This talk will discuss a two-pronged strategy that leverages digital marketing to propel your business forward. We will discuss prospecting and remarketing and how they can be combined to create a full-funnel campaign.
Prospecting
Prospecting is a type of marketing that involves reaching out to potential customers. They may have never heard of your business or even be familiar with it. A startup that has no brand recognition needs to find potential customers who might be interested in your product. Even established companies can use prospect marketing to reach new customers.
There are many options for prospecting in digital marketing. Social media marketing is one of the most cost-effective and common methods for prospect marketing. This can include Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. It all depends on your customer base and the best social media platform for you. These tools can both be used for prospecting or remarketing. We’ll begin with the prospecting part of the house.
Tools for Prospecting
- SEO: While it is a great way to rank high in organic search results, it can also be difficult. Search terms that are relevant to your business can bring you lots of traffic and leads. Our SEO blog will teach you more about SEO and the best ways to do it.
- Google Ads: Google Ads can be a great option to generate quality traffic to your website if you’re willing to pay a bit more to appear in search results. You can learn more about Google Ads by visiting our Google Ads Blog. There are tons of articles such as this that you can use to get started.
- Paid social: You can use paid marketing to reach people who are not searching for your product/service on search engines. To reach your prospects, you can use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
- Organic Social: Although it is difficult to build a following on social media, it can be rewarding if you do it well. Find the right platform for your audience and give it content that they like and will share. Then, grow your social media presence to generate leads.
- Other strategies: You can also use influencer marketing, affiliate marketing and email marketing to drive traffic and buzz to your website.
Prospecting Example
Let’s say we launch a new product and want to target a specific segment of the population. We could launch social media ads targeting people we think may be interested. We would target parents who are interested in healthy snacks for children if we launch a new healthy snack. All of the tools we have mentioned can be used to reach people based upon their interests or demographics, as in our example.
After we launch our campaign we might notice that we spend a lot on advertising, but not getting many conversions. Although people are interested in the product, we drive traffic to our website but conversion rates are very low. Remarketing…
Remarketing
Remarketing refers to marketing to customers who have engaged in some way with your company. Remarketing is a common way to do so. Facebook can tag visitors to your website with its Facebook Pixel and add them to a remarketing program. This is true for both display advertising and Google Ads. After we have generated all the traffic through our prospecting strategy, it is time to get those customers back to us so they can convert.
Although they have shown interest in our products by visiting our website, they might need to take some time to consider the purchase or forget about it. Remarketing strategies are more profitable because of the demonstrated interest. You target a specific, smaller group of people who are familiar with your brand and have already visited your website.
Tools for Remarketing/Retargeting
- Google Ads: Google Ads is well-known for its search functionality, but it also offers a huge opportunity for remarketing. Google Ads allows you to target website visitors and show them ads on the internet by using remarketing lists. You will need to create engaging ads and target the right audience in order to do this effectively. To ensure that you reach different audiences with your ads, you should have as many remarketing list as possible. If you have multiple products to offer, you will likely want to show an ad that features the product they are looking at.
- Paid Social: This works in the same way as Google Ads. You serve display ads to visitors to your site, and you create audiences based upon site visits. This is a difference from Google Ads. Instead of appearing on multiple sites, you will appear on any social media platform that you choose to display ads on. This has its pros and cons. You could argue that social media advertising is better than Google’s display ads, but you have to consider the cost.
- Email marketing: This method is the most cost-effective and efficient, but also the most difficult. You must set up an email collection system on your website in order to be able to send remarketing emails via email. As a way of collecting emails, you can offer samples or guides for free. Then you can use those emails to market your products and services. Email marketing is free, and should convert well to other channels. However, you must be creative in order to collect lots of email addresses on your website.
The One-Two Punch
Although we’ve spoken about prospecting and marketing via remarketing separately, the real power lies in the combination of both. For example, if we are selling a healthy snack for kids, we might start by prospecting broadly to generate interest. Then we can remarket to close the deal with the most relevant targets. Prospecting can increase the success of our prospecting campaigns and prospecting helps us grow our remarketing lists. If done properly, they work together. Marketing can be compared to fishing. You set out to fish, and then you retarget them with a remarketing strategy. Prospect marketing is followed by remarketing strategies to reel them in.