Why the future of Digital Marketing is Dynamic Prospecting

Brands are increasingly putting consumers at the heart of their campaigns to great effect. Just look at the success of the “Share a Coke” campaign – where logos on coke bottles were replaced with names, while Lidl frequently uses tweets from users in its marketing to endorse the brand. Currently in the online world the closest example of this kind of personalised marketing exists with dynamic retargeting, where online ads contain products you were browsing for only a few moments ago. For most people, it’s their only experience of dynamic creative, however as ads are only seen by people who have already visited the site it means you are talking to a pretty limited customer pool.

So what is the answer? Fortunately, one game-changing tactic is emerging that will truly deliver the tailored campaign success that has been achieved offline in the online world – dynamic prospecting.

In a nutshell, dynamic prospecting is all about finding new, in-market users who have never visited your site. One of the oldest marketing goals is finding prospective customers and delivering ads containing ‘the right product, in the right place at the right time,’ and with the right technology, you can now achieve this by using dynamic creative for prospecting. 

Today’s customers have more choice than ever and are increasingly difficult to identify. Given this increased competition, changing consumer trends, and the multitude of digital touch points, digital marketing needs to be personal, cross-channel, and in real-time to effectively acquire new customers.

Prospecting does just this by using real-time data to deliver personalised advertising based on users’ recent browsing habits – to the device they are using at the time. It does this by employing big data techniques to identify attributes most common to online customers and build data profiles. This can contain lifestyle information, location, gender and more. By examining the user profiles looking at web pages in ad exchanges, it’s possible to buy those that fit the pre-defined profile.

The ability to match dynamic creative to data at scale remains a challenge but some companies have already demonstrated that enhancing messages with personalised creative is possible and is driving new users to sites. Here are some examples of how brands can use dynamic creative for prospecting:

  • Car dealers can include details of the nearest dealer to a web user, or promoting larger cars to families and sports cars to singles.
  • Travel companies can target cruise holidays to older users, or adventure holidays to a younger demographic.
  • Retailers can build separate profiles for different products and update creatives with new products, prices, and offers in real-time. For example, fashion ads can show either men’s or women’s ranges according to the gender of the user.

Personalised content is growing, with 78% of consumers more interested in building relationships with brands creating personalised content, and a recent study finding that over half of UK’s social media users are willing to share personal information to receive personalised content. Customised ad creative is highly effective at increasing campaign performance, and CTR increases of over 100% compared to non-personalised creative are commonplace. When combined, the impact on ROI is irresistible.

It’s still early days and only the most clued-up marketers have started testing dynamic prospecting. The process is fairly straightforward – just add a pixel to the conversion page, provide a list of creative assets, products, prices, and other variables. The additional step is establishing your strategic goals – including geographic, demographic, and lifestyle – and to work with tech providers to ensure these goals are aligned with delivery strategies. 

Recent advances in technology and data management solutions mean that with the right planning, marketers can execute dynamic prospecting campaigns. Designing audiences to target, building dynamic creative, optimising performance, and analysing complex data requires hands-on knowledge of the latest digital marketing tools, and a team of traders and analysts with the right skills. To deliver dynamic campaigns seamlessly across multi-channel, and reporting it on each device isn’t easy, but through the use of dynamic marketing it is possible to turn consumer data into actions to reveal new customers and grow business.

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