It’s always a challenge but finding new business opportunities is the lifeblood of any business. However if you don’t have your own Marketing Database you are at the mercy of constantly having to attend events, pay for ads or rely on prospects being refereed to or finding you online.

However, many businesses do not have a Marketing Database strategy as part of their overall Marketing Strategy. Having a strategy that consolidates and creates a database of contacts in a proper CRM can equate to sales for your business if done right. Think of all the revenue opportunities you are missing out on because you have not started to create a list of people you have come across!

So in a recent Marketing Strategy Show Podcast, we interviewed the “Orang-utan Whisperer”, Andy Kyiet from Demand Flow Intelligence. Andy works with B2B’s and helps them engage the right clients in the right “jungle” so to speak.

Where to start with your Marketing contacts data

Before you start building your Marketing Contacts Database think of your ideal target market so you can categorise the various contacts in your list. This could be by Industry, by profession, by company role or by what they are interested in and by contact type – prospect, customer, supplier, referral partner, personal etc.

Here are ten  possible sources of contacts for your Marketing database to start with:

1. Existing customers (use your Accounting software or Customer CRM to make sure they are all captured)
2. The contacts in your phone – customers, referral partners, networking contacts, suppliers, past prospects
3. Your LinkedIn network contacts
4. That pile of business cards sitting in a drawer or on your desk
5. Your Facebook nor Instagram community/Page followers
6. Past enquirers who did not convert to customers
7. Inactive or lapsed customers
8. Create a lead generation campaign by allowing your audience to download a valuable “content offer”. A content offer is an incentive that you can offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address or other contact information. This could be in the form of a PDF, Guide, Video or Cheat Sheet.
9. Buy a list of your ideal target customers from a list broker – but work with someone from Australia so they can give you data that is correct as they will know more about your area, your local markets and geography for contacts who may a good fit for your products or services,
10. Search Google, Yellow Pages and Directories for contacts who may a good fit for your products or services and build your own database of prospects

Keeping your Database Interested

Once you have a database in place, it is time to think about the message. Audience Fatigue is a real issue when it comes to Marketing and can occur quicker than you think. If you are sending the right message to the wrong people, you will not get sales.

Audience and Database fatigue can occur if you are constantly sending emails  mail, making social media posts or calling a contact who is not interested in what you have to say. It can also occur if you are sending too many emails or contacts or if you are sending emails that are constantly telling them to buy something. More importantly, you will experience this if you are sending the right message to the wrong person.

This is why segmenting your database is important and should be part of your marketing budget and plan.

Segment your database or risk a loss of interest in what you offer. Unsubscribes or being marked as spam can have an adverse effect on your marketing campaign. Now, a certain number of unsubscribes is inevitable, but if you find you are getting more than your fair share, and your list is dwindling, it is time to re-assess your database.

This is when you think about seriously spending some time and some marketing dollars on segmenting your database. Depending on your business, this can be done by geography, industry, stage in the sales process or base it on what the person downloaded when giving you their details.

Check out these stats on how relevant emails improve engagement with your brand (courtesy: www.impactbnd.com):

• Compared to non-segmented campaigns, segmented emails are opened 14.31% more often.
• Segmented emails are clicked on 100.95% more often.
• Unsubscribe rates drop 9.37% when a list is segmented.

 OK, You get the picture, get some contacts, put them into a CRM  and start marketing to them. That’s great start – but if you start doing to them without a little preparation, all your efforts may be wasted. You need to invest a tittle time (and maybe money) to get the best results from your Marketing Data.

7 Tips for an effective Marketing Contact Data Strategy

Getting your Marketing Contact Data strategy right is critical to generating the lifeblood of any business – new prospects and customers,  so a few months ago I went searching for a Marketing Data specialist and found Andy Kyiet from Demand Flow Intelligence. 

Demand Flow Intelligence has “cleaned “and used clients’ data every day for years, therefore they see a lot of horror stories and witness the effects of having poor Marketing Data. So I thought it would be great to get Andy’s ideas on what to get right as for your Marketing data strategy in a recent Marketing Strategy Show Podcast.  Here’s a summary of the seven tips for an effective Marketing Contacts Data Strategy we discussed:

#1 Stop killing your audience!

Massive audience fatigue is the norm these days. Apart from saturation advertising, your audience is drowning in a sea of content, posts and irrelevant information. How has this happened?

The number one culprit is poor marketing data segmentation. Segmentation defines the different attributes that help you target your market accurately, such as by Industry and types of Role.

