Excellent B2B data is about more than having a company name and an email address.
The more you know about a business and the people within it, the more precisely you can identify your ideal prospects, segment your audience and build relevant sales and marketing campaigns.
That is where B2B data enrichment comes in.
Data enrichment adds useful information to existing business or contact records, turning basic data into a more detailed picture of the companies and decision-makers you want to reach.
For a marketing team, that could mean adding company size, turnover or industry information to existing records. For a sales team, it could mean identifying the right decision-maker, their job title, direct work email address or LinkedIn profile. For more specific targeting, enrichment can go considerably deeper.
What is B2B data enrichment?
B2B data enrichment is the process of adding additional information to existing company or contact data.
A database may already contain a business name, address and telephone number, but those details alone may not provide enough information to determine whether the company is a good prospect.
Enrichment adds further context.
A basic company record can be developed with information about its industry, location, turnover, employee numbers, business type, SIC code or other relevant characteristics.
Contact-level enrichment can add named decision-makers, job roles, seniority, individual business email addresses and other professional information.
The purpose is not simply to create a database containing more fields. Effective enrichment should add information that makes the data more useful.
The right enrichment can help answer three important questions: Which businesses should you target? Who should you speak to within them? And what do you need to know to make your approach more relevant?
What is the difference between data enrichment and data cleansing?
Data enrichment and data cleansing are closely related, but they perform different jobs.
Data cleansing concentrates on improving information that is already present. Records may need to be corrected, standardised, deduplicated, updated or removed when information is no longer valid.
Data enrichment goes further by adding information that was previously missing.
For example, cleansing a company record could involve correcting its address or confirming that the organisation is still trading. Enriching that same record could involve adding its employee numbers, turnover, website, industry classification or relevant decision-makers.
Both processes contribute to better business data.
There is little value in adding extensive information to records that are inaccurate, just as a perfectly clean database can still be of limited use if it contains too little information to identify and segment the right prospects.
Why is B2B data enrichment important?
Most businesses already hold data in some form.
It may sit within a CRM, marketing platform, customer database, prospecting file or spreadsheet. The problem is that the information available internally is often limited to what was originally collected.
That can make meaningful segmentation difficult.
Two companies might appear almost identical when your database contains only their names and locations. Add industry, employee numbers, turnover, technologies, business characteristics and decision-maker information, and the differences between those organisations become much clearer.
Data enrichment gives sales and marketing teams more context with which to make decisions.
Instead of treating thousands of records as one audience, businesses can identify the organisations that most closely match their ideal customer profile and build campaigns around them.
Build more precisely targeted audiences
One of the biggest advantages of enriched B2B data is the ability to become much more specific about who you want to reach.
Traditional targeting might begin with a broad requirement such as manufacturing businesses in the North West.
Enrichment allows that audience to become considerably more precise.
The campaign could instead focus on manufacturing companies within particular locations, above a specified turnover or employee threshold, operating within selected industry classifications and containing the particular senior decision-makers relevant to the product or service being promoted.
For some campaigns, conventional firmographic information is enough. Others require a much more detailed understanding of the target market.
Financial information can add another layer to this targeting. Turnover data is available for at least 76% of companies within the Business Data Prospects UK database, helping businesses identify and segment prospects according to financial size as well as industry, location and other company characteristics.
Of course, access to millions of business records doesn’t mean you need millions of prospects. The value of a large database is the ability to narrow it down. By combining the enrichment criteria that matter to your campaign, a much larger market can be refined into a highly targeted audience of businesses and decision-makers that match your requirements.
The objective should always be the same: use the information that genuinely helps distinguish a relevant prospect from an irrelevant one.
Reach the right decision-makers
Identifying the right company is only part of successful B2B prospecting.
You also need to identify the right person.
A company can fit your target market perfectly, but a campaign directed towards someone with no responsibility for purchasing your product or service is unlikely to achieve the same result as one aimed at the relevant decision-maker.
Contact enrichment can help connect company information with the people behind the organisation.
Depending on the campaign, this could mean identifying individuals by department, responsibility, job title or seniority and adding the professional contact information required to reach them.
This creates a more useful prospect record: not simply a business that matches your criteria, but a business accompanied by the person most relevant to your approach. BDP’s UK database includes more than 4 million named business decision-makers, providing contact-level information that can be combined with company data to create more precisely defined prospect audiences.
Improve campaign segmentation
Better information creates more opportunities to segment your audience.
Rather than sending the same message to every prospect, enriched data can be used to separate organisations according to characteristics that matter to your campaign.
A supplier may have one proposition for smaller businesses and another for large organisations. A technology company may want different messaging for companies using particular systems. A professional services firm may want to distinguish between sectors, locations or different stages of business growth.
The underlying principle is straightforward.
The better you understand your audience, the easier it becomes to create groups of prospects that share meaningful characteristics.
That allows marketing to become more relevant without necessarily making the campaign more complicated.
Make sales conversations more informed
Data enrichment is not only useful before a marketing campaign is launched.
Additional company and contact information can also give sales teams useful context when researching prospects and preparing outreach.
Knowing more about an organisation before making contact can help a salesperson understand whether it fits the target profile and why the company may be relevant.
It can also reduce the amount of time spent manually researching basic information before prospecting begins.
Rather than starting with little more than a company name, sales teams can work from records containing information selected specifically around the requirements of the campaign.
