What do most entrepreneurs dream about? Close your eyes and imagine. Chances are that growing your business is one of the things you envision. To make that dream come true, business owners need more new customers. Luckily, there is a marketing tactic that lets you turn this dream into action — Prospecting. It helps find people who may be interested in buying your product — prospects - and reach out to them.

This tactic is one of the first stages of a sales process. Once you find potential customers, you keep developing and nurturing relationships with them to help them become ready to buy. One of the most effective tactics that help prospects convert, i.e. make a purchase is Retargeting.

You can create two types of automated Prospecting campaigns in Adwisely: Lookalike Audience Prospecting and Broad Audience Prospecting.

• Lookalike Audience Prospecting: the ads are delivered to people that have things in common with your existing customers and those who added your product to cart.
• Broad Audience Prospecting: the ads are delivered to people who are interested in products similar to yours.

Marketers use Prospecting for the following objectives:

• Finding new customers: show your ads to people who are most likely to buy from you.
• Building brand awareness: even if people targeted by interests are not ready to purchase from you at the moment of seeing the ad, they're more likely to remember your ads.
• Behavioral targeting: prospecting ads can help you even reach out to people based on such actions as browsing and shopping actions.

To find more about Prospecting campaigns, read this article in our Help Center.

At first glance it may seem that these two terms are the same, however, the difference is quite distinct. Customer Acquisition is the process that aims at gaining new customers and Prospecting is just one of the tactics used to achieve this goal.

In other words, Customer Acquisition is developing a relationship between a business and a person with clear objectives — purchase and retention (repeated purchases in the future). Prospecting is merely a way that leads a potential customer to buying a product.

Facebook and Google are the biggest platforms for eCommerce store owners and online marketers to run digital campaigns on. Both platforms can boast incredibly large audiences and quite sophisticated targeting capabilities. Let’s see how Prospecting works on each of them.

Prospecting on Facebook

Facebook has 2.85 billion active users, which gives marketers incredible opportunities for reaching out to new people. Even though there is no such campaign objective as Prospecting in the Ads Manager, you still can get prospects by running Traffic or Conversions campaigns. At the end of the day, targeting is what matters here.

Facebook Prospecting ads can be delivered either to a vast majority of people — if you target only by location, demographics, and general interest — or to a very precise group of people by targeting people that are similar to your existing customers. Also, your Prospecting ads can be delivered far beyond Facebook, to platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Audience Network, a group of trusted apps.

Prospecting on Google

Google also enjoys unimaginable popularity among users worldwide — 3.5 billion searches take place on Google every day. 76% of all the global web searches happen here. On top of that, Google Display Network has gathered more than 2 million websites, YouTube videos, and apps to give businesses huge exposure.

The benefit of Google Ads is that they can target people who are actively looking for a product similar to yours, and those potentially interested in your goods while they browse the Internet. When you advertise on Google, your ads can be displayed on Google Search Network (search-related websites that feature ads and free product listings), Google Display Network, YouTube, Gmail (in Social and Promotion tabs), and Google Discover.

Both platforms have rich opportunities for Prospecting, and we are not to tell you which one is the best. At Adwisely, we believe in multiplatform advertising — that is why we enable our customers to create and automate their Prospecting campaigns on both Facebook and Google.

If you would like to learn more about the similarities and differences between these two platforms, check out our Facebook ads VS Google ads article.

One of the advertising commandments says “Do not create ads that compete with themselves.” If you do, your campaigns may bring more harm than good:

• You will be competing with yourselves for the same people, and this will increase your ad spend for no practical reason.
• There’s no point in investing your time and efforts in creating two campaigns to see which one performs better since all the ad platforms provide you with A/B testing tools.
• Your potential customers may become tired of seeing your ads over and over again, and instead of generating interest, your ads may cause repulsion.

Yes, you need a Meta Pixel regardless of the campaigns you run. This piece of software will help you track the performance of your ads, gather insights about people’s behavior and their preferences, and let you deliver customized ads to relevant prospects. To learn more about what Pixel Adwisely uses, read this article.

Installing Pixel is one of the first steps we take when starting working with a new store as it is the source of very valuable information on people’s behavior and preferences. To learn more about what Pixel Adwisely uses, read this article.