When marketing campaigns fail and the post-mortem is conducted, companies tend to point to the message, timing, or execution ⎯ everything but what is at the core of every marketing campaign: account-based marketing data.
Your customer contact data is the fuel on which your marketing campaigns run and it must be clean fuel. If this data is incorrect or sorely out-of-date, then your campaigns will hit a dead end. But how do you know if your contact data is accurate and up-to-date? You may think that list you just bought has data that’s been recently confirmed. It’s a reasonable expectation, but unless you inquire with the source, you can’t be sure. If the list was developed prior to the start of the pandemic, chances are good it’s not up-to-date. The email address may be current, but the rest of the contact record may not be. Before launching any lead gen marketing campaign, you want to make sure you have a target list with guaranteed accuracy on the entire contact record.
Hitting Your Sales and Target Marketing Goals
Seventy-four percent of marketing managers and decision-makers responding to a survey we conducted titled, “My Life as a Marketer,” said their CEO is pleased by qualified, sales-ready leads likely to convert to opportunities. More specifically, 34 percent say CEOs want them talking to direct influencers, not tire-kickers. If you’re a marketing manager at your company, then starting with a list of validated contacts is paramount. With recently validated leads as your target audience, your marketing campaigns will generate leads at a higher response rate and salespeople will have greater success with making connections with prospects and closing deals in a timely manner.
Getting Data Hygiene You Can Trust
Capturing qualified, sales-ready leads starts with compiling accurate customer data and researching every individual company contact ⎯ not just the target company ⎯ for every unique marketing campaign. You need to gather as much information and sales intelligence as possible on each individual, using various sources such as the company website, LinkedIn and other social media. This is something we can do for you so your sales team can spend 100 percent of their time focusing on selling.
In addition, the target company should be contacted to validate the individual contacts and their job titles as well as their email address, phone number and mailing address. It’s also important to determine what a contact’s responsibilities are if their title doesn’t make that clear. You want to ensure that you not only have the correct data on a contact but also determine that the individual is the right contact.
Leveraging Your Clean Account-Based Marketing Data
Clearly, building a super-accurate and focused contact database is an art that involves advanced strategic planning to ensure it is complete and relevant as well as accurate. Having homed in on contacts who are highly relevant, you can begin to dig deeper by conducting surveys with them through a third-party such as SimplyDIRECT. Our surveys uncover your contacts’ goals, needs, problems and interests, what their buying habits and patterns are and whether and when they might be looking to buy the solution you offer.
This deeper level of contact research helps you to generate and identify qualified, sales ready leads more precisely. It also helps you to obtain the information you need to know to best communicate with your contacts, which channels to use to reach them (e.g. email, social media), and what content you should offer that will appeal and draw them to you. More importantly, the survey feedback will help you know what stage you can place a contact in the sales funnel and how to move them through the stages to the point of “purchase.”
Get a free trial of our database cleansing service. We’ll deliver 25 human-verified contacts with 95% plus accuracy. Just tell us who you want us to identify through our contact discovery process.