Think about everything that distances you from your audience. It might be literal, especially if you’ve grown large enough to have a national or global market that makes collecting data more challenging. Maybe it’s the metaphorical distance created by communication gaps or missing data; you can’t connect with your prospects if you don’t have their contact information, after all.
With a more strategic marketing approach, database services close those gaps and bring your audience within reach through better customer care, improved lead insight, and more relevant branding.
Closing the Gap
Some smaller gaps between you and your leads are an easy fix, such as adopting better data hygiene procedures that keep contact information up to date. Some distances are tougher to bridge or take time to overcome; gathering detailed behavioral data, for instance, requires building up some history between you and your prospects. Other gaps can’t be changed on your end; you don’t control the hierarchy of approval your buyers might have to navigate before making a decision, for example.
Whether the gap between you and your buyers is on your end or theirs, you can go a long way toward overcoming it with a strategic, account-based marketing (ABM) approach that makes prospects’ contacts with you as frictionless as possible.
Seamless Integration
When you watch a film, you aren’t actually seeing the actors move. It’s an optical illusion, the appearance of movement created by a complex arrangement of still images on film and a projector that displays them at just the right speed. The gaps between frames seem to disappear as your brain fills in the blanks and puts the “motion” in the motion picture you’re watching.
ABM guided by marketing automation software likewise helps your audience move smoothly past any gaps. From the outset, leads get guidance from nurture programs that anticipate their specific pain points and offer relevant solutions.
Here’s where branding comes in.
Database-Driven Branding
A great brand is consistent, meaningful, and rooted in real observations of your market – not the audience you think you have, but the one the measurable data supports. To know that audience, you need technology sophisticated enough to collect data from numerous sources into a single centralized database where the information can then be analyzed. Careful, thorough analysis of your customer and prospect databases will tell you volumes about who your market is and how your brand aligns with their needs.
As you’re shaping customized user experiences around your leads with marketing automation, the data they’re feeding into the system helps mold your brand more closely to your audience’s needs. The distance between you and your leads disappears as they move further along their buying journey until you’re both on common ground.
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