What is Prospecting in Advertising?

Prospecting is a customer-acquisition tactic that involves a marketing or sales team sourcing for new, potential buyers. Leads differ from prospects in that leads are potential customers who have expressed proactive interest in a service or brand by engaging in their website, or filling out a contact form, for example, but who are not necessarily aligned with the target audience of the service or provider. 

To initiate prospecting, the first step is to identify personas, or target audiences, for your brand. These archetypes help define key characteristics of consumers that align with the need or desire for your service or product. One tactic is to create a lookalike audience, or to target individuals who clearly match your existing customers. The hope here is that there may be a gap in brand awareness that can easily be bridged through more exposure, thus quickly converting those prospects into buyers.

Most of the work of prospecting has now become streamlined through programmatic TV software. A trusted TV buying platform can quickly analyze customer or viewer data and produce lookalike targets, or match certain characteristics and add in new parameters to define a new, but somewhat similar, audience pool.

One rule of thumb for prospecting is the more data you have, the better. With more data on current customers and the strength of their sentiment towards your brand, the more accurately a new audience can be mapped that is likely to engage.