If you’ve ever doom scrolled on your phone while browsing social media, you’ll notice you get served personalized ads.

It makes you feel as if someone is listening to your conversations or tapping into your mic through your smartphone.

This is called digital ad retargeting and the future is looking even more sophisticated than ever.

GDPR Cookies and The Future Of Ads

With iOS14 update and GDPR laws, it’s going to become increasingly more difficult to advertise to new customers. iOS14 added something called ATT (App Tracking Transparency). Now, users are given an option to allow or disallow certain apps from tracking their behavior and activity.

Facebook’s entire business model is based on the back of personalized advertising so when users started to opt-out of tracking, it botched the facebook targeting system making ad campaigns less profitable. It also makes it harder for Facebook to identify conversions. It uses an AI algorithm that learns which types of people are more likely to buy your product or service.

If that wasn’t enough, Google is planning to deprecate cookies inside Google chrome. What does this mean for the future of your advertising campaigns?

You’re going to have a more difficult time measuring the effectiveness of your advertising and reaching your ideal customers. Brands are going to need to look into new opportunities to advertise.

If you’re a brand who sells physical products, you’ll want to pay attention to this next strategy or you could be leaving sales on the table.

Physical To Digital Retargeting

Physical to digital advertising in-stores is where brands with retail locations or displays inside stores can gain a huge edge. Normally digital retargeting works through social media pixels.

Facebook allows you to place an advertising pixel on your website and when people visit it, that pixel fires and collects that customer’s information. You can then re-target them on Facebook and Instagram at a later time.

Because you’ve already built up familiarity with customers with retail store ads, retargeting can potentially have higher conversions rates and is usually much cheaper.

But what you might not know is that you can also target customers who visit physical locations. And physical to digital retargeting doesn’t have the same advertising restrictions as traditional digital marketing campaigns.

Enter geofencing.

Geofencing

Geofencing is a location-based trigger that captures a model device’s ID when a user steps into a virtual boundary setup in a retail store or supermarket. The tech uses RFID, GPS, Wifi, cell data to scan a person’s phone ID and use it at a later time.

So remember how we talked about how it almost feels like someone is listening to your conversations and suggesting you ads?

Well another way customers are getting targeted is by visiting shopping malls and retail stores and stepping into these geofences. By setting up a geofence around a store, brands can tag shoppers’ smartphones when they visit and also get customers to scan QR codes. This gives brands the ability to collect data based on people who have shown interest and re-market to them at a later time.

Customers and businesses aren’t that aware of Geofencing and its capabilities but if they only knew how effective this style of retargeting can be, they’d immediately pay more attention to it.

The Power Of Retargeting Physical To Digital

Competitive Advantage

When running in-store advertising campaigns, you gain a competitive advantage. You can advertise your products in big-chain retailers like Rite Aid, Walgreens, Walmart, Target etc. By having a display setup in these retail locations with major foot traffic, you have an opportunity to make a sale right in the store. The physical ads themselves are dirt cheap and can range anywhere from $200 – $400 depending on the location.

If customers don’t purchase the product, you have a second opportunity to sell to them at a later date.

The reason you gain a competitive advantage over competitors is because very few of them are using this strategy and it’s cheaper.

Your next edge is setting this up inside all YOUR retail locations. It doesn’t cost you anything because it’s your store but it gives you that same opportunity previously mentioned.

Staying Top-Of-Mind

Did you know that 97% of people who visit your site for the first time leave without buying anything?

That means you need to create multiple touchpoints with your customers before they potentially make a purchase.

So using a retargeting strategy like this can help improve the timeliness of your ads by making sure your brand stays top-of-mind. You want to live in their heads rent free as much as you can.

Improved Conversion Rates and Relevance

The next benefit of retargeting is that you can improve your conversion rates.

When a customer visits a shop and gets close to an ad, there’s a good chance it’s relevant towards them. I’ll give you an example with Ray Ban sunglasses.

A customer walks into the store and steps near a display that has oval shaped sunglasses. They spend over 20 minutes at that display trying on oval shaped sunglasses but decide they need more time before they buy.

Later that week, they get on social media seeing the exact pair of sunglasses they tried on and it reminds them how they wanted to buy the sunglasses.

Next they go online and make a purchase through the Ray Ban ecommerce store.

The Future Ads

AI and increasingly strict privacy laws are going to rock the world of advertising. The smartest companies and best brands are going to need to adapt to all of these changes or they’re going to get left behind.

Coming up with creative ways to reach your ideal customers like using Physical To Digital In-store ads is a great way to stay one step ahead of your competitors.

In-store advertising can be affordable and when you pair it with the social media ad services of Animas Marketing, you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve.