Marketing Database Optimization Best Practices

Data Strategy Magazine published reports of a study carried out in the UK by Kalido where they researched companies with a turnover higher than $500 million and found less than half of the respondents satisfied with their database quality. In the report Data Strategy Magazine published:

Nearly one quarter of respondents (24 per cent) said they were not very or not at all satisfied with the consistency and accuracy of master data in their company and that data issues were many and constant. Just over one third (35 per cent) said they had no data issues at all. The largest group of 41 per cent fell in between, being somewhat satisfied, but with a few data issues still to resolve.

Given that marketing organizations of such large companies need to rely so heavily on their data for driving new revenue, its surprising how little attention is paid to it’s upkeep. Perhaps if their customer and marketing databases were valued monetarily as a company asset and this value was tracked through the year based on how much of the data is active and useful in developing future business, it would get the kind of attention needed. While marketing budgets are generously allocated towards events and campaigns aimed at generating new leads, very few VP’s of Marketing or CMO’s apportion an amount towards maintaining, cleansing and enriching existing data which incurred a sizable cost to build earlier. The article in Data Strategy goes on to say:

As part of the study, companies were asked to put a financial value on the costs savings or increases in revenue that might result from data quality initiatives. The majority (57 per cent) were unable to answer. Among those who could, the average benefit was put at $38 million. 

Thats no small change in potential revenue and it may have been possible by budgeting a fraction of that amount in data cleansing and putting in a more stringent policies to keep data quality in check monthly or at least quarterly. It’s not just the large companies in the UK which suffer from data quality and management issues, we can only wonder what the results would show if the same survey was carried out on the Fortune 500 companies. The company database is a valuable asset, treat it like one!

Paid online advertising to spread the word about your company or product is a significant online marketing strategy. Depending on the size of the company or nature of products and solutions the company is looking to drive traffic for, using Google Ad-words or vertical specific ad sales networks are the quickest solutions to getting an online advertising campaign started for the business. Vertical specific ad networks such as Federated Media, Adbrite, Adify and others enable companies to find and distribute their advertisements across numerous networks to focussed online audiences and cater to a number of verticals from travel, food to technology. What if you want to build your own network and connect with some very niche or specific sites? What if you want to link your product or services to these sites and have a special agreement with them?

Building your own ad network for either advertising on a pay per click model or even simply connecting with some prominent sites within your industry or network needs a marketing + sales approach. Once the online publications or sites within the vertical where you’d like to drive traffic from are identified, the next critical step is locating the decision makers for these websites who need to be approached along with contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers. Building this list of the sites you want links from and the key decision makers for those sites is half the battle. From there onwards, it’s about connecting with those who are in charge of advertising and links on the sites through well crafted email messages and followed up by personal calls to put across the proposal you have for either an advertising on their site or perhaps a mutual exchange of links.

This could be a very effective strategy for niche businesses and products such as bio-technology, renewable energy solutions or various others where carrying out an ongoing effort to reach out to popular sites in the area and working out how to partner with them along the way is a sensible investment. Does your company network with others in your vertical? What is your game plan for building a network within your vertical?

Companies are waking up to social media marketing and making a proactive efforts to develop company active blogs as a part of thier social strategy and reach out to0 their customers. Many have figured out its a great way to connect with their customers and communicate with them. Others have learnt its a great way to get feedback from them. Then there is using the blog traffic and capturing leads. The most common way to do this is creating a call-to-action form with some incentive for the reader to submit their email address, company name and phone number so that it can be added to the marketing or lead database. Comments are not often looked at as a source for leads. Why? Many of them could be good prospects. They could be a great addition in the lead nurturing cycle. Why don’t they make it to most databases?

Active blogs that are drawing a good amount of traffic get a fair amount of comments from readers who are often prospective customers. A good percentage of these commenters will link to their company website or their own website so its not to difficult to determine which company they are from. The email address is usually a mandatory field for submitting a comment so you have a contact point and possibly another clue to the organization they work with. Not many companies harvest the data entered while these comments are submitted. If they do, perhaps they dont make it to the CRM or marketing database because they are “incomplete” by the standards of what is considered a complete contact or lead which can be entered into the system. These contacts don’t have to go to waste. Its possible to carry out data append or data enrichment efforts similar to those we do here at ReadyContacts for our customers. Once details like the account name, address, website url, description, contact name, email, phone number, postal address and so on are confirmed and appended its a complete record fit to go into the database. 

There are data append solutions available to enrich your data or you can build a process which ensures comments are regularly exported, appended with additional data, filtered and directed to the marketing and sales cycle. Once you have such a process in place, you know you’re making the most of your company blog. If you’re not, you may have missed a possible customer somewhere among those commenters.

There is a plethora of marketing and lead generation software applications tools out there. Some of them simple, others loaded with features. Some of them cost a small fortune and others are priced as low as nothing. While large companies can set aside significant technology budgets for their lead generation technology, it doesn’t mean small businesses don’t have other options to carry out similar tasks. We wrote “B2B Lead Generation Using The Big Friendly Giant” to help startups and small businesses see just how much can be done with the free services Google offers. Whether you want to build a target list of accounts and decision makers, set up product sites, landing pages, start a company blog or track competitors, there are ways to leverage what Google offers to put these plans into motion. 

