Retargeting in B2B marketing — personalizing engagement across the customer journey with ads.
Retargeting isn’t just about re-engaging lost leads. For B2B marketers, it’s about creating meaningful touchpoints across the buyer’s journey, leveraging data and automation to move leads closer to conversion. With long sales cycles and multiple stakeholders, B2B retargeting must deliver precise, personalized, and scalable campaigns to make an impact.
In this guide:
- What is retargeting?
- Why retargeting matters for B2B marketing
- Solving the complexities of B2B retargeting
- How to build better retargeting campaigns in B2B marketing
What is retargeting?
Retargeting is a marketing tactic that re-engages individuals who have previously interacted with your brand but haven’t yet converted. In B2B marketing, where buying decisions often involve diverse stakeholders and long decision-making processes, retargeting helps keep your brand top of mind, nudging prospects toward the next step.
There are several key types of retargeting, each serving different purposes:
Pixel-based retargeting.
This approach uses tracking pixels embedded on a website to identify visitors and serve ads based on their on-site behavior.
Example: An IT director visits your pricing page but doesn’t submit a demo request. Pixel-based retargeting allows you to serve them ads highlighting customer success stories or free consultation offers.
Why it’s effective in B2B: Pixel-based retargeting ensures precise, behavior-driven engagement with prospects who have shown interest.
List-based retargeting.
List-based retargeting relies on uploaded email lists or CRM data to target specific individuals across platforms like LinkedIn or display ads.
Example: A SaaS company uploads a list of healthcare CIOs and delivers ads focused on industry-specific use cases, such as patient data security.
Why it’s effective in B2B: It allows for account-based personalization, so high-value prospects see relevant content.
Social media retargeting.
This method targets prospects on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook based on their previous interactions with your brand.
Example: A procurement officer downloads a whitepaper and later sees ads promoting your webinar on cost-saving strategies.
Why it’s effective in B2B: Social media retargeting reinforces engagement with stakeholders across functions, ensuring your brand stays visible where they spend time.
Email retargeting.
Email retargeting targets users who have engaged with your email campaigns or abandoned an action within the email funnel.
Example: A lead opens your email but doesn’t sign up for the free demo. A follow-up email featuring a case study can drive them closer to conversion.
Why it’s effective in B2B: Email retargeting keeps leads engaged by delivering timely, personalized follow-ups.
Why retargeting matters for B2B marketing.
Challenge 1: Long sales cycles.
B2B sales often take months due to the complexity of decision-making and the need for thorough research.
How retargeting helps:
Retargeting ensures your brand stays visible and relevant throughout the sales cycle, making it an essential part of effective customer acquisition strategies. By delivering consistent, personalized reminders, you can nudge prospects back to your website or encourage them to complete actions like scheduling a demo or downloading additional resources. It also ensures your offering remains top-of-mind during critical evaluation phases, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Challenge 2: Diverse stakeholders.
B2B buying decisions typically involve multiple roles. Each stakeholder has unique priorities and concerns, ranging from financial justification to operational feasibility or marketing alignment.
How retargeting helps:
Retargeting allows you to tailor messaging to each stakeholder’s role and interests. For instance:
- CFOs may see ads emphasizing cost savings, ROI, and overall business value.
- CTOs and CIOs might receive technical case studies or messaging that focuses on system integration and scalability.
- Martech leaders can be targeted with content on how your solution enhances marketing automation, campaign efficiency, or data-driven personalization.
- Procurement officers could see ads highlighting competitive pricing, contract terms, or vendor credibility.
This role-specific targeting ensures every decision-maker feels addressed, improving the chances of a collective decision in your favor. For example, a SaaS company might run a retargeting campaign where CFOs see ROI-focused messaging, while martech leaders receive tailored content about streamlining marketing operations with the platform. This personalized approach helps align decision-making across diverse stakeholders.
Challenge 3: Multichannel journeys.
Prospects interact with your brand across channels like email, social media, and programmatic ads, creating opportunities for inconsistent messaging.
How retargeting helps:
Retargeting aligns messaging across all touchpoints, creating a cohesive experience that helps businesses stay consistent throughout the customer journey. A webinar invitation seen on LinkedIn could be followed by an email reminder, and display ads could reinforce key takeaways. This consistency builds trust and ensures your brand remains top-of-mind throughout the journey.