What information can be added through data enrichment?
What information can be added through data enrichment?
The information worth adding depends on what you are trying to achieve. For some campaigns, industry, location and company size provide everything required to define the market. Others need a much deeper level of detail.
B2B data can be enriched with information such as industry, SIC code, company size, employee numbers, turnover, location, postcode, number of sites, business type, company website, technologies used, named decision-makers, job title, department, seniority, direct business email address, direct dial telephone number, LinkedIn profile, recruitment activity, funding information, company growth and buying signals.
Technographic data can add another level of detail, identifying the technologies and software used within a business. Technology information is available across 62% of the BDP database, where this information can be identified and verified.
The right combination of enrichment criteria can turn a relatively basic company or contact record into a much more useful prospect profile. A business could, for example, identify companies within a particular industry and turnover range, using a specific technology, and then identify the senior decision-makers responsible for the area it wants to target.
The important point is that enrichment should be driven by the campaign rather than by the number of fields available. Having more data is not automatically better. Having the right data is.
Start with your ideal customer
Before enriching a database, it helps to define what a valuable prospect actually looks like.
Consider the customers that are already a strong fit for your business. Look at what those organisations have in common and which characteristics genuinely influence whether a prospect is likely to need your product or service.
That might be their sector, size, location or turnover. It could be a particular technology, company structure or type of operation. It might also depend heavily on whether you can identify a particular decision-maker within the organisation.
Once those characteristics are understood, enrichment can be used to identify and prioritise companies sharing them.
This makes enrichment part of the targeting process rather than simply a database exercise.
Data enrichment should improve relevance, not just volume
It is easy to measure a database by the number of records it contains.
That does not necessarily tell you how useful it is.
A smaller, carefully defined audience containing relevant businesses and appropriate decision-makers may be considerably more valuable than a much larger database assembled around broad criteria.
Enrichment helps businesses move away from volume for volume’s sake.
Instead of asking, “How many companies can we contact?”, the better question is, “Which companies should we contact?”
That distinction matters in B2B marketing, where a relatively small number of well-matched organisations can represent significant commercial opportunities.
Why data quality still matters
Enrichment is only valuable when the underlying information can be trusted.
Businesses change constantly. Employees move roles, companies relocate, organisations grow, close or restructure, and contact details change.
Adding more information to an inaccurate record does not solve the underlying problem.
For that reason, enrichment and verification should work together.
Business Data Prospects owns and maintains its UK B2B database in-house, giving our research team direct responsibility for the information we supply. Data selected for customer orders is reviewed and human verified before delivery, providing an additional quality check at the point the data is needed.
This is particularly important when enrichment is being used to create highly targeted audiences. The more specific the targeting becomes, the more important the accuracy of the underlying information becomes.
B2B data enrichment and compliance
Data enrichment should also be considered within the wider responsibilities surrounding the use of business data.
Organisations need to understand where their data comes from, how it has been obtained and the basis on which it will be used.
For B2B sales and marketing in the UK, this means considering the requirements of UK GDPR and PECR alongside the specific channel and purpose of the campaign.
Data quality and compliance should therefore form part of the same conversation.
An enriched database should not simply contain useful information. Businesses should also be confident about the provenance and appropriate use of that information.
Enriching your existing business data
You do not always need to start again with a completely new prospect database.
If your business already holds company or contact records, enrichment can be used to make that information more useful by filling gaps and adding relevant information.
The starting point is to understand what you already have and what is missing.
If the database contains companies but few decision-makers, contact enrichment may be the priority. If contacts are already present but there is little company information, firmographic enrichment may make better segmentation possible.
In other cases, the requirement may be to compare existing records against additional business information to create a more detailed view of the market.
The right approach depends on the purpose of the database and how the enriched information will ultimately be used.
Choosing a B2B data enrichment provider
A useful enrichment partner should be able to do more than append additional fields to a file.
The quality of the underlying data, how recently it has been checked, the depth of information available and the provider’s understanding of B2B targeting all matter.
It is also worth considering whether the provider can work around a specific brief.
Some target audiences can be defined easily using standard criteria. Others are more difficult to identify and require a combination of data, research and experience to determine what information can realistically be used.
This is where a conversation about the audience can be more valuable than simply selecting fields from a database.
BDP data enrichment
Business Data Prospects provides access to more than 300 enrichment options, allowing businesses to develop much more detailed B2B prospect and customer records.
As a UK B2B data provider, we build and maintain our own business database rather than simply supplying records from an external source.
Our data can be refined using company characteristics, decision-maker information and more specialised criteria to help businesses identify the audiences most relevant to their campaigns.
Every order is individually reviewed and verified before delivery, combining data enrichment with the human verification process used across BDP data.
Whether you need to add information to existing records, identify named decision-makers or build a new highly targeted audience, the starting point is the same: understanding exactly who you need to reach.
Turn your business data into a better prospecting tool
Data enrichment turns basic records into information that sales and marketing teams can actually use.
Done properly, it can help you understand your market in greater detail, identify better-fit businesses, reach the right decision-makers and create more relevant campaigns.
But effective enrichment is not about adding every available piece of information.
It is about identifying the information that helps you make better targeting decisions.
Want to find out what can be added to your business data? Speak to Business Data Prospects about your target audience and enrichment requirements.
