B2B Companies: Use Retargeting to Find New Clients

Retargeting need not be merely a tactic for B2C companies to reach consumers. Done right, it can be an incredibly effective way to reach future clients, as long as you combine the right retargeting tactics with strong and tailored messaging.

To illustrate the effectiveness of B2B retargeting, I want to call attention to a case study on an insurance client of Centro’s. What this example illustrates is that if you know your audience, pay close attention to the right benchmarks, and are willing to test a number of approaches, retargeting can work very well in a B2B context.

Overview
For this insurance company, Centro ran a two-month campaign whose initial objective was to target small business owners and decision-makers interested in purchasing small business insurance. The primary objective was to increase applications and, in turn, boost its lead generation effort, while recognizing a positive ROI.

We had a few challenges to address out of the gate. First, the client historically had seen a fairly long pathway to conversion, including a large number of site visitors who would start, but not complete, the application for insurance. They held us to a relatively challenging CPA benchmark. Since this was the very first Centro campaign for the client, we had no historical data to use in for campaign optimization.

Strategy
Setting up the insurance company’s first campaign with Centro meant we were to build a user pool to increase the scale we’d get with retargeting small business owners. We also tested multiple data and content partners right out of the gate to improve efficiency, gain insights and increase scale. Specific campaign approaches included:

• Optimizing predictive targeting toward a CPC goal, using Centro DSP’s auto-optimization tool as more site traffic helped build the retargeting pool.
• Bidding aggressively on retargeting tactics to win as many impressions as possible. This was especially effective in retargeting to “App Starters,” or users that abandoned the application for insurance before completion.
• Testing a small business audience segment from DataLogix. Compared performance to similar audiences from BlueKai and eXelate and optimized toward eXelate’s audience, based on high performance.
• Testing contextual targeting to small business content using GrapeShot and Peer39. Optimizing toward Peer39 content based on strong performance.
• Setting up dayparting between 6am-10pm based on higher performance during this block.

Results
Due to Centro DSP’s multiple integrations with data and content providers, and its ability to create tiered retargeting through advanced pixeling strategies, we were able to target application starters more aggressively to come in at about one-half the client's cost-per-action goal, with strong overall numbers.

As a result, the insurance company expanded its retargeting efforts considerably, extending into multiple, specific small business industry campaigns and testing a variety of messages against each audience.

Learn more about retargeting with Centro.