Solving the complexities of B2B retargeting.
Retargeting in B2B requires a nuanced approach that accounts for the unique challenges of long sales cycles and multi-stakeholder decision-making. Here’s how to overcome these complexities:
Personalization at scale.
Pain point:
In B2B, retargeting must resonate with diverse stakeholders like CFOs, martech leaders, and procurement leads, each with different concerns. Scaling this level of personalization for large accounts is time consuming and resource intensive.
Solution:
- Use audience segmentation to divide stakeholders by behavior, job role, or industry.
- Automate workflows to deliver personalized messages at the right time.
- Generate customized content for retargeting ads, such as cost-saving calculators for CFOs and technical case studies for martech leaders.
Example:
A SaaS provider targets CFOs with ads about cost savings and martech leaders with content on enhancing marketing automation. Segmentation ensures each stakeholder receives relevant messaging, and automation delivers these messages efficiently.
Cross-channel consistency.
Pain point:
Prospects engage with email, LinkedIn ads, programmatic display campaigns, and webinars. Disjointed messaging across these channels disrupts the buyer journey.
Solution:
- Synchronize messaging across email, social media, and display ads to ensure a cohesive experience.
- Create variations of content that maintain a consistent tone while adapting to the specifics of each channel.
- Use tools to orchestrate campaigns across touchpoints, ensuring timing and messaging align.
Example:
A cybersecurity firm retargets CFOs and martech leaders with LinkedIn ads and email campaigns. Consistent messaging ensures that both roles receive aligned content, such as cost savings for CFOs and campaign automation benefits for martech leaders.
Retargeting across the funnel.
Pain point:
Long B2B sales cycles require re-engagement at each funnel stage, from awareness to decision. Stakeholders at different stages need contextually relevant content.
Solution:
- Trigger workflows to deliver content specific to each funnel stage, such as educational resources for awareness-stage leads and ROI calculators for decision-stage prospects.
- Develop content that addresses common objections or barriers for each stage of the buying process.
- Focus on retargeting ads that guide prospects toward key milestones, such as signing up for a demo or attending a webinar.
Example:
A tech company retargets enterprise leads exploring cloud migration. Awareness-stage stakeholders see infographics on migration benefits, while decision-stage leads receive pricing guides. This tailored approach ensures engagement at every stage of the buyer journey.
How to build better retargeting campaigns in B2B marketing.
To maximize the impact of your retargeting efforts, follow these practical steps:
- Define your audience segments: Use data to identify behavioral patterns, job roles, and industries.
- Choose the right channels: Select platforms like LinkedIn, email, or programmatic display ads that align with your audience.
- Create a retargeting workflow: Map out triggers, content types, and delivery timelines for each funnel stage as part of your broader digital marketing strategy.
- Test and refine: Regularly analyze performance to optimize creative, messaging, and timing. Use A/B testing to experiment with ad variations, messaging, or targeting parameters. Refine your campaign by prioritizing what resonates most with your audience.
Enhance your retargeting campaign today — how Adobe can help.
Retargeting can be one of the most impactful tools in your marketing strategy, helping you nurture prospects, engage diverse stakeholders, and drive conversions across the customer journey. With the right tools, you can elevate your campaigns for even greater success while maintaining consistency and personalization at scale.
Adobe Advertising provides a comprehensive solution for retargeting ad campaigns, offering features like AI-powered bidding, automated optimization, and dynamic retargeting across multiple channels. Its ability to integrate with other Adobe Experience Cloud tools ensures seamless execution of retargeting strategies tailored to your business needs.
For marketers looking to deepen engagement with high-value audiences, Adobe Marketo Engage enables precise targeting and retargeting across channels like Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Its native integrations make it easy to deliver personalized campaigns that align with your broader marketing goals.
To solve the challenge of personalization at scale, Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing empowers teams to create on-brand, enterprise-level content efficiently. By combining AI-powered tools with governance and streamlined workflows, GenStudio for Performance Marketing ensures every asset aligns with your messaging and resonates with your audience. Watch the video overview to see how GenStudio can transform your retargeting campaigns.
