According to the British Chambers of Commerce, almost a third of UK businesses intended to make redundancies over the three months to the end of September, as firms continue to struggle from the fall-out caused by coronavirus Not all furloughed workers will have jobs to return to by the end of the year, meaning unemployment is likely to rise above 10%.
Work locations have also altered, with most of the population working from home over the last six months. This will have provided new business contact data that may change again over the next few months, as people go back to working from their office location.
The other area to consider is your data segmentation. Have you thought about the industry sector impact of COVID-19?
According to the current Dun & Bradstreet COVID-19 Commerce Disruption Tracker, the following sectors have been rated for risk.
Very high: dining, public recreations venues, retail travel, hospitalityHigh: advertising, perodical publication, public entertainment and film, speciality doctorsMedium: lawn centers, airport services, non-essential manufacturing, commercial banking Low: general hospitals,food production facilities,wholesalers, grocery storesVery low: public safety, tv/radio stations, central banking, utilities
In the retail sector, which has been one of the hardest hit, many big brand names such as Laura Ashley, Muji and TM Lewin have already gone into administration, and there will be many more large retail employers following suit.
Conversely, tech sectors have generally experienced a positive or low impact. We’ve all read about Jeff Bezos recently becoming the first person ever to be worth over $200 billion.
So in these uncertain times, two things you can be certain about are: your business data will be decaying at a lot faster rate than usual; and, certain market sectors will be at higher risk, so less likely to invest, and more likely to have cash flow issues. But others will be booming.
Data quality and segmentation therefore need to be pre-requisites before any data-driven marketing activity takes place, if you want to maximise the return on your marketing investment.
Fortunately there are some great B2B Data as a Service (DaaS) solutions now available, so you can quickly and easily assess your data quality yourself, and better understand where and who to target. A couple of solutions are as follows, though Google will provide a more complete list
- D&B Optimizer for Marketing D&B Optimizer helps you improve the quality of your data, profile your best marketing and sales opportunities, and target the audiences that mean the most to your business.
- Experian’s Aperture Data Studio is another intelligent self- service data quality and enrichment platform, providing similar solutions.
The key thing to remember is your campaign’s performance will be directly affected by the data accuracy, and the targeting. So as the new business world starts to reshape, it’s time to make sure your data and targeting reflects this global change.