Segmentation that is missing, inconsistent or just plain wrong, resulting in many people receiving irrelevant information. The end result is that they either unsubscribe or simply switch off from your brand, thus ignoring future messages that are actually relevant to them.

TOP TIP 1: Get your data expertly and consistently segmented on a regular basis.

#2 A green field has the quickest yield

Whenever Andy’s company does a lead generation campaign, the most common request they get from a Business Development Manager (BDM) is “Can you find me some fresh prospects?” An experienced BDM instinctively knows that new prospects can often yield quick returns. The reality is that the existing marketing data has, in all probability, been over-farmed or exhausted by #1 above.

TOP TIP 2: Subscribe to a quality source of data so you can extend your reach on a regular basis.

#3 Personalised Marketing is coming! Be ready for it

We are in the age of personalised marketing and our audience no longer responds to general messaging.
Your chances of engagement are much higher if your marketing communications appear as though they were hand-crafted for the individual – a bit like old-fashioned letter writing. To do personalised marketing well, there is a high reliance on clean and accurate data. Get it wrong and it’s a very poor look and worse than no communication, at all.

Every time I receive a poorly addressed or inaccurate communication, it’s straight into the Recycle Bin as I know it was a mass mail-out using dodgy data. With a first name like Kym I’ll often receive a letter or email that starts with Ms. Kym Heffernan or ….” as a female business owner…”. if they can’t get this right it creates immediate doubt.

TOP TIP 3: Get your data health checked to ensure it’s in a fit state for personalised marketing. If not don’t use it for personalisation!

#4 Stop chasing Chimps when you need Orangutans

Have you ever spent weeks trying to get hold of a prospect, making multiple-calls, leaving many messages and sending several emails? Finally, you get hold of them and discover that, after all the effort to reach them, they weren’t actually in your profile – they were a Chimp, and you wanted an Orangutan! Prospects have never been harder to reach than they are now.

Company switchboards have become more and more aggressive with their vetting of calls and extension pick-up rates have declined, along with email open and click-through rates.

The upshot is a marked increase in the number of attempts required to reach a suspect. Having put in the hard yards and eventually made contact with the target, it’s particularly galling to then discover that they weren’t what you were looking for.

TOP TIP 4: Make sure your data includes segmentation on the Role and Seniority of the contact

#5 Have at least 80% of your addressable market identified

In comparison to many other mature markets, the ANZ B2B market is fairly finite. This becomes especially evident when you consider that there are less than 3,000 ANZ businesses that have a revenue of more than $A140m ($USD100m). In a market of the size of ANZ, having at least 80% of your particular market identified is both a realistic and essential goal. The good news is that only two pieces of information need to be known to identify where your personal bar sits;

1. A) the size of your market and B) how much of it you already have in your marketing database.

The bad news is that many businesses do not know the answer to either of these questions. Many only have a macro view of the market size, at best. Due to the state of their data, a greater number are under an illusion that their actual current market reach is greater than it is. Duplicated Accounts and contacts, miscoded industry values and highly inaccurate data on the size of a company are some of the regular problems with data that we see.

TOP TIP 5: Get your data cleaned, de-duped and enriched so you can accurately measure what you have. Engage an expert provider to research your particular target market size data

#6 Make that CRM pay you back

Many businesses have already invested in some level of CRM or Marketing or Sales platform. All of these, without exception, are capable of supporting highly targeted marketing campaigns – it’s the nature of the beast. Your investment was made, purely to drive more sales and get a return, many times over. To achieve the best ROI, your system relies heavily on the quality of your data. GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) still rules supreme. Our experience is that it’s disturbingly “normal” for marketing data to be up to 60% delinquent.

TOP TIP 6: If you’re moving to a new marketing platform, get your data cleaned and segmented at the same time as the data transformation work. If you’re staying put, with your system, get your data audited – it’s almost certainly dirtier than you think!

#7 Add underlaying value to your business

Imagine you’re considering selling your business and are negotiating the multiple. Your business comes with a reputation, a customer base, computer systems, some possible plant and machinery and a two-foot thick “Procedures Manual”, telling the potential buyer how to crank the handle.

So far, so good. A key asset that can drive up the agreed multiple, is your marketing data. Given an auditable assurance that the data is in a clean and up-to-date state and has a reach of at least 80% into the target market, the multiple is likely to be at least 20% more.

TOP TIP 7:

Get your data certified for quality and reach before you put your business on the market

So, have you got a Marketing challenge? Let’s talk

If you have a question about Lead Generation, Marketing Data – how to enhance it , get the strategy right or how to use it better – we’d love to talk.

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