Your organization may have separate strategies for prospecting and retargeting, but siloing this information makes it impossible to reach the full value. A full funnel strategy brings these tactics together to complement one another and enhance your overall strategy.

What Is Prospecting?

Prospecting is the responsibility of your sales team, in most organizations. This team looks for potential customers and begins the cold contact process to see if they would make suitable leads for account executives.

Prospecting screens out completely unsuitable people and begins lead nurturing. Each potential lead starts to learn about your products and services, along with other useful information that will move them deeper into the sales funnel. Since prospecting happens at the beginning of the relationship between a lead and your company, it can take some time before that individual is ready to make a decision.

What Is Retargeting?

Retargeting is an online advertising tactic that serves ads to people who have already visited your website. Since these prospects have some familiarity with your organization, they will accept ad creatives that get more in-depth on what you have to offer.

You’re working with a narrowly defined audience and improving their brand awareness, so you often see better results with retargeting compared to other online ad campaigns. This concept works similar to offline direct mailing, where simply being exposed to the brand name multiple times could lead to a conversion.

When the prospect is ready to make a purchase decision in your product or service category, they will remember your name and want to investigate what you have available.

Why Combine Prospecting and Retargeting?

Separate prospecting and retargeting efforts make it difficult to leverage the data each one gains. You have to double up on data entry, which means you might lose out on important insights that could lead to an optimized online advertising campaign.

By removing the silos between prospecting and retargeting, you can take a full funnel approach that builds off of these tactics. When a new prospect enters the system, they could be automatically added to your retargeting campaign. You save sales and marketing time, letting the team focus on more complex tasks.

Another benefit of combining these two areas is improving your ability to attribute sales from the start of the funnel to the end. When you know which touch points lead to the final purchase decision, you can make improvements in the buyer’s journey.

Full Funnel Strategy Best Practices

Online advertising campaign budgets can grow out of control when you pay for views or clicks. You have no guarantee that the traffic is valuable, which could lead to a lot of money going toward poorly performing sources.

If you switch to a platform that offers a cost per action, or CPA, option, you only pay for the outcomes you make. You get better control over your advertising spend and can easily scale with this type of approach. In addition, you don’t have to stress out over poor quality traffic, since you don’t pay for bots and other low-value visitors that fail to take action.

Integration is a key component for transforming many areas of your organization. Prospecting and retargeting are simply the next in a long line of business processes that work better together than separately. By moving to a full funnel strategy and leveraging CPA campaigns, you have a cost-effective way to bring in new customers with a customized buyer’s journey.