In her Harry Potter universe, J.K. Rowling’s magical sorting hat at Hogwarts automatically placed incoming students into the house where they would find the most success. You may not have wizardry at your disposal to tell your Gryffindor from your Hufflepuff, but you do have data enhancement technology that performs the same feat. Your ability to sort leads into the appropriate segments and associate them with the right buyer personas is only as good as your data, so here’s how to make your technological “sorting hat” smarter.
The bulk of your data collection efforts will be determined by your industry, customer base, sales and marketing goals, and so on. The more specialized your data, the more equipped you’ll be to segment, target, and successfully market to your customers.
Demographic Details
The more detail you can add to a lead’s account file, the better you’re able to exceed expectations and help new prospects graduate to sales. Data enrichment services use information you’ve already collected and combine it with verified demographic and firmographic data from other sources to create more complete records – no magic needed. With leading-edge data enhancement, you can see improvement to as much as a quarter of the files on your prospect list. Even better: Enhancement adds more detail that can then inform the next round of data enrichment, leading to even more complete files.
Behavioral Data
There’s more to successful sorting than demographics. After all, it was Harry’s bravery that got him into Gryffindor, not his street address. Tracking your leads’ behavioral data and putting it into context against a larger view of other prospects’ choices tells you volumes about how they make buying choices. Some behavioral metrics you can measure include overall site traffic, bounce rates, time on site, content downloads, and newsletter subscriptions.
Attribution
To discover which marketing activities produce the most consistent ROI, you need to know more about the paths your prospects take on their buying journey before they get to you. Attribution is the data-driven science of studying how your leads reach you and why they make the buying decisions they do. When you’re able to attribute progress along the sales funnel to a specific marketing initiative or piece of content, you can then learn more about what motivates market segments and give them more of what they need to make key decisions.
Nurture Program Content
If you’re putting your demographic and behavioral knowledge into practice, you’ll soon learn which content types and topics work best with each segment of your market. Some content will inevitably be more relevant to some leads than to others – and that’s a good thing. It’s the basis of designing effective content streams through which you can send leads for further nurturing. Data enhancement metrics that take engagement into account can guide your content marketing strategy and refine your approach to specific segments of your audience.
Exit Information
Let’s turn to the other end of the buying journey for a moment and look at what happens when customers and prospects lose touch. Have they reached the end of their customer life cycle, or has insufficient data hygiene allowed them to slip away through data decay? Did a lead lack support or feel overwhelmed by too much communication? Data enhancement helps you understand why leads leave and what you can do to prevent it.
Data isn’t witchcraft; it’s science. Make the most of it, though, and you’ll find its effects on conversions pretty magical.
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