Please download a copy from Scribd and let me know if you found any part of it particularly helpful or have any other tips and tricks you’d like to share.

B2B Lead Generation Using the Big Friendly Giant -2009

I know there are two very different schools of thought when it comes to inside sales with one selling aggresively without taking no for an answer and trying to push towards sales and the other more passive who digg for insights to judge whether the prospect is open to buying and carefully wait for the right time to pitch an offer. I’ve seen both work so I can’t advocate one over the other but there is one tactic which is very relevant to the current slow economic times which can help inside sales pitch to the right accounts in a more informed way.

Sales account profiling or building detailed first hand intelligence on target accounts can really give the inside sales team the kind of ammo they need to alter their message and sales pitch based on what they know about the account, the decision makers, their preferences and their inside agenda. A set of key questions would normally help shed some light on who those decision makers are, what their challenges are and what their budget and time line look like. However , a lot company plans have been upset by the economic conditions today and getting a clearer insight into where these companies stand in light of this will help identify which accounts are better to pursue so that inside sales can focus their efforts. A pre sales call into key target accounts to ask a decision maker within your market area with open ended questions can help pre qualify and prioritize the accounts. For example:

• Has your company changed direction or announced a new strategy for the current times?
• How has it impacted your department?
• Has the company strategy to tackle these times hit your departments budget?
• What are the current challenges your organization is seeing?
• Have you curbed spending on new initiatives? When do you see things possibly turning around for the better?

As mundane as it may seem to know the answers to such questions for every target account in your database, these questions can help quickly filter out businesses who have completely capped spending and have extremely tight budget restrictions within the organization being sold into. This can be a huge saving on inside sales or sales’ time which can be directed at accounts which are still investing and growing or possibly not hit by the economy at all. Even one or two questions slipped into the usual account profiling process will help streamline the efforts towards what can convert and not chasing the wrong leads. Bad times call for better practices. Start with better account profiling.

Salesforce Annnounces Twitter App – Read this post on the Zdnet blog and it confirms one of the new year predictions we made in January and validates what we have been talking about in some of the earlier posts B2B Marketing Data Forecast – Blog, Twitter & Linkedin Info A Standard Data Field . 

As quoted in the Zdnet blog:

As for the Twitter application itself, salesforce is enabling companies to query the tweets that are being blasted through the Twittersphere as they relate to the company’s brand, products or even competitors and monitor – in real time – what people are saying. A company like Comcast might quickly learn when a city is experiencing an outage or service problem, for example, while a company like AT&T might be able to monitor what’s being said about iPhone service in a particular region.

Twitter feeds are a great source of intelligence and can give you a great insight into what a company is doing or even an individual. The fact that you can put up a 140 charachter update in just seconds as opposed to having marketing communications come up with a press release, its often a realtime source to hear chatter related to companies. Almost exactly like a quickly doing some research into a company’s website and a google search before calling in, checking out a Twitter feed can help with some really good insights and goin in better prepared.

Other than a source of intellience and updates, its proving to be an equally good channel to get a message out to a group or individuals who actively follow on Twitter and is slowly developing into a channel for communication. With phone channels being protected from cold calls and email boxes being plagues by spam, reaching out via Twitter is picking up pace. How long this will last and will it ever reach the popularity of phone and email is not certain. What is sure is it is currently gaining momentum and Salesforce has been quick to act on it. Gathering account intelligence data just got smarter!

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An inside sales rep with the task of cold calling the CEO or high ranking executive of a fairly large organization over the phone would have a daunting experience even connecting. Getting past the gatekeepers and assistants is just part of the battle. Even if one is lucky enough to connect, its not always easy to strike up a rapport as executives are more likely to be pre disposed ‘not to entertain a cold call’.

Now think about this…have you ever approached a high level executive or noted professional using a Linkedin message or sending a Twitter direct message / tweet? Whoaa a reply! That was easy! We haven’t put this through a formal research so I cant state this as a fact but from my experience, it’s a lot easier to connect with a CEO or executive using Twitter, Linkedin or commenting on his/her blog. Somehow, just as much as we dislike being interrupted by a phone call at the office, we love recieving a direct message on Linkedin, a comment posted to our blog or a tweet from one of our Twitter followers. I’m sure when phones were still new, executives were happy to answer calls but times have changed and more often than not, they aren’t always excited about incoming phone calls. It was the same with emails and once spam came into being, open rates declined and connecting through email also became challenging. Communication channels are evolving and even executives are shouting out “connect with me on Linkedin” or “follow me on Twitter”. So how does this effect marketing and CRM data?

For starters, other than having a company phone number, contact phone number/extension, postal & email address, Linkedin profile, Twitter url, blog url and others are likely to become standard contact data fields for leads. Imagine going through your Salesforce data, clicking a contact and seeing a feed of the leads most recent updates on Twitter. Imagine cold calling a CEO and saying “We haven’t spoken before but we’ve exchanged thoughts thought comments on your blog”. It helps connect on another level which is a lot easier than pure cold calling. It’s effective, it’s relevant to our times and it works! If these contact details can make it to visiting cards, don’t be surprised to find them as a standard requirement in CRMs and marketing databases soon. Would this make you re-think how your marketing data looks?