If you thought retargeting was only good for winning back customers who had abandoned their shopping carts, think again.

Retargeting is now at the top, or close to the top, of the sales funnel. Savvy marketers are using it for brand awareness, social engagement, customer retention and driving sales.

In fact, in a 2014 Marin Software survey of 233 enterprise marketers, 88 per cent said that they were already using retargeting to re-engage with users who didn’t convert or purchase on their initial visits.

But, what is retargeting?

Retargeting is a strategy that lets advertisers serve online ads to visitors who have previously visited their website.

It works equally as well for B2B and B2C marketing strategies.

According to AdRoll – one of the largest digital marketing agencies in the US, 71 per cent of marketers spend between 10 and 50 per cent of their display-ad budgets on retargeting.

They also report that 90 per cent of the marketers in their study declared that retargeting performs as well as or better than search, email and other display advertising.

There are three types of retargeting: Site, Social and Mobile.

Site lets you retarget visitors as they view other websites across the web.

Social allows you to reconnect with visitors on Facebook by placing ads in the News Feed and on the right hand side of the page, as well as on Twitter through their tailored audiences.

Mobile presents advertisers the opportunity to retarget desktop visitors as they browse Facebook and Twitter.
Finally, retargeting is one of the few digital tools that allows you to re-engage with the customer across multiple channels regardless of their preferred platform.

So what’s the most effective retargeting combination? According to Marin’s data, the marketers who enjoyed the highest click-through rates were those that simultaneously retargeted on both Facebook and internet browsing.

Whilst both AdRoll and Marin say that marketers’ budgets for retargeting still only account for a small portion of their total ad budgets, this is slowly changing as marketers see an improvement in the ROI – especially with consumers’ increased mobile usage and YouTube viewership.