I moved house recently. In the process I experienced a beautiful double whammy of online ads from a single company. The process was simple, yet none of their competitors were doing it.
As part of moving house, we wanted to have the carpets professionally cleaned before the new owners moved in. To find a carpet cleaning company, I did what everyone else does nowadays – I searched on Google for “carpet cleaning Hamilton”.
I read the ads and clicked one. I also scrolled further down the search results page and looked at the organic results, clicking on a couple of sites to compare.
And then I did what so many of us do … I got interrupted. I don’t remember if it was for dinner, or to help my children with something, or for some other reason. But even though I wanted a quote I didn’t phone any of the companies (it was after hours so I had decided not to phone) and I didn’t fill in a form to request a quote. The interruption took me away from the immediacy of taking action and changed it to something I would need to do later when I remembered.
The next day while sitting on the couch, scrolling through Facebook, an advert appeared for “Carpet Cleaning” with a button: “Get Quote”.
It was a simple advert, nothing profound. Just a simple photo of a carpet cleaning machine, a short blurb and the “Get Quote” button drawing me in.
I clicked the button and was presented with a simple form to request the quote. Within one minute the quote was requested. This simple advert had moved me from having “get carpet cleaning quotes” on the backburner that I needed to get back to, to instead having it ticked off my list.
How did it work? It was a simple double whammy approach of using both Google Ads and Facebook ads together, to greatly increase the impact of the campaigns.
In this case it started with a Google search for the service I was interested in. I then clicked their ad or their listing in the search results, which took me to the company’s site.
Because I had now visited their website, the company was able to show “remarketing” ads to me on Facebook and Instagram. (Remarketing is the process of showing ads specifically to people who have visited your website).
This remarketing ad is what I saw the next day. The power of remarketing is that it captures people right when they’re hot in the buyer journey. Once I have filled in the quote request form on the website, I will then be excluded from seeing future ads for that campaign – after all there is no point telling me to request a quote when I already have.
This the power of remarketing.
The length of time that you should remarket to someone depends on the length of your buying cycle. If I’m searching for carpet cleaning, it’s likely I want carpet cleaning within the next few weeks. There will be no point showing the ads to me for the next six months, as I will be well beyond needing carpet cleaning by that time. But for companies with a much longer buying cycle, for example house building companies, or for companies selling a unique product where they need to educate and persuade their target market, it can make a lot of sense to show remarketing ads to people for much longer.
Whether or not you’re running Google Ads already, we can help you take advantage of the double whammy effect by using both Google, Facebook and Instagram remarketing together to remind your target customers to take action. Just contact us to discuss how we can make this work for you.
