Big companies clearly need big data, but so do small and mid-sized B2B businesses. Data is an essential resource in the modern marketplace, and organizations of every size benefit from having more of it – but only if it’s well maintained with database services that ensure you govern your data instead of letting it govern you. Here’s what proper marketing data management can do for you.
Reveal New Markets
Like hopeful actors and models, markets are out there just waiting to be discovered. Unlike ambitious ingenues who move to Hollywood or New York City, your markets may stay hidden unless you have ways to spot them. With data, you can observe how data points cluster in unexpected ways, leading to insights about your customer base that can point you toward lucrative new market opportunities to develop.
Eliminate Wasted Effort
Just as important as knowing where to expand your business is understanding where you can scale back marketing efforts. Visitors who aren’t leads, such as competitors scoping you out or students doing research, may be important in other ways, but they aren’t leads; with database management that builds a history of your customer base, you learn this quickly and know where your leads aren’t.
Link Cost and Revenue Quantitatively
“Black box” marketing is an issue many organizations face. Budgeted money goes into it, and revenue eventually comes out, but what happens on the inside can be a mysterious process – sometimes even to the marketing team itself. The only way to draw a direct line between marketing activities and revenue is having enough data to tell the story and trace a buyer’s journey. When you’re able to consistently produce ROI figures, your marketing department becomes a reliable revenue driver.
Score Leads
Leads aren’t all created equal. Some are going to align better with your offer from the outset. Others need to be nurtured for a time to become sales-ready. Still others may be candidates for a scaled-back marketing effort suitable for long-term development, and a few aren’t leads at all. Data tells the story about your leads, and with enough of it, you assemble a remarkably clear picture of who your customers are and which of your leads most closely resemble them. Lead scoring is largely guesswork without data to back it up, but effective database marketing introduces hard science into the fine art of lead ranking.
Shorten Your Sales Funnel
With sufficient knowledge about your leads, you’re able to shorten the time it takes them to traverse your sales funnel. Shortening the interval between top-of-funnel exploration to an eventual sale gives you a clear advantage over competitors who are still feeling their way in the dark. Demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data light the way for you.
Using big data in your database marketing strategy is more than just collecting as much information as your database can hold, though. Experience with marketing automation tools that look at aggregate information and derive actionable insights from them is essential to making big data work.
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