How B2Bs Can Get More from Their Marketing Database
You’re a marketer and you’ve just written a stack of great promotional leaflets. You give them to the postman and he distributes them. Most of them are never read because they are sent to vacant addresses or to people who are no longer interested in what you have to offer. Of the thousands sent out, maybe you get a couple of tyre kickers and that’s it. How can you make sure that won’t happen again?
Target your marketing campaigns to the right businesses
You don’t have to market every offer to all the people in your database. Instead, send your offer only to those customers who are most likely to react positively to it. Here the importance of having detailed data about each contact is important. Untargeted marketing costs three times more than targeted marketing. Take you time to gather the data necessary to do targeted marketing, rather than using a scatter-gun approach.
Focus on quality and not quantity
Prefer a small, accurate, and detailed database to a large one with bad or missing marketing data. The more you know about the businesses you send your offers to, the easier it will be to decide which offers to send them. Always focus on the quality of the entries in your database, not in the number of contacts alone.
Assess your records at least once a year
Businesses go through significant changes every year and that creates a lot of missing, incorrect, or outdated information for marketers. The staff changes, strategies and goals also change, depending on the economy and the state of the market. The only way to survive all those changes is to assign to someone, or better to a team, the task of checking your marketing database and adding, updating, fixing, or removing information constantly.
Use marketing automation systems
They accurately capture useful information about your customers, either through web forms or advanced activity monitoring and recording tools. It’s hard to recommend any specific marketing automation system without first knowing your site and needs. You should be able to find the right system for you if you read reviews for software available for your platform.
If you’re a B2B marketer, make the maintenance and updating of your marketing database a priority.
