Nowhere, it could be argued, does the old adage of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ ring truer than with data that underpins a marketing strategy. Without good, fresh data it’s difficult for a business to establish its best prospects. If the foundation on which that marketing strategy is based data and information on the customer is flawed, what is the chance of getting a positive customer reaction and a sale?
Keeping prospect data up-to-date in B2B is difficult and can be an issue for many organisations’ data providers. For a start, the different ways B2B prospect data is captured and stored can result in discrepancies between similar information in different places and means that a single prospect view can be problematic. Added to this, businesses often write basic information such as their company name and address differently at different times, combined with changing business circumstances, moving premises and staff changes mean the ideal of keeping business lists and prospect data fresh can be harder to achieve.
Technological leap forward
Yet there are developments in the B2B marketing arena that are set to make highly relevant data a reality and bring advanced data techniques to a mainstream business audience, primarily SMEs. And in this instance it’s B2B that’s leading the way ahead of B2C marketing.
That development is essentially wrapping complex technology around strong data sets to bring sophisticated direct marketing to this new audience. But, actually this technology is straightforward and means that complicated data techniques can be made simpler and, for the first time, brought to users who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of data analytics and data mining.
We’ve seen an element of this trend emerge with the growth in websites that are offering small businesses creative direct mail. These allow the very smallest business to upload their own logo and imagery, add creative, choose a mailing format and print and mail out to very specific customers, business and consumer prospects for as little as 60p per mailer. Such developments have taken direct mail to a whole new frontier and new set of potential users.
So, for larger SMEs with slightly more sophisticated requirements, what does this new technology wrap for data look like? Well, imagine being able to help yourself to robust marketing data online at any time. Once online you can select, target, segment and refine your data against a whole host of variables. That means businesses can find prospects by traditional targeting measures like location and geography, business type and business size.
In addition, prospects could also be targeted using sophisticated tools, such as credit risk and behaviours. This segmentation means businesses can remove high risk business prospects so that marketing spend is for lower risk customers, and choose to target businesses that have a propensity to buy certain products and services. Such data can make a difference to prospect targeting and is undervalued by larger organisations.
An Experian QAS research paper on contact data management of more than 2000 businesses worldwide found that one in four organisations were not able to list the top four users of their products never mind target prospects by product or service usage.
As a final layer of technology helping to demystify complex data, how about access to a B2B marketing expert who can provide further list building, segmentation and targeting expertise online while a user is actually on the site trying to build a prospect list? This level of interaction is what helps to bring the direct mining of extensive data sources to a new audience.
Working for tomorrow
With both of the developments described above, what is interesting is that both these user groups have little understanding of data, propensity targeting or segmentation.
Nor do they really need to have the technology does it for them. Some might argue that developments such as these risk dumbing down the data industry. Is that really the case? Or do they alongside demonstrating the value and the intrinsic importance of data as a driver for marketing activity allow SMEs to get on with the business of running their business and marketers to get on with marketing? The SMEs of today could become the big businesses of tomorrow and an early understanding and appreciation of the value of up-to-date, highly targeted data can only be good for the industry and B2B marketing.
