What’s more important: finding a new customer or targeting someone who’s previously shown interest in your products?
That’s a trick question. They’re both equally important, but one is often given short shrift in favor of the other. The problem is that one (retargeting) seems easier to do, while the other (finding new customers) often requires trial and error and investment.
In general, when it comes to retargeting versus prospecting doesn’t necessarily mean those results are good.
Retargeting results should be much better than advertisers are currently seeing.
One study has even shown that nearly 40% of people who see a retargeted ad are put off altogether, which is not exactly the reaction you want when trying to attract customers.
Think about your own online experience: How often do you visit a site once and then never return to buy a product?
Simply visiting a website isn’t a guarantee of interest.
There are undoubtedly people who click over to a website out of pure curiosity, and they don’t find anything that interests them, or the prices aren’t right. They are subsequently annoyed to find their browsing experience forever marred by the same series of ads. In this case, a brand’s retargeting strategy may have backfired spectacularly, resulting in the alienation of a potential customer.
In the same vein, relying on last-touch attribution to build out a list of prospective clients can be equally misleading because it doesn’t take into account all of the other exposures. Tactics like last-touch attribution only became popular because they were easy to carry out and people weren’t scrutinizing the results so closely. But now, given the leaps and bounds that have been made in the marketing industry, they just aren’t going to cut it. Without a detailed understanding of the customer’s journey, you might as well be guessing at what’s really making that person buy your product. Conversion rates for people being retargeted might be better, but brands still spend a significant amount of money on people who never convert — and, more importantly, who were never going to convert.
As a solution, brands need to be managing a prospect from the beginning of their journey to the end, which still includes retargeting. In essence, this requires a change in mindset, because brands now have to be thinking about how to best reach each individual prospect instead of pounding people with ads across all platforms. To do this, marketing teams need to connect one layer of the funnel to the next and work on aligning the different teams — and sometimes different companies — that are handling various aspects of it.
Another solution for brands is to invest in more sophisticated technology, like deep learning. With these tools, brands are able to have the information and infrastructure necessary to carry out a campaign from start to finish. This is something we help brands with at ConnectRetarget.
Using deep learning provides the ability to mine large amounts of customer data to come up with the best method of reaching each person. Unlike humans, algorithms are capable of finding patterns in huge amounts of data. But more importantly, they’re also able to provide context. For instance, algorithms can tell if a person responds particularly well to an ad at a certain time or on a certain site and then optimize future ads to incorporate those insights. It can also tell when a person’s browsing behavior signals a future purchase or not.
Using deep learning tools in-house is possible. But because most aren’t made for amateur use, I’d recommend having your data scientist — or someone in a similar role — manage this process. Companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft do offer certain AI capabilities that businesses can use, provided they have the software and deep learning development expertise necessary. Partnering with a firm that specializes in deep learning and has extensive real-world experience in deploying those algorithms is, of course, also an option.
The deep learning tool you choose ultimately depends on what you want to do with it. If you’re looking to incorporate any kind of speech recognition into your business, whether it’s as a skill for Alexa or a digital customer service assistant, then it’s best to use those tools provided by the experts — AWS, Google, etc. But at the end of the day, businesses need to choose tools that have proven track records and can provide demonstrable value to their organizations. There are two considerations that every business should keep in mind: first, whether or not the tool will solve a problem they are having, and second, how easily that tool will be able to integrate into their existing infrastructure.
In today’s environment, marketers and their agencies need to be smarter about how to manage and target the entire customer journey. Taking a list of people who have visited or taken an action on a site and then blindly considering them to all be of equal value is the way of the past. Today, you can be smarter, but are you?
Choosing to retarget and prospect concurrently, instead of breaking them up and distributing them to different teams, allows companies to be more efficient and spend less time and money on outdated methods of retargeting. After all, the only way a brand can grow is by gaining new customers. So why not free up as many resources as possible in order to do so? It’s time to focus on the whole customer journey.
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