pixel Pool. Crazy huh.

So while this blog is to introduce you to the concept of retargeting so you can go down the rabbit hole and learn all about it, the question you are probably asking yourself is…If this is sooooo amazing, why aren’t more businesses and entrepreneurs doing this in the Caribbean?

Well…I am glad you asked. As a country, we have less than 3000 registered websites in Trinidad & Tobago. I am going to do some more homework and find out how many registered domains we have in the Caribbean as I’m sure you are curious.

Businesses are not doing this locally because most of them don’t have websites. In order for this to work, you need to have a website and have your pixels installed on your website so that your Pixels can tag the site visitors and store it in their databases.

So far those who still think a website is just merely for showcasing their products or business information on a statice website, you are gravely mistaken.

Remember, whether you choose to take advantage of digital strategies like Retargeting is completely up to you. However, you will lose the battle online to anybody who is employing these strategies and they will be able to syphon clients away from you.

I hope I have tickled your fancy enough to start doing your homework on how you can add this strategy to your digital marketing plans. I will be sure to have a workshop on this in the near future, walking you through the behind the scenes of setting up your pixels, audience and showing you how it works.

So let me know in the comments below, will you be looking to add Retargeting to your marketing plans?

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