Prospecting

Prospecting is the practice of using paid advertising to reach people who have not previously interacted with your brand, with the goal of introducing them and creating new demand.

What Prospecting Means in Marketing

Every retargeting pool started as a prospecting audience. Prospecting is the input to the whole paid acquisition system: without it, you are only ever reaching people who already know you, and that pool shrinks as customers churn without new ones entering.

The defining characteristic of prospecting is that the audience is cold. They have not visited your site, signed up for your list or bought from you. You are making a first impression, usually to someone who was not looking for you. That makes prospecting inherently less efficient per conversion than retargeting or branded search, and inherently more important for growth.

Most e-commerce and direct-response brands run some version of a prospecting and retargeting structure: prospecting campaigns reach new audiences at the top of the funnel, retargeting campaigns follow up with people who showed interest but did not convert.

How Prospecting Works

Prospecting campaigns rely on targeting to reach the right new audience. The main levers:

Interest and behavioural targeting. Platforms like Meta allow you to target based on stated interests, purchase behaviours and categories. Useful for broad initial reach but can be imprecise.

Lookalike audiences. You provide a seed audience, your best customers or highest-value purchasers, and the platform finds people with similar patterns. This is often the most efficient prospecting approach because it uses your existing data to find new people who resemble those who already convert.

In-market audiences. Google and Meta can identify users actively researching a product category, putting ads in front of people who are already considering a purchase even if they have not found your brand yet.

Keyword targeting. In search, non-branded keywords reach people who are looking for the product category without specifying your brand. These are prospecting searches.

Prospecting Example

Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 targeting an audience that existing beauty brands largely ignored: customers who needed shade ranges beyond what was available. Their prospecting campaigns on social media specifically reached users interested in beauty who represented demographic groups underserved by existing products. The new audience had no prior relationship with the brand and had rarely been targeted by competitors. The launch sold out across 40 shades within 40 days.

Why Prospecting Matters for Marketers

Retargeting is efficient but finite. The moment you stop prospecting, your retargeting pool stops growing, your acquisition slows, and your business starts shrinking the next time customer churn outpaces new entries.

Prospecting is harder to measure than retargeting because its impact shows up downstream, in branded search volume, retargeting pool size and eventually new customer numbers, not in direct click-to-conversion. Marketers who judge prospecting by direct ROAS will chronically underspend on it and under-appreciate what it produces.