Retargeting, also called remarketing, is a way to build awareness for your brand and drive clicks to your website. It’s often thought of as a B2C-first tactic because of it’s ability to drive repeat purchases or bring back abandoned visitors, but retargeting is a powerful tool for B2B marketers as well.

Over the last year, Bizible has been retargeting for an enterprise SaaS product, driving leads, and ultimately, revenue. In collaboration with RingLead, we developed an ebook on B2B lead generation, and here are some best practices from the ebook.

1. Segment Visitors By Funnel Stage

Common retargeting platforms such as Adroll or Google enable you to show ads and messages to visitors based on specific pages/sections they viewed.

Using information on page visits, you can estimate the funnel stage of each of yours visitor, and then offer appropriate content that pulls them through the funnel. This is how you can create new form submissions with increasing value.

It’s simply about aligning content and offers to each stage.

2. Use Industry Targeting And Test Date Ranges

Relevant messages matter and writing ads that are industry specific can have click through rates (CTR) that were 20 – 60 percent higher than the average content ads. Retargeting is no different. Make it custom. Think about the pages users are visiting and make the ads shine.

Another consideration is recency, or when the user last visited the URLs in your retargeting campaign. Most platforms allow you to specify an end date for the ads. Definitely do this and test different options, such as 0 – 7 days or 0 – 30 days.

Since you pay based on a CPM model, serving ads too long from a user’s visit will be less effective and not worth the cost.

3. Use Cross Channel Retargeting And Optimize For Mobile

With more than 50 percent of Facebook and Twitter traffic coming from mobile, a cross channel approachand often mobile first) is a reality that’s not going to change.

2015 is the year of mobile for B2B and retargeting is no different. Make sure your landing pages and messages:

  • Do not truncate on mobile
  • Are responsive to display accurately on any device
  • Support mobile

Speaking of cross-channel, consider running different messages on different web properties. For example, Adroll can run across Facebook, Twitter, and display while the Google Display Network’s retargeting ads ensure frequency and impression share to drive action.

4. Combine Account And Time-Based Retargeting

Depending on the stage of your company, goals, and traffic, you may consider advanced company-based and/or time-based retargeting with enterprise B2B retargeting platforms like Bizo (recently bought by LinkedIn) and DemandBase.

5. Use Email Addresses When Running Retargeting

If you are only retargeting web visitors, you’re missing out on a great opportunity: Facebook Custom Audiences. Facebook Custom Audiences makes it easy to run Facebook ads to specific users based on their email address.

B2B contacts can have an average 12 – 15 percent match rate on Facebook, since many Facebook users do not list their work email address. It’s not great, but when you have thousands of email addresses, it can add up to a sizeable opportunity.

One common reason for retargeting based on email address is to specifically target people in funnel stages. Export your leads, MQL, opportunities, and free trials and deliver a custom message designed to bring them into the next stage, without any need for web visit correlation. Services like GoChime can auto update your custom audience list based on people in your marketing automation system.

Helpful tools can automatically tag and track your remarketing efforts directly in Salesforce to make it easy to see how it drives leads, and ultimately, revenue.

Get more lessons on B2B lead generation in the free ebook.