Big data might be regarded as a buzzword, but it’s here to stay. Marketing data and the insights that can be gleaned from it are helping business grow, attract new customers and retain current customers.
Formulating marketing campaigns based solely on intuition and guesswork may have sufficed a few decades ago, but today no business – large or small – can ignore the potential for marketing data to galvanise your marketing strategies. That said, any old marketing data won’t do. You’ve got to be as strategic about how you source data about your prospects as you are when using said data to generate the right type of leads. The better the quality of your marketing data, the lower your chances of wasting time on marketing campaigns targeted at the wrong people. Let’s look at some of the ways you can quickly source high quality marketing data for your next campaign.
Custom databases are a source of new data, ideal for when you want to target new demographics
Let’s say you’ve already got a database with information about your current clients, but you want to launch a campaign targeting a whole new demographic: you need to source entirely new marketing data. Either you buy a generic data list and pray that some of the data will be relevant to your target personas, or you invest in a custom data list. A custom database will give you data about the prospects or companies you want to target, letting you better segment your audiences and develop more relevant messaging to them. With more relevant messaging, you’ll improve engagement rates and, as a result, ROI for your campaigns too. Another fantastic benefit of custom databases is that they’re smaller (because they only contain marketing data about the people you’re interested in) and therefore require fewer resources to manage.
Data cleansing turns an outdated database into a living, breathing value-adding asset
As brilliant as investing in a new set of marketing data is, sometimes all your database needs in order to become a lead-generating asset is a clean up. Data cleansing gets rid of out of date information, junk or inactive contacts and duplicates, fills in missing information and updates data fields with new information. Live databases, along with telemarketing and DNS email verification, are used to verify the validity of data. You can choose to clean your entire database or just sections of it, depending on your campaign objectives and who you’re targeting. Your sales and marketing teams are also useful instruments in ensuring that your data is squeaky clean prior to use in a marketing campaign.
New campaigns don’t always require new databases – only enriched databases
A bit like data cleansing takes your current database and revamps it, data enrichment takes your current database and puts it on steroids. Even if your database has served you well in the past and generated leads that convert, in the future you can be sure that you’re going to want and need further data that can deliver greater insights into your target prospects and their companies or industries. The first step is knowing what data you need more of. The next is knowing where to source the data that’s going to move your database up several notches. This is why it’s so important to partner with a data provider that understands their customers and knows where to look to provide them with the data that will result in more personalised campaigns that generate higher ROI. And did we mention that data enrichment can improve response rates?
If you’ve made it to the end of this blog, you’ll agree with us about the importance of using quality data when planning and executing marketing campaigns. Download the guide for more information about data sourcing and how GCL can help you enhance the quality of your marketing data:
