Lookalike audiences and retargeting for paid media campaigns in manufacturing marketing

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Lookalike audiences and retargeting: nurturing prospects in the manufacturing sector

In the competitive world of manufacturing, nurturing prospects and converting them into loyal customers is more challenging than ever. With long, complex and non-linear sales cycles, buyers tend to move slowly from initial research to decision-making, often taking months, and may interact with your business multiple times before even considering getting in touch. 

For marketing and sales teams, this presents a challenge: how do you keep potential buyers engaged without overwhelming them? And how do you make sure your brand is remembered when they’re finally ready to act?

That’s where data-driven strategies such as lookalike audiences and retargeting come in. Used well, they can help you stay visible and relevant, nurturing high-quality leads without relying on luck or guesswork.

In the digital environment, these marketing strategies offer powerful ways to reach high-potential leads, keeping your brand front-of-mind throughout the buyer’s journey.

In this blog, you’ll discover how lookalike audiences and retargeting can help manufacturing brands nurture prospects, increase engagement, and turn browsers into buyers.

What are lookalike audiences?

Lookalike audiences are groups of potential customers sharing similar characteristics, behaviours, and interests with your existing best customers. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google use sophisticated algorithms to identify data, such as job roles, industries, engagement behaviour, and decision-making patterns. 

They target these audiences, helping you expand your reach to people most likely to engage with your manufacturing brand.

Paid Media campaigns will become more efficient through ad spend, have an improved return on investment (ROI), and lead to faster scaling of campaigns. 

Essentially, lookalike audiences help marketers go beyond manual targeting to find new, qualified leads based on real data and performance trends.

For manufacturers, this is a game-changer. Instead of casting a wide (and often expensive) net, you can expand your reach to high-fit prospects who are statistically more likely to engage with your brand and convert over time.

The benefits for manufacturers:

• You’ll reach more of the right people: Tapping into new markets by targeting decision-makers who share traits with your most valuable customers.
• You’ll increase the efficiency process: Focusing ad spend on high-potential audiences, who’ll be more likely to engage and convert.
• Personalising your messaging: by tailoring content that resonates with audiences similar to your buyers

What is retargeting, and why does it matter? 

If lookalike audiences help you find new prospects, retargeting helps bring back the ones who nearly got away.

Retargeting (or remarketing) is the practice of serving ads to users who have previously interacted with your website or digital assets but haven’t yet converted. In manufacturing, where decision-making often involves multiple stakeholders and weeks (or months) of research, retargeting is essential to keep your brand front of mind.

The benefits for manufacturers:

• You’ll stay top-of-mind: By reminding prospects about your products and solutions when they’re still evaluating options or comparing suppliers.
• Your conversions will increase: Nudging interested buyers back to your site, which will improve the chances of closing deals.
• You can segment campaigns: Deliver tailored content based on specific products or pages viewed, so your messaging retains relevance.

Retargeting isn’t just about pushing reminders – it’s about meeting potential customers with the right message, at the right time, in the right place.

How to combine lookalike audiences and retargeting

To get the most from lookalike audiences and retargeting, they need to work together, not as separate tactics, but as part of a connected strategy. Here’s how manufacturers can align both approaches for a smart, scalable system, nurturing leads across every stage of the buyer journey:

• Build a strong data foundation: Start by identifying your highest-value customers using CRM data, analytics, and sales insights. Who are your best clients, and what do they have in common?

• Create lookalike audiences: Upload your customer list to ad platforms to generate lookalike segments, finding new contacts who closely match your existing customer profile.
• Implement retargeting: Set up retargeting campaigns for visitors who engaged but didn’t convert.
• Align your messaging: Use insights from your best customers to craft compelling, relevant ads for both lookalike and retargeted audiences.
• Measure and optimise: Track performance metrics and refine your campaigns for maximum ROI.

Lookalike audiences and retargeting are essential tools for manufacturing brands who want to nurture prospects, boost their engagement, and turn browsers into buyers. 

By harnessing data-driven targeting with a consistent and persistent follow-up, manufacturers will maximise their digital marketing ROI, which will help them stay ahead of the competition.

How to use lookalike audiences effectively

The quality of your lookalike audience will depend on the quality of the data you feed it. In manufacturing, with high-value deals and deliberate decision-making, precision will matter more than scale.

