Through the Awareness & Education stage, your goal is to drive users to a property.

Once the user has visited your property (website, mobile app, e-commerce site, social profile), your goal is for them to CONVERT on that property.

A conversion can mean a wide range of things based on your campaign or business goals - a site visit of a certain length, a newsletter signup, a request for information or contact, a sale, content consumption, etc.

Users typically interact with brands a number of times before making a purchase decision. According to Lori Wizdo at Forrester, "in a recent survey, 74% of business buyers told Forrester they conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase."

While you won't necessarily gain a new paying customer the moment someone goes to your site, you can measure individual actions on your properties in reference to how they engage with your content over multiple touches on their way down the sales funnel.

Then, based on actions people take and what their conversion patterns look like, you can then go back and retarget them. You can also optimize the user experience of that site or social page for a higher response rate, based on their behavior on your property.

Retargeting is the process of defining an audience based on interactions you've already had with them. Retargeting encourages people to complete transactions after they've abandoned them, come back for a subsequent purchase, or to return to a service they have cancelled. You've probably been followed around the internet by the pair of shoes you admired but didn't purchase, or received an abandoned cart email for that gift you weren't sure you should buy. That was retargeting. Marketers are fond of retargeting because, in most cases, audiences who have tried to learn more about a product or brand are more likely to be interested in that product or brand than audiences who have not tried to learn more.

Retargeting is one of the most powerful tools to drive conversion - display retargeting can increase conversion rates by 70% . Top retargeting tools include AdRoll and the Google Display Network in addition to social retargeting on Facebook Atlas and Twitter.

Note: retargeting isn't just for B2C brands. B2B companies can retarget to encourage content downloads, event registrations, webinar attendance, etc., as long as you can define an audience you've already reached and would like to reach again.

Use your top of the funnel stack to figure out what messages and channels push which audiences to convert. Then, use conversion experimentation to drive it home and earn customers.