To answer the question in advance: yes, data-driven marketing can be used for more than just retargeting. However, sustainable economic growth is only possible if not only existing customers or potentially interested parties who have already been in contact with the brand in the past are addressed. Of course, customers from the past are of particular importance to companies. On the one hand, however, companies want to grow, but on the other hand, they don’t want to be surprised by a rude awakening if an existing customer they thought was safe should one day leave. That’s why new customers need to be acquired regularly! So-called prospecting campaigns serve as a supplement to existing marketing approaches for the circle of existing leads. Programmatic advertising is also used here to identify new potential customers and then target them precisely.
Why are new customers even necessary?
In online marketing, marketers always analyse the footprints that potentially interested parties leave behind as they roam the internet. For example, users who have visited a specific landing page or – in the case of an online shop – have placed a specific product in their shopping basket are very promising. They are then offered adverts with suitable products or services which, in the best case scenario, bring them back to the website, for example to complete a purchase or make a repeat purchase. At some point, however, this base of repeat visitors is exhausted. In many cases, however, completely new visitors are not added to the extent that would be required for the growth that many companies are aiming for. Retargeting is therefore not possible indefinitely. Prospecting is therefore about acquiring new customers. In the best case scenario, they are reached before they have even started searching.
Three steps to a programmatic new customer campaign
New customer campaigns are specifically tailored to new contacts. They therefore differ from retargeting measures in terms of their approach and form. These three steps lead companies to their first prospecting campaign:
- Exclude existing customers: The first step leads companies to their CRM system: Here, existing contacts must first be identified and bundled. Other tools such as Google Analytics, tracking pixels or information from cookies can be used to supplement the data set. All people who are now included in the collection are excluded from the prospecting campaign. These people have already had initial contact with the brand and are therefore not the target group of a campaign that is completely tailored to new people. This does not mean that they are generally unimportant for marketing, on the contrary. But the focus is now on other target groups – and they need customised advertising content!
- Identify the right customer groups: Although existing customers are not included in the display of advertising material for the prospecting campaign, they are particularly informative for the creation of measures. Observations of existing customers provide conclusions as to who may also be a candidate with high conversion potential in the future. It is possible that certain customer groups that tend to have similar characteristics have emerged over the years of business activity. These characteristics include, for example, age, origin, certain preferences or habits. The main idea behind programmatic advertising is to customise advertising material and thus deliver particularly relevant ads to the target groups. Knowing the exact interests of the target groups to be reached is therefore a fundamental prerequisite for an effective programmatic advertising campaign. Only once this foundation has been laid can advertising media be created and played out to the right people on the basis of this knowledge.
- Monitor the campaign closely and measure success: As is always the case in online marketing, the same applies to addressing new customers with programmatic advertising: a campaign is not finished when it is launched. As soon as the first advert has been played, it is important to keep a constant eye on performance. Is the target group being reached optimally? Is the number of conversions being increased? Are only new customers really being reached and not existing customers being approached again? Patterns can also sometimes be recognised as to which target group or sub-target group has a particularly high conversion rate. In any case, the campaign should be adapted in line with the latest findings and the media budget utilised accordingly.
These factors are particularly important when approaching new customers
New customers have not previously been in contact with the brand. Clearly, the approach must be completely different to that of recurring business contacts. These factors must therefore be taken into account for this type of campaign:
- Creativity: If everyone follows the same path, everyone gets the same result. For this reason, creativity makes all the difference! Data-driven marketing is all about finding new ways to attract the attention of potential customers and business partners.
- Narrowing down the target group: Of course, narrowing down parameters vary from campaign to campaign. However, one characteristic of people is particularly decisive in B2B marketing: their position within the company. In addition to the right industry, decision-makers in particular should therefore be addressed. Campaigns in the B2C sector, on the other hand, are more interest-orientated.
- Clean preparation of the data: In order to exclude existing customers from the new customer campaign, for example, existing data must be cleanly prepared. The information can only be used reliably for marketing communication if different data sets can be distinguished and easily separated.
Conclusion: Addressing new customers through programmatic advertising is a useful addition
Only targeting new customers makes sense in very few cases. At the same time, it would be economically unwise to rely exclusively on existing customers. And let’s be honest: these existing customers have to come from somewhere first. For this reason, the most effective marketing strategy is to combine classic retargeting measures with prospecting campaigns. Incidentally, if the new customer approach through programmatic advertising works so well that customers are reached before they are aware of their intention to buy, this leads to a pleasant side effect. This means that the target group does not yet have to deal with the competition and is calibrated to your own brand at an early stage. Price expectations and expectations are therefore always aligned with your own brand!