Occasionally we have businesses calling to ask if they can have a few details or a specific name of a director within the business of an individual company.
Like many data companies, the investment for a marketing campaign is usually based on a cost per 1,000 records which is sometimes simply too many records for a micro business to handle before they are out dated.
Well, listen up…. this is already free of charge and in the public domain.
When you purchase a new data list, the most important part is to use the list to its full potential to turn your prospects into new clients. This may sound obvious, although sometimes companies dive into purchasing B2B data without any thought on who they are targeting and how they are going to use the information provided.
It is essential to plan your marketing strategy before purchasing the data, this will give you a better idea of who to target, how to target them and to ensure this is done with military precision. This will maximise your return on investment.
As promised in our Data Marketing Acronyms post, we have listed below some of the terms used regularly in our industry and have included various levels of additional explanation, which we hope you will find useful.
A/B split – to test a campaign, it is sensible to send out a percentage split of two versions, often to test response to different messages.
Affiliate – a person or company linked to a campaign as referrer or sales agent.
Append – if you already own a database, you may wish to append additional fields to your existing base, such as telephone number or email address.
Campaign – an individual mail / email / telemarketing programme. Each campaign should be measured and judged separately.
When you are planning a marketing campaign, the ultimate consideration is “What is my ROI, Return On Investment?” There are two ways in which you need to judge “return” – short term and long term.
The most straightforward short term measurement is to look at conversion rates – sales generated as a direct result of a particular campaign. How many units did I sell, at what profit, after deducting the cost of the campaign?
As in any industry, data marketing people tend to assume you know your CPA from your CPM without stopping to explain what they are talking about. So we thought it might be helpful to give you a bit of rundown on the various acronyms and jargon used in B2B (there we go already…) data marketing.
To kick off, here are some basic TLAs (Two or Three Letter Acronyms) with the words they stand for and a few which are Four Letter Acronyms which we just couldn’t leave out. Hopefully most of these are reasonably self-explanatory and many will be known to you.
ADC – Automated Data Capture
B2B - Business to Business
In your business you could be sitting on a goldmine, but you’ve just not had time to dig for it. Dig into the data you already have and you’ll probably find there are some amazingly valuable nuggets ready and waiting to be discovered. You’ve probably got:
• Existing clients you can sell other products and services to
• Lapsed clients just waiting to be re-sold to
• Prospects who have never been followed up
These people are probably all sitting in your own database somewhere – you just need to get organised and find them.
Do you recognise this situation?
You have a new product or service you want the world to know about.
You have told all your clients and known prospects about it and the reaction has been encouraging.
Time to spread the word more widely.
With an increasing amount of marketing utilizing email rather than postal mailing, we are asked more and more for as many email addresses in a sector as possible – after all, many companies think there is only a small cost penalty for adding a few more hundred names to an email and sending it out to the maximum number of people, compared to the print, post and fulfilment costs of a direct mail piece.
Loss of credibility
There may be little cost penalty, however there is a credibility and time penalty. Large amounts of bounces do not impress email delivery services and clog up in-boxes, plus poorly targeted emails will ensure your domain is registered on spam lists before you have even got through to the real person you need to get to.
Measure, Measure, Measure
All kinds of marketing campaigns should be measurable to ascertain what level of attention you receive from your target audience.
A full colour advertisement can look amazing, however:
Do you know how many people have taken action on the advert?
Do you know what return there is on your investment (ROI)?
At BDP, we are a great believer in measuring all forms of campaigns. Blanket brand building exercises should be left to large corporations such as Coca Cola, McDonalds or Tesco’s and even then, everything is measured to the very last detail.
How to Make Data Work from a Sales Perspective?
If you are currently researching your own leads, you may be spending considerable time generating prospects to promote your products and services and not doing what you do best.Presenting your business to pre-qualified prospects that are up-to-date, and from a dedicated specialist will not only save you time and money, it will also streamline your role, enabling you to concentrate on developing your sales pipeline.A recent survey showed that SME’s spend on average 35% of their allocated sales time, actually generating sales, and the rest of the time is spent on researching prospects, administration and updating records. Better information makes you more effective.
