Data is a perennially difficult subject for all B2B marketers. For Jack Schember, director of marketing at Californian healthcare data provider SK&A Information Services it is particularly so. We sell data to pharmaceutical marketers and their agencies, and this data is very hard to find, he explains. You can’t search by SIC code. You have to search by very specific job titles, and until recently I’d not found a way of doing this satisfactorily.
In late 2009, Schember discovered Zoominfo, one of a new breed of online data providers, I briefed them to source me a list of very specific targets. They came back with a small list only 300 names but I was very impressed with the accuracy and level of detail. In fact, the results from that first campaign were so impressive that I’ve since used them twice. It’s a very different approach to sourcing data, but it seems to work.
In the US at least, companies like Zoominfo are already transforming the way that B2B marketers look at data, and the results they achieve from that data. So far, no more than a handful of UK B2B marketers have tapped into these data sources, but stories like Schember’s mean that a growing number are now beginning to look at it more closely.
Data the holy grail
Without accurate, up-to-date prospect information any investment in campaign strategy and creative is wasted. The best campaigns are based on data that not only meets these hygiene factors but is also finely segmented and detailed, allowing for a high degree of personalisation.
However, this sort of quality data is difficult to acquire. Traditionally, marketing data has been sourced from big corporate data owners, such as Experian or Dun & Bradstreet, and from niche players such as publishers or event organisers. Even the best data has been pretty unreliable, with people moving jobs and companies moving offices so fast that annual decay rates of 35 per cent are possible.
The Internet has promised solutions to this problem, but so far they have been incomplete. For example, LinkedIn members enter and maintain their own details with every incentive to do so, as many companies use it as a recruitment tool or even a supplier vetting mechanism. So it provides a wealth of accurate, detailed information on more than 50 million business people around the world. However, its focus is depth, rather than breadth making it of more use to salespeople and recruiters than marketers.
A new hope
In the last two years, a new breed of data provider has stepped in to make use of the Internet. Such companies actually collect the data from the Internet itself. One of the largest examples is Jigsaw. This Californian-based company has used crowdsourcing to build a B2B database of four million companies and 20 million contacts. It claims to have email addresses for each of those contacts. The principle is simple: for every contact that one of its 1.3 million members updates, adds or graveyards, that member gets a record in return. Jigsaw makes its money by using its database to improve corporate databases. For one seat for a month, it charges $99, or $79 if you agree to share your data.
Jim Fowler, CEO of Jigsaw, says, Our members no longer need to build, host and maintain their own databases. They access ours remotely, just as they increasingly access their software in the cloud. Five years from now this is how all B2B data will be bought and sold. It will free up marketers to do higher value tasks. It will transform the role of marketing.
Boston-based ZoomInfo, sources its data in three ways: Firstly, it crawls the Internet for information on business people and uses natural language processing to structure that data. Secondly, one million people voluntarily update their own data just as they do with LinkedIn they see it as a way of maintaining their personal brand. Thirdly, they allow contact trading. It has five million companies and 45 million contacts. It charges 3070 cents per record or a per seat price of five seats per year for $5000.
Chip Terry, VP and general manager of Zoominfo’s Enterprise Solutions, says, Our information is broader, fresher and deeper than traditional data. In an average week, we update 750,000 records, we refresh 1.9 million, and we add 230,000 new people. We can give you a list of chief finance officers in the London area, but crucially we can also give you a primary source for each individual. This allows you to get much more personal and relevant with your marketing communications.
Crossing the pond
The majority of Jigsaw and Zoominfo records are from the US and Canada, but in the UK, Zoominfo has 1.5 million contacts at 300,000 companies, and has been used by IBF, Imperial College, HSBC Finance Corporation, London Financial Studies, Wirefast and SAS, among others.
Jigsaw has around one million UK records, and one UK company that has begun to use them for marketing purposes is marketing agency Clever Touch. Nick Burrell, director, says, Data is essential to our campaigns and in the past we’ve relied on data from brokers but it quickly decayed and reduced the effectiveness of our work. Jigsaw is changing this. A year or so ago, when we first tried it, it was a bit patchy and biased towards HR executives I think a lot of recruiters used it but recently it’s filled out and is proving very useful.
He continues, I like the way you can see the exact job title, as it appears on the person’s business card, before you select it. We’re promoting one product that speeds up applications and so we need applications managers. Lumping them in as IT managers doesn’t cut it for us, but Jigsaw gives us the necessary level of detail. We use it for filling in gaps of 40 to 50 records at a time.
Challenges ahead
Not everyone is so convinced. Some question the accuracy of these online info sources. Max Firth, client director for PH Group says, If collection of data is part web and part self-update, as is the case for some of these new online resources, then you can never be confident that the data is in fact up-to-date. With data decaying at 33 per cent a year, accuracy is a real concern.
Fowler at Jigsaw answers, We recognise that some marketers will be sceptical about the accuracy of the Wiki model we operate, but we have stringent policing measures in place. Members get an eBay-style rating, and are penalised or even locked out for damaging the database. There are ‘Data Defenders’ monitoring accuracy all the time.
Others question the legality of this type of data in the UK. Andy Taylor, head of marketing and product development at Infogroup UK, says, The ‘give-to-get’ business model on which these tools are based is fundamentally flawed. European legislation dictates that personal data cannot be freely exchanged in this way. Businesses in the US, however, are not bound by such stringent regulations and tend to rely on the self-regulated principles of ‘implied consent’.
Fowler has an answer for this too. He says, As soon as someone is added to our system we email them to allow them to opt- out and set their preferences on how they want to be contacted. Less than one per cent of people do opt out. In fact, we’ve had more complaints from people about not being on the database.
Burrell at Clever Touch raises the final concern. The content sharing model will continue to grow as long as people are happy to share their details, he says. But in the future people might become less and less willing to do so.
This is of course possible, but to a very great extent this is in the hands of the marketers. If they use prospect data responsibly, delivering relevant and timely information, then online information could have a future and B2B marketers could have found an answer to the age-old problem of data.
The future is embedded
It is clearly early days in the UK market for these online information sources, and neither Jigsaw or Zoominfo has done any proactive marketing here. However, the recent news that Salesforce has bought Jigsaw for $142 million, indicates that larger companies are beginning to see the potential in this market.
Indeed the future for these services may be for them to be embedded within marketing automation services. Leading players like Silverpop and Eloqua have yet to make any progress in this direction, but Act On, which is financed by Cisco and staffed by ex-Responsys executives, is taking the lead. It allows users of its system to see who is visiting their sites, and then drill into Jigsaw to find other prospects at that company.
As Shawn Naggiar, VP sales and business development, concludes, In the past it wasn’t possible to see who was visiting your site. Now you can see that and at the touch of a button find out who they work with. It’s a remarkable step forward for B2B marketers and one that more and more businesses will be looking to exploit in the months and years ahead.
