What’s Going Wrong With Your Marketing Database?
Database marketing is critical for any B2B firm, and one of the first things each new business should do is start building a marketing database. Database marketing allows you to understand your clients’ wants better and respond with engagements that satisfy them. Better customer service results from a more customer-centric strategy, prioritizing what they want over dictating a traditional marketing message. When you make judgments based on client data, your firm will thrive. Data acts as both a map and a source of energy, allowing you to rethink how you construct marketing plans and engage with your target audience. By using a business contacts database, collecting data is easy.
One of the most significant difficulties facing B2B marketers today is Big Data Overload. That can make demand generation seem unachievable; how can one keep up with sales demand if you don’t even have access to your database?
According to a recent industry poll of senior B2B marketers, this difficulty may be primarily technological. But, on a more fundamental level, there are five common blunders that, if avoided, can save you a lot of time and money. While one of them is investing in a company contacts database, also consider the following:
You don’t enrich/refresh your databases regularly.
If your marketing organization isn’t frequently renewing its databases to stay up with the continuously changing nature of your data, your data is likely degrading right now. We’ve worked with several customers whose primary source of conflict between sales and marketing is outdated marketing data. In some circumstances, it might force marketing to field seemingly “qualified” leads to sales that turn out to be completely unqualified; in other cases, the sheer volume of “poor” or out-of-date data paralyzes marketing.
You’re concentrating on broad criteria such as “job title.”
Firms with “too little” data often resort to third-party data suppliers to fill their pipeline with net-new leads and accounts. Sometimes — particularly if you’ve got your buyer profiles correct — this can work incredibly nicely. But increasingly, we’re seeing firms damaged by a chronic tendency — on both the vendor and customer sides — to focus on shallow data sets like “job title” while seeking new prospects. Because if you’re constructing your network based on external observations, you could wake up to find yourself back to square one – drowning in a sea of unexpectedly unrelated data.
You’re making use of a variety of data sources.
But while handling various data sources can yield short-term benefits, in the long-term, it will just exacerbate your data issues with duplicate, often contradicting, data sets.
You’re focusing on leads or accounts — and neglecting the essential item.
“Leads vs. accounts” is a tired cliche. Most marketers today, especially with the rise of account-based marketing, focus on both without a doubt.
But there’s a deeper meaning to this paradigm shift that many people are overlooking. You’re not marketing to accounts or even “leads,” as the case may be. Your “Market Units” are your target audiences: the tiny group of decision-makers you need to contact within your target accounts.
Rather than scouring the Big Data Sea for leads and accounts, marketers should focus on a smaller pool of highly prospective customers.
All data, no intelligence
Finally, collecting all that data is useless unless you can turn it into actionable intelligence to direct your marketing. Analytics tools are essential to analyzing an otherwise indecipherable amount of enormous data B2B marketers frequently face. In particular, the development of cognitive computing and Artificial Intelligence marketing technologies gives great optimism for marketers in our data-deluged world.
Scott’s Info
By contacting Scott’s Info, you may get started with your database services. Scott’s information can aid you in getting your B2B firm listed on one of the most popular marketing databases. Scott’s Info further provides a Canadian phone number database which makes it easier to appeal to a targeted audience. Once a company has created a successful data-based marketing strategy, this exposure can be highly beneficial.