Here’s how to build and use lookalike audiences that actually work:

• Start with your best customers
  Use your CRM or analytics platform to identify high-value customers. Not just frequent buyers, but clients with long-term relationships, high order values, or those with strategic importance. These make ideal ‘seed audiences’ for lookalike modelling.
• Categorise by industry and intent
  Don’t just lump everyone together. Categorise your source data by factors like:
  • Industry sector (e.g. construction versus pharma)
  • Company size
  • Product interest
  • Recency of engagement
    This will help you build multiple, targeted lookalike groups matching specific parts of your offering.
• Use first-party, privacy-compliant data
  Rely on ethical, directly collected customer data, such as e-mail subscribers, leads from gated content, or demo requests. This will keep your marketing GDPR-compliant and will improve accuracy.
• Focus on job titles and buying roles
  For B2B manufacturers, targeting the right roles (e.g. procurement, technical leads, engineers) is more useful than broad demographic information. Tailor your audience creation around these filters, where at all possible.
• Pair with the right content and campaign goals
  Lookalike audiences aren’t just for brand awareness. You can use them in:
  • Lead generation campaigns
  • Webinar invites
  • Product awareness pushes
  • Niche offer promotions

The key is to match content relevance to the buying journey. The better the match, the higher the engagement.

How lookalike audiences support long-term nurturing

The power of lookalike audiences lies in their ability to support continuous, data-driven nurturing over time.

When integrated with your CRM and marketing automation tools, lookalike audiences become part of an ‘always-on’ growth engine, using real, high-quality data from your best customers to find prospects with similar intent, needs, and behaviours.

As you convert new customers, their data will feed back into your system, refining your models and making each campaign sharper and smarter than the last. This will create a feedback loop where targeting, messaging, and lead quality will improve continuously, without the need to rebuild your strategy from scratch.

For manufacturers, this means more control, less waste, and better outcomes across a long, complex sales cycle. 

Campaigns powered by this type of automation and modelling often see higher click-through and conversion rates, through being relevant, timely, and consistently visible to the right people.

In a competitive sector, being seen once isn’t enough. Being remembered and trusted is where the growth happens.

Strategies to maximise retargeting performance

Retargeting works best when it’s strategic, not just repetitive. For manufacturers, it’s a chance to guide prospects back with relevance, not noise.

Here’s how to make it count:

• Use dynamic, personalised ads
  Show ads based on what a visitor actually views – whether it’s a product page, white paper, or case study. Personalised content will boost recall and relevance.
• Sequence your messaging
  Don’t serve the same ad repeatedly. Start with educational content, then move to proof (like case studies), followed by a CTA (demo, quote, or brochure).
• Go multi-channel
  Reach decision-makers across LinkedIn, Google, and display networks. A consistent presence will build familiarity and trust over time.
• Focus on high-intent behaviours
  Prioritise visitors who’ve shown strong buying signals – like viewing pricing pages or starting a contact form.
• Test, learn, optimise
  Run A/B tests on messaging, creatives, and timing. Small tweaks can lead to major improvements in performance and cost-efficiency.

Better nurturing means better growth

In manufacturing, success isn’t just about finding leads – it’s about nurturing the right ones with the right message over time.

By combining lookalike audiences with retargeting, you’ll have a smart, scalable strategy which will keep your brand in front of the people who matter most, whether they’ve just discovered you or are close to making a decision.

In this way, you’ll stay relevant, build genuine trust, and drive conversions in a long and complex buying cycle.

Done right, these tools will create a consistent flow of high-fit prospects who won’t just know your name – they’ll understand who you are and what your value is.

Want to build a smarter nurture strategy that brings the right prospects back – and brings better ones in?

At Red-Fern, we specialise in branding for manufacturers, helping businesses like yours get clear on their difference, cut through the noise, and build trust in crowded, competitive markets. 

Whether you’re refreshing your visual identity, refining your messaging, or building a full end-to-end strategy, we’ll help you create a brand that looks good and performs where it counts.

We help manufacturing brands unlock the full power of data-led marketing. From CRM segmentation to omnichannel campaign planning, we’ll help you use lookalike audiences and retargeting to drive the leads that matter.