Data-driven marketing isn’t just about the quality and accuracy of the data you already have. Successful database marketing also takes an investment in acquiring new information and making your prospect records more complete. The latest Dun & Bradstreet Marketing Data Report discovered some statistics about missing data that should alarm marketers who rely on the strength of their data. Only 1 in 10 marketing records had complete transaction data, and 86 percent of records were missing vital employee data.
If you don’t know enough about your audience, you can’t market to them. Here’s how to find out what’s missing from your data and fill in the blanks.
Finding the Fundamentals
Many records are missing some of the most basic information needed to contact leads, including email addresses, postal addresses, and phone numbers. Without these critical pieces of information, B2B marketers cut their organizations off from entire channels of communication with their potential customers. Data enhancement is an essential part of completing customer records with this fundamental information. Using data append processes, data enhancement services match the information your list already contains against a larger and rigorously verified database to associate needed data with your prospect records. By opening new avenues of communication, you’re able to be more responsive to your leads’ needs.
Learning More about Lead Behavior
Data enrichment does more than fill in the basics. It can also give you greater insight into your leads by understanding their behavioral cues. The digital signals leads send with their social media communication, site visits, and preferences are a kind of body language, signals that tell you more about what they need to know to make buying decisions and where they are on their buying journey. Behavioral data enhancement also gives you better knowledge for creating customer personas and segmenting your audience so you can align your message with their needs more closely.
Enhancing Data in Real Time
Gathered data is only useful when it’s accurate. Some of the most accurate data comes directly from the primary source as your leads enter information into forms to access gated content or subscribe to a newsletter. People are fallible, though, and even primary sources can introduce errors that later lead to inaccurate or duplicate records. Using marketing automation technology, it’s now possible to limit the number of errors due to typos and transposed numbers by comparing entry information against records in real time.
Automated systems can also differentiate between business emails and personal ones, which is a boon for B2B marketers. When you collect business-related contact information, you’re then able to connect more data points to it, building a more complete image of clients and forming a strong foundation for account-based marketing activities. Instead of turning away leads with forms that are unnecessarily long and complex, you ask them for a few key details and use data append for the rest, creating a better user experience while collecting all the information you need.
Prioritizing the Data You Gather
B2B business leaders understand the importance of data, but they also need to organize that data in ways that make sense for them, prioritizing the information that correlates directly with higher revenue. In the latest Marketing Data Report, respondents cited contact data, sales data, and demographic data as their top priorities. By using third-party data enhancement, companies can append geographic, demographic, and firmographic data as well as filling in the blanks on contact information.